Editor’s Note: Pat Gowens works with Welfare Warriors and is the editor of its newspaper Mother Warriors Voice.

PA: Can you talk about Welfare Warriors?

PG: We are a group of mothers in poverty. We came together 18 years ago to produce a newspaper, Mother Warriors Voice, to give a voice to moms, especially single moms in poverty because the war on the poor seemed to be targeting our families. All of the stereotypes and war propaganda against us made it difficult to raise our children.

Our goal in addition to giving voice to mothers in all policies and community decisions, is to work to create a government guaranteed child support program for dependent minors as opposed to a welfare system where you have to prove poverty and there is all this divide and conquer where the majority of people are prejudiced, angry and actually resentful and jealous of the poor who get anything. We would like a system where the dependent minors are guaranteed a support check regardless of income simply because they are dependent and unable to support themselves.

The only thing we have in this country that provides support to children is the Social Security survivor’s benefit. We are modeling our government guaranteed support on that program but with two major exceptions. Survivor’s benefits require that the absent parent be dead or disabled. We would like the children be guaranteed income even if the absent dad or mom is alive. It really doesn’t matter; the children should have that base of support. Our country can certainly afford it. The other part of the guaranteed support program would not require the parents prove they have an x-amount of work hours. It would simply be a guaranteed income based on their existence as children.

It is cheap and affordable because most of the money going into welfare goes into administration and policing now. It doesn’t go into the hands of low-income families. A program that would automatically send out a monthly or weekly check would eliminate all the policing and administration, which of course for the professional class that would be a problem.

That is one of our long-term goals. And over the years it has been an even longer-term goal as in the meantime the few benefits that existed for children and mothers have been attacked and controlled and denied and decimated.

PA: We hear a lot about how since the 1996 reform law, the welfare rolls have been cut in half. This is touted as a big success. How accurate is that?

PG: It’s half accurate. It is true that fewer families in poverty are getting support now from our government. It’s half in some states. In Wisconsin it’s much less than half. It’s only about 10 percent of families that get any form of support from the government. So that is true. The actual cash rolls for support for families have been drastically reduced. But the reason I say it’s half true is because the second half of the headline should read: 'but costs to taxpayers increases.' Supposedly people were always worried about that one penny of the taxes they paid for welfare. But now in fact welfare costs more. Wisconsin is a fantastic example. We went up from $548 million to support 300,000 people up to $710 million to support only 20,000 people. So imagine the cost to the taxpayers. Over $200 million more to serve virtually no one in terms of the people in poverty. In fact nationally, it used to be about $15 billion that went into welfare support programs, but now it’s up to $16.5 billion.

The reason Wisconsin is so extremely high is that welfare is being administered by private corporations for profit.

PA: So corporations can gouge the government for extra cash?

PG: Private corporations have more motivations not to give out the money to keep it for themselves. Private corporations feel, I guess, that the sky is the limit in terms of paying CEOs. When they started administering the cash grants, their CEOs were making around $75,000 a year. Now all of them make more than $200,000.

It just became this huge glut of greed and prejudice. When the government runs welfare, the poor people just have to deal with the prejudice. But when the corporations run it, it’s this deadly combination of greed and prejudice. Prejudice doesn’t go away. Private corporations actually made $38 million in profits in the first two years of the reform – in profits! They were actually allowed to make profits. Think of the conflict of interests. They know that if they deny families in crisis any cash support – basically unpopular single moms with no defenses and no lawyers, not even any men – they get to keep it. Why in the world would they ever give it up?
Usually you don’t go to the welfare doors until you’re so desperate you’ve waited way too long. You’ve either lost your job, your man, or your health. So you go to the welfare system for some sort of crisis assistance and what you’re told by private corporations, now even by the government agencies, that they can’t help you. I said it cost the taxpayers more money, but that isn’t the major issue anyhow. It is causing our communities incredible suffering. In the Milwaukee area, the infant mortality rate among African American children has increased 37 percent since 1997 when the welfare deform began. We did calculations to determine how many dead babies that is; it comes to about 30 a year. They are dying for absolutely no reason.

PA: Meanwhile the right wants to give back so much of this money in tax cuts to the rich. Do you see this as part of…?

PG: The growing gap between the rich and the poor? It’s pretty transparent. Our ruling fathers definitely want to put their money into billionaire businesses whether they’re warmongers warring on the poor mothers and children in Iraq and Afghanistan or whether they’re the moms here in this country, they’re putting the money into the corporations and the billionaires. Tax cuts for everyone except the poor. The tax cuts never filter down to the moms and kids in poverty. We make less than $10,000 a year and you had to make around $17,000 to get that tax cut.

Of course it’s a transfer of income in many ways from the poor to the rich, although there has never been enough money to enrich them that much. It’s two layers: while they are removing the tiny drop of support that poor people in this country have ever been able to claw and get, at the same time they are giving more and more tax money to big business.

But then there is also a middle layer. People keep saying that the middle class is disappearing, and it is true there is a lot of outsourcing of middle class jobs. But in order to placate those middle workers the government has transferred the incomes of the blue-collar workers as well as the poor into the hands of the professional middle management to prey on the poor, to actually be deadly parasites, where they do nothing for a living except prey on the poor in a million different programs and pseudo-professional ways.

PA: We’ve been painted a rosy picture about all of the poor people who are now working. How accurate is that?

PG: We wouldn’t have an increase in poverty if all of those single mothers managed to hold down those two paid jobs and then their single-mother-with-kids-alone job. Obviously, not only is there an increase in poverty every year, but there is also a massive increase in the use of the food pantries and homeless shelters. They are completely unable to serve the people who need their assistance. If you are homeless now you have to wait days before you can get into a shelter because they are all filled.

If you need food, it is a big ordeal to get food from the food pantries because they are all over taxed. If it were true that all mothers could be super-Amazonian women who could all take care of the kids and work a full time job and this could be a solution – a double workday is never a solution for any worker. Single mothers by definition don’t have a second breadwinner either caring for the children or usually even supporting the children.

So even for the women who are even able to be in the workforce, what welfare deform did first and foremost was take the women out of college. A quarter of the women on welfare have always been going to college in order to support a family. All those women between 1994 and 1996 were removed from college as a precursor to the final welfare deform bill that Clinton passed. In Milwaukee we lost 16,000 mothers from college.

What that meant is that they all had to go to Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Osco and fast food restaurants. So the fastest growing industries in the 1990s are retail sales, fast food, nursing home/day cares. These are the jobs they couldn’t get most Americans to take because most of them like Walgreens and Wal-Mart are part-time, 30 hours a week, $6 to $7, and most are not family-supporting jobs. So that’s the reason big business lobbied Congress to get the mamas, because those are high school jobs but they couldn’t get enough kids and they don’t really want teenagers anymore. They lobbied Congress and said, we want the mothers, the five million women who are getting public benefits because they are a group who you can use their children as hostages plus the average woman is 27 years old. It’s a group of women with a lot of ambition and work ethic because being single you have to get used to working a lot.

Can you imagine how happy they were with the first million they took out of college? Every year since then the women that would have been going to college aren’t allowed to. So we’re up to millions and millions of single mothers now who have been denied access to college. The women who were in college and had the skills and family support to go to college, those are great workers at Wal-Mart, Walgreens and at Osco. Now they have no lack of employees for jobs that most people won’t take voluntarily.

PA: It sounds like a scheme.

PG: It is. It was the plan. It started with Reagan. Reagan took away the right to combine work and welfare, which was what almost every mother in the country needs. We need a second source of income. Another 25 percent who weren’t in college were combining work and welfare. Reagan changed the calculations so that basically it was one or the other. If you worked you lost dollar for dollar. Gradually it became impossible for moms to do both. They also took away the medical insurance for single moms who were not on welfare, but were working and low-income.

They also took away the right to have a husband. In those days we could marry a man and still get a check for our children – not for ourselves, but the man was not legally obligated under any law to support another man’s children. So we could continue to get a welfare check for the children.

This all started in 1981 and by the end of the 1980s they could say, we gotta make these women work, after they stopped us from working. In fact, I was one of those moms in 1981. I lost my job after they took away our supplement. We didn’t get a whole welfare check. It was based on how much we earned, but we were able to get a $100 or so and still have some supplementary help, plus we got medical insurance as long as we were getting that $100. From 25 percent of us working, within one year it went down to only 10 percent a month who were working because it wasn’t beneficial anymore, you couldn’t handle it, you lost your supplemental, you lost your insurance, etc.

By taking away the right to marry, now the new man in your life had to support the former man’s children. Even though there was no law that obligated him, by denying the mother any support from the welfare system, it was in essence requiring the stepdad to take on the responsibility for another man’s children. It discouraged support from the former fathers and discouraged the new guys from marrying the mothers.

It’s interesting. Everything they stopped us from doing – go to college, get married, go to work – now it’s, we gotta make them go to work, we gotta make them get training, we gotta to make them marry those men. We have to give money to the churches to make them marry those men.

The whole religious thing is all about transferring income into the hands of middle class professionals. Billions of dollars will go into the hands of churches and agencies to sit around and pretend they are doing something. The problem is that it is coming out of the pot of poverty money. By taking that money out of the poverty money, it can’t go into the hands of the poor as long as it’s going into the hands of all these administrators of all these crazy programs to control and humiliate poor people.

PA: Hence the demand Welfare Warriors is making about direct payments to dependent children and their families?

PG: Right. Let the middle people get a real job instead of preying on the poor like the poverty parasites they are. Direct payments would eliminate professional parasites. I suppose I sound angry, and I really am. It’s such a betrayal. Even many of the groups that used to support changing things so that poor people weren’t as exploited by the system are at the government table getting money to train mothers not to be angry or to train mothers like we’re dogs in nurturing, parenting, anger management and now marriage management, etc. It’s been such a bitter sellout to watch people who have been allies become professional parasites. They’ve got the media and the non-profits and now they’re getting the churches. So the last potential allies, the churches, are being bought off. They are making sure the poor are completely defenseless and alone with virtually no allies left.

PA: The picture is pretty bleak. What are people doing to fight back?

PG: The usual: trying to build a larger alliance with the groups that have not sold out, the unions and the feminist movement, the usual lobbying and street protests. In order to organize resistance you have to resist in the streets, the courts and the legislatures. We’re missing the court part because private lawyers are unwilling to take up pro bono cases against the government because of the expense. Our government was clever enough to create the legal services lawyers as a sort of panacea. People say, well go to them. Of course they are severely controlled by the government and they can’t help us in any large way in the class action suits that we need.

So one of the things Welfare Warriors is doing is working on seeing what we can do to develop some support from private lawyers to begin to sue on some of the more horrendous impacts of the welfare deform. There’s a lot of death as a result. I mentioned the infant mortality. There’s also a lot of death among children over one year. Infant mortality only measures death under one. There is no measurement of how many older children are dying.

Our largest welfare agency in the beginning was the Goodwill. They were responsible for the death of a boy named D’Andre Reeves. They refused to allow his mother to stay home during the summer to care for him as she had for 13 years. She worked in the school year and stayed home in the summer. They said, no, this is a work program. You’re required to work and you can’t take off time to be home with your child. She said, can you give me day care? They said, no, we can’t give you day care because he is over 12. Her son had cerebal palsy, was limited to a wheelchair and was mentally retarded. She had her 14-year old care for him. One day the 14-year old put him in the bathtub, went and made hot dogs and came back and the boy was dead. He had scalded himself to death. This 13-year old died for no other reason than because Goodwill, which is a $1.3 billion corporation, said they couldn’t manage to provide a check for his mama for three months. So they killed her son instead. Unfortunately she never sued them, she didn’t want to be dragged through the mud and she was in trauma.

There are a million cases, not quite as dramatic as that, but so many cases where one of the welfare agencies illegally refused to give some kind of support. Women are homeless, children are sick and dying, women with disabilities are being sent to early graves, and some women have killed themselves or tried to kill themselves because of this horrible, deadly lack of access to income combined with the degrading way you have to go through to try and get the income.

So we would like to see more lawyers getting involved even with personal injury suits where you sue for losing your children, becoming homeless, injured or sick because of illegal denials of services and benefits.

PA: What should our readers do?

PG: We want everyone to notify their local, state and federal politicians and say stop the war on the poor. We need guaranteed support for children. We need to recognize that mother work is work. Caregiving is work. We have to start saying children come first not work first. None of those legislators tell their children to work first. Work first is a deadly proposition. To start with people need to keep deluging their state and federal officials that this is wrong. The federal welfare bill called TANF must be reauthorized by Congress. Bush wants to force moms to work off the check at 40 hours and the Senate wants 34 hours! Our allies need to let Congress know that the current 30 hours is already too many hours since it interferes with a mom’s chance to search for PAID work and interferes with her mother work duties. We’re destroying our children and our families and our workforce. Wages in the workforce have been drastically reduced because of the huge amount of single mothers who are being forced to take any job anywhere for any pay. We need living wages, but we’ll never have incentive to have living wages if every year there’s a group of five million women forced to work any job for any pay. Those concepts need to be conveyed to politicians and media. We also need your readers to support groups struggling to end the war on the poor. We all need both financial support and more allies involved in the struggle.