The War on Poverty … what is it good for? … absolutely nothing

Is California ground zero in the War of Poverty, the West Coast Theatre where the haves and have nots stare each other down, waiting for someone to blink?

The nature of a capitalist economy, the miasma of despair, these are conspiratorial forces at work to keep the poor poor and overcoming exclusive to only the psychologically strongest. It’s the cross pollination of Charles Darwin’s survival of the species and Adam Smith’s place as the father of capitalism and modern economics.

Honestly, I don’t understand enough about either theory to defend that, but it feels right. Especially in California.

We live in the world’s ninth-largest economy, where Hollywood moguls and Internet millionaires rub elbows with billionaire venture capitalists over dinner and drinks as the country’s largest concentration of those living in poverty — 24 percent, nearly 9 million people — dream of a crumb falling from the table.

As in culture, politics and people, California is the microcosm for the larger nation — conservative and liberal pockets, Anglo entrenched and Latino immigrant and, of course, abject poverty and abundant wealth, the state with the largest recorded disparity in the country, according to Census reports.

The United States on paper is a constitutional republic, commonly — and mistakenly — referred to as a democracy. But this duck walks, waddles and quacks like a plutocracy, where many laws are shaped to keep the poor disenfranchised from voting and the working poor in a sort of limbo from which many never ascend in their lifetimes, where the rich have the power and prestige to fund and run for office, hold corporate positions that pay the freight of the nation and control the purse strings on social programs to keep the station of poverty stable, obedient.

The wealth disparity in this country is so woven into the fabric of the nation that to make a serious dent in it, to give birth to yet another wave of the middle class, could be to pull at the single string that unravels the sweater. Is it any wonder the hardest hit in economic downturns is the middle class, knocking families further down the rung on the socioeconomic ladder?

History has shown that this country prospered and ignited a revolution on the principles that the wealthiest colonials could keep their lifestyles intact by pulling away from the English, that the systems of money and power in the hands of the few thrived on having a broad base of the poor, as slave labor, servants, workers to exploit, all while defying the tyranny of King George, which was really the economic tyranny of excessive taxation.

To steal from one of my own recent columns: circa 1770s, the top 10 percent of the northern colonials controlled 45 percent of the northern wealth, while the top 10 percent of the southern colonies controlled 75 percent of the wealth. That is not all that far off from the 2007 statistic that the top 20 percent of Americans hold 85 percent of the country’s total wealth.

Vast disparities between the rich and poor are part of what we are as a functioning society of capitalist nation builders, feudal lords driving a cyclically prosperous economy that prevents true economic equality.

The War on Poverty is a fallacy. It treats the symptoms and not the root causes, like America’s drug war, heavy on military and enforcement might and light on treatment of abuse and social reprogramming. President Johnson’s declaration basically set up the lion’s share of the modern social safety net, through welfare programs like food stamps or Head Start, a system that diverts money and increases complacency and apathy.

Sure, it sounds like the poor is to blame. If a page is torn out of the modern conservative handbook, where the safety net is something to be dismantled in the name of fiscal responsibility and hatred of the poor, then that argument holds water. But if one assumes that the entire system has been put in place to anesthetize the poor from economic revolt, that has a better ring to it.

In many ways poverty is a social and psychological condition, a state of mind and a cycle that affects generations of families in how they perceive themselves, in how they envision a path out of poverty or whether they can even see that far ahead. It takes a strong person to continue to fight while on their back with a boot against their chest.

And yes, it is also fair to say that welfare, extended unemployment, institutional apathy and disengagement from mainstream society has personal responsibility built in. These things work together; outsides forces reinforced by giving up.

Where are the equal attacks on poverty that treat the physical needs and the psychological symptoms? I have yet to see it. Until that happens, the War on Poverty is unwinnable.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Aug. 8, 2014.