12-20-05, 8:51 am

A very old friend who has worked as a medical psychotherapist in hospital health programs for decades told me this story very recently. It will not get into the press anywhere but it is an example of what goes on everyday in 21st century U.S. state monopoly 'free enterprise.'

A devoutly religious Haitian woman (her religion is a mixture of Roman Catholicism and African derived Caribbean religions) was a client of my friend. Her biggest problem was that she had no money. My friend asked her how she paid the rent, and she replied that she hadn’t for five years. She told my friend, her therapist, that the landlord’s son who came to collect the rent that she had no money and prayed and fasted that so that all would be well. My friend told her that she had to get some money and get her life together—her fasting was more an accommodation to the fact that she had no money than the providence of God (which may also explain the fasting ritual among the poor for millennia, that is, they sought spiritual justification for their hunger).

She did have a little business in her apartment, purchasing various trinkets from an 'African trader' (the Brooklyn neighborhood where she lives is largely inhabited African and Caribbean people), but she sold these goods on credit to poor people like herself who only paid her sporadically.

What was the answer to all of this? Since the woman had never been on public assistance, she could, my friend told her, qualify for what is known in New York 'post Welfare' (meaning post Gingrich-Clinton abolition of Aid to Families with Dependant Children) as a 'one shot deal.' To do this, she would have to get her landlord, whom she believed had let her live without paying rent because she was a good religious woman to give her an eviction notice. Then she would be entitled to a lump sum of money to pay off her rent. Well, it took a lot of doing for her to first accept this and then to get the landlord to give her an eviction notice, but she finally did.

Meanwhile, the medical mental health program in which my friend had been a therapist was in effect being destroyed by a new administrator who was removing staff and turning the program over to 'research,' meaning that mental health services would be replaced by lucrative 'research experiments' in psychiatric drugs and other programs funded by grants from pharmaceuticals and state and federal programs serving the interests of pharmaceuticals. My friend got herself another and better job in Community Mental Health, based on her skills and experience, but was outraged about what was happening to her existing program, which had been part of a prestigious New York State Hospital.

As a postscript, and something of a happy ending, the Haitian woman saw my friend and told her she was also leaving, that is taking the money and moving to Miami, which has a large Haitian population, warmer weather, and probably lower living costs. For her, God had provided. For my friend, there was a new job waiting to direct a Community Mental Health program providing services for working class people, not treating them as test subjects, which is what her old job had become.

Research is both necessary and valuable, but it is not a magic solution to anything, particularly when it is used, as it is in public sector activities of all kinds, to undermine and substitute for teaching and other service providing programs.

Furthermore, what I would call 'anti-social research' in the sciences and professions, which is funded to either run interference for corporate policies or provide data for the advertising of corporate products, often detracts from chronically under funded research projects in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in programs like nutrition, health science, public health, occupational health and safety, social psychology, and the physical and biological sciences that had application to solving collective social problems and improving the quality of life for people.

Governments that aid corporations and private wealth while at the same time undermining or dismantling programs, including research based programs that provide general education and public services are in effect robbing the people to subsidize the capitalist class. They are, in effect, reducing everything in the public sector, as Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto 157 years ago, to the cash nexus, the profit motive, the selling of anything and everything to the highest bidder on EBay.

The late Ronald Reagan and other right-wingers might call that Haitian woman a 'welfare cheat,' but I don’t think so. The real cheats are those who eliminated public assistance as a social right, established 'one shot deals' to get rid of people, privatized education and community health and development programs, regardless of the waste, inefficiency and increased social inequity that followed. I would only wish that woman well in Miami. Perhaps if she restores her little business, begins to sell on EBay, even gets customers with credit cards, she might become a financial success and an example of what religious belief and the administration’s approach to social welfare can produce. She might even be invited to a White House Prayer Breakfast.



--Reach Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.