Safety net in name only

The important thing to understand about the abusive process by which we make people apply for social benefits is that it is abusive because we chose to make it that way.

But it may be that not all of the claimants have successfully signed up for the benefits. Facebook pages are full of people complaining that they can’t get through on the phone or online to file their claims. If they do, Facebook posters grouse, they can’t get answers to their questions.

In previous interviews, Dejoie has counseled patience, saying that she and her staff are working around the clock. Her agency was organized to handle 1,500 claims per week – not 60 or 70 times that.

“Nothing about this is normal,” she said in the email.

But almost everything about this is normal.  The state agency that administers these benefits is understaffed and underequipped. The application process is complicated and invasive and requires people to prove on a weekly basis that they are trying to find work or they can be dropped. The purpose of this is to prevent as many people from actually receiving any help as possible.

We chose this. We chose not to have a social safety net to speak of in this country. This was what Bill Clinton meant when he promised to "end welfare as we know it."  Our political leadership fully bought into the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy and must be prodded into work under whatever circumstance capital decrees. That has been the paradigm under which all discourse has proceeded since.  It's why Louisiana spent several months recenlty trying to attach work requirements to medicaid.  It's why Joe Biden says, even now, that he would veto a single payer healthcare bill if it came across his desk.

Here is a book I recommended last year by Virginia Eubanks about the insidious way technocratic neoliberalism has birthed dystopian experiments with "data driven" screening systems for welfare benefits. Eubanks argues that these systems constitute a "digital poorhouse" that exists symbiotically with the expanding police state. Again, this is no accident. What we call a "safety net" is actually an elaborate trap that keeps poor people in precarious and isolated situations where they can be more easily intimidated and controlled.

All that's different today is tens of millions of Amercians are finding themselves ensnared at once. That's very embarrassing to political and media elites because it's a bigger number than they are used to belittling or ignoring all the time.  So they feel a little bad about it right now. But they'll get the hang of it soon enough.  Give it another month or so and the editorials calling to force people off the unemployment rolls so we can "reopen the economy" will begin.