I was saddened when your Friday report on Welfare Reform only allowed the voice of the Heritage Foundation. It did not include voices like the insight of the Center For Welfare Law, who could have told you a very different story, if you would have listened:
http://www.welfarelaw.org/. It did not mention the human rights issues we are facing by the likes of Robert Rechter, with his war on the poor, mostly on women and children, that has been waged since the 1970's. He and his ilk have shown time and again they detest the thought that governments should support We The People, rather than the bottomless pit of corporate interests.
The man who spoke in your piece is an elitist who became incensed when he came upon a group of women living in DC who had fled abject poverty, racism and sexism in rural Virginia where there were few if any opportunities to find meaningful work with living wages. This is when he wrote the Personal Responsibility Act or Welfare Reform as his friend Frank Lund likes to frame it. These women had the nerve to want an education and better opportunities for their families rather than work as domestics for the likes of Mr. Robert Rechter for the rest of their lives. God forbid that an uppity poor black woman would desire to go to college and to ask for the support of our nation since they had nowhere else to turn!
The passing of the draconian Welfare laws this year is only the beginning for people like Mr Rechter. He would like nothing better than to destroy the middle class by making it impossible to become part of it so he and his friends can have cheap labor for their comfort. He is an enthusiastic cheerleader for the elite wealthy who have no business even being in government because they hate a democratic social safety net for anyone but themselves funded by the way, by the working poor. He along with his cohorts such as Grover Nordquist, prefer to "drown democratic government in the bathtub" while ignoring the literally thousands of times more revenue they support spending on corporate welfare and giveaways to the rich. They like to pretend that sitting by the pool while raking in inherited wealth is "work". Work to him certainly is not the unpaid but important work that women have done weaving communities, neighbors and families since time immemorial. His idea of "work" means working for slave wages with little hope of going anywhere but to the poorhouse. Rechter does not consider it "work" for low income women to raise children, who by the way, are the very ones dying in Iraq at this time. If raising children is "doing nothing" as he said in your article, than he is saying in essence that pouring any kind of time, love and energy into the future generation of this nation is in actuality "doing nothing".
Poor women need education and training, they need the support of our nation to raise their families, not a job at Popeye's where they will hit the dead end of never even making enough to pay the rent. But then people like Mr Rechter would like nothing better than to keep poor women down by making sure they spend their lives waiting on him, making him and his friends richer, rather than bettering themselves. When a minimum wage job becomes more important than a child, people like Mr Rechter should never pretend they care about anything but making money for himself and his friends. As a matter of fact I would venture to say, people like Mr Rechter would like to keep ALL women down.
I could give you all the statistics about the history before Welfare Reform, ironically named "The Personal Responsibility Act" by legislators who are anything but personally responsible themselves. How the average stay on welfare was less than two years before it was enacted, how most women had been married before they had to turn to welfare and had the average of 1.3 children, and how 70% of these women were able to graduate from college, rather than work minimum wage jobs for the rest of their lives. I could tell you that people like Robert Rechter were screaming about welfare women as if they were taking so much of our tax money when in reality it was less than 4% of the budget, while corporations got thousands more in tax breaks and pork and the military was taking almost half the budget ~ in peacetime. Remember, this was in 1996. welfare is even less now, less than 3% of the national budget at this time, but God forbid that the poor have anything, right Mr Rechter? They should only pay the taxes not benefit from them, right Mr Reichter?
But then I know the Heritage Foundation is not into the truth, they are into making sure that in the future, female voices like the ones I heard reporting on this article, are silenced. Since YOU have such a nice job reporting about the plight of women in this country, one way to support other women is to look elsewhere rather than to the likes of Robert Rechter. He has no idea what it is like to be a low income woman in this country where jobs with livable wages are scarce as hens teeth, sexism is alive and well, forced parenthood is in our future with the advent a woman's right to make a choice taken, and the destruction of educational system are also part of his agency's plan. Pass this on to him, I would love to hear his response if he has one. He already said it himself that raising children and taking care of family is "doing nothing"! He makes a mockery of his conservative friends' so-called family values ~ unless the only families he values are rich families. Then for God's sake consider letting the Welfare Law Center tell you what his policies have wreaked upon the poor and defenseless in this country in the name of profit making and corporate welfare. But I know if you did this, you would lose your own precious spot in his inhumane darwinist plans to make sure the weak are preyed upon by himself and his friends.
Sincerely,
Catherine L. Sullivan
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