Appalachia, San Joaquin vs. Senator Welstone

Let us view some more rhetoric in the framed terms. Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MI), who was killed in a tragic plane crash on October 25th, 2002, said this on the Senate floor on August 2nd 1996 (113):

I think, today, what we see in the U.S. Senate is a spiritual deficit because, Mr. President, I know some of my colleagues do not want to look at this. They push their gaze away from unpleasant facts and an unpleasant reality. Sometimes people do not want to know what they do not want to know.

Mr. President, the evidence is irrefutable and irreducible: This legislation, once enacted into law will create more poverty and hunger among children in America. That is not reform.

Mr. President, there will be a $3 billion cut over the next six years in food assistance, nutrition assistance, even for families who pay over 50 percent of their monthly income for housing costs. So now we put families in our country -- poor families , poor children -- in the situation of "eat or heat," but they do not get both. At the same time, my colleagues keep wanting to cut low-income energy assistance programs. This is goodness? This is goodness? (113)

But I had taught classes dealing with welfare policy. I've done organizing with the very families that were going to be affected by it. I guess I really felt like I just knew the subject matter too well to be able to vote any other way. (142)

I am going to embark on a poverty tour in our country. I am going to bring television with me, and I am going to bring media with me, and I am going to visit these children. I am going to visit some of these poor, elderly people. I am going to visit these families. (143)

Wellstone followed through on his promise to do his poverty tour. One of the places he spent a lot of time was in Appalachia, a mountainous rural area stretching from New York to Georgia that has been impoverished for the past 60 years. On February 9, 1998 Michael Janofsky a reporter for the New York Times wrote a lengthy article titled “Pessimism Retains Grip on Region Shaped by War on Poverty”. Here are some excerpts (151), (152), (153):

Janofsky visited Owsley County, Kentucky, and found a poverty rate of over 46 percent, with over half the adults illiterate and half unemployed. “Feelings of hopelessness have become so deeply entrenched,” he reported, “that many residents have long forsaken any expectation of bettering themselves.” For years, the government has been trying to treat the despair with welfare programs: two-thirds of the inhabitants receive federal assistance, including food stamps, AFDC, and SSI disability payments. This, it now appears, is part of the area’s problems.

“The war on poverty was the worst thing that ever happened to Appalachia,” Janofsky quotes one resident as saying. “It gave people a way to get by without having to do any work.” Local officials told him that “many parents urge their children to try to go to special education classes at school as a way to prove they are eligible for [SSI] disability benefits.” (The senior class at the local high school picked as its motto, “I came, I slept, I graduated.”)

Why did the war on poverty fail? What was wrong with the programs under which the nation spent over $5 trillion attempting to solve the problems of the poor, only to come up empty? It’s an important question to ask in these days of welfare reform. The first step toward a sound policy ought to be to identify the errors of the past.

Michael Janofsky detailed the failure of this effort in the one region that was supposed to be the centerpiece of reform. “Federal and state agencies have plowed billions of dollars into Appalachia,” he wrote, yet the area “looks much as it did 30 years ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty, taking special aim at the rural decay.” (151), (152), (153)

On a hunch, I decided I would look up rates of single mother hood in Appalachia. I was surprised to find the rates were nearly identical with the national average. I wondered if perhaps our pattern of single motherhood, teen births, poverty, and government dependency had been broken. I then discovered that Appalachia - the Appalachian mountain region - is broken down into sections and that the north and southern parts of it have never really been impoverished compared to the rest of the nation. Only in Central Appalachia, where only 10% of the population of Appalachia lives, has there been a scourge of poverty lasting over 40 years. Appalachia, as a whole has a poverty rate of 13.6%, only one point higher than the national average.

I did a search for the poorest county in Appalachia and found McDowell county. McDowell County has the fifth highest poverty rate in the country and 60% of its children live in poverty. (157) From the Associated Press (154):

The county ranks last in West Virginia in economic sustainability and general health; first for its rate of diabetes, low birth weights, births to unwed mothers, suicide, homicide and sudden infant death. The life expectancy of 64.5 years for men is about 13 years less than the national average.

During coal’s heyday the mining companies supplied most people’s needs, from jobs to housing to sewage to medical care. With the War on Poverty, the government replaced that “coal-camp mentality” with another kind of dependency says Jo-Claire Datson, a program director with the Council of the Southern Mountains and president of the county's rural health advisory board.

“You're dealing with a population in which those who were raised with work ethics and who really want to work have left, for the most part,” says Datson, who left an analyst position with Dun & Bradstreet seven years ago to give back to her native community Those remaining here, she says, may not be against working, “but they don't know how.” (154)

Join me while we explore the dark-side of Appalachia the social scientists and politicians won't talk about. Here we have the Southern plantation mentality combined with the socialist welfare state. With a population that's 97% white, it isn't people of color on the cheap labor plantation. (155)

The following Chart depicts female unemployment or non employment Chart 53 (158):

Compare this Chart to Chart 52 and you can see that most of these high unemployment areas fall in center Appalachia - where Mcdowell county is. Further, McDowell County has the highest birthrate to unwed mothers under age 18 years in West Virginia. (158) Women's News adds:

Since welfare reform was implemented in West Virginia in 1997, under the name West Virginia Works, the number of welfare cases has dropped dramatically, from 33,000 to about 14,000 today.

Even in McDowell County, which has the highest number of caseloads in the state, the caseload has fallen from about 1,600 in 1997 to 1,100 last January. But looked at another way, about 3,000 of the county's 27,000 residents are still receiving welfare--more than 11 percent. (159)

Trying to find out the politics of the county, I was not surprised to find this in a press statement from the West Virginia Republican candidate for Attorney General:

"The fact that the party chose southern West Virginia for its convention is also telling. I grew up in Welch in McDowell County. Last time I looked McDowell County was 94% Democratic. But, the county almost went for Underwood in 2000. I think it is wonderful that West Virginia voters are beginning to base their votes on the person and the issues, and not the party." (160)

We can hope that Welfare Reform will help bring McDowell county out of poverty. Unfortunately, I could find no statistics on the changes that occurred since Welfare Reform, just general statements that the teen birth rate has dropped by at least 10 percent in parts of Appalachia. As I was doing this research on Appalachia county, I encountered this interesting tidbit in the migration section of University of California Davis:

The San Joaquin Valley has a teen birth rate that is double the state average, 95 births per thousand 15- to 19-year old girls in 2000, compared to 48 statewide, a result of poverty, boredom and isolation. One expert said: "If it's between having a baby and working in a packing plant, motherhood sounds pretty good to these girls." In smaller San Joaquin cities, it can be hard for girls to anonymously get contraceptives and counseling in health clinics. Tulare and Kings counties have the highest teen birthrates in California. Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter) said the "number one commodity" of the San Joaquin Valley was babies born to teens: "We're so focused on economic development issues in the Valley, but as much money as we raise for the state, it goes out the back door when it comes to the amount of teen pregnancy." Nearly half of the children living in the Central Valley live below the federal poverty line, unemployment averages double the state rate, and in some areas the high school dropout rate is 40 percent. The California Senate's Ending Poverty in California committee held a hearing in Fresno in May 2003, and heard that only massive government intervention could head off the creation of an "Appalachia of the West." In Fresno County, 27 percent of the county's adults are on public assistance and 36 percent of county children live in families with below-poverty-level incomes. Fresno county has 15 cities, and 11 have double-digit unemployment rates. Unemployment rates have been rising, from an average annual rate of 10 to 11 percent in 1987-89 to an average annual rate of 14 percent since 2000. (161) (emphasis mine)

This is so amazing I'll excerpt this statement again because it illustrates why the 'war on poverty', the way liberals run things, will never ever, ever be won because they themselves are creating the poverty:

The California Senate's Ending Poverty in California committee held a hearing in Fresno in May 2003, and heard that only massive government intervention could head off the creation of an "Appalachia of the West." (161)

These fools will create an "Appalachia in the west" by trying to prevent it!!! Isn't it obvious that government assistance is already causing the problems that exist here?! The reason I said 'liberals' in the previous paragraph is because California is overwhelmingly Democratic. As we have heard, that state's destructive policies resulted in the stagnation of it's economy, exodus of it's businesses and the recall of it's governor. We can only hope that, in the next election, California will throw out most of it's incumbent State Senators (especially any irresponsible liberals on this 'Ending Poverty in California' committee). A simple graph illustrates the point that the same mistaken arguments applied to Welfare Reform can be applied widely, and devastatingly to an entire state's economy. As this Chart shows, California stands out because of the failed policies of it's state government representing the leftist ideology of it's citizens. People vote with their feet Chart 54 (162):

Also, notice Georgia, arguably the most solidly GOP state in the country is booming. A state profile written for prospective graduate students states:

For decades, Atlanta has been referred to as "the city too busy to hate", reflecting a relentlessly positive attitude toward diversity. Atlanta is home to The King Center, the memorial to civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Atlanta also has the largest African-American middle class population in the country. (163)

How can that be? The 'poor' south, known for hillbillies, confederate flags and past racism now has the largest African American middle class, in the most Conservative State in the country. An amazing statistic, downplayed by the media, is that President Bush won 97 of the fastest 100 growing counties in the country in 2004. (248) Coincidence?

Well, we are getting a bit off track and to get into all of California's woes and Georgia's growth would be even more time consuming than this look at welfare is turning out to be. I admit my explanations are probably oversimplified.

In any event, we were discussing Senator Wellstone's rhetoric on the Senate floor. Despite his denunciations of Welfare Reform, his publicized tour of the poverty stricken areas, most notably the Appalachia area, and his good intentions, he is (like Wendell Primus) actually the arch enemy of those in poverty . The problem is that no one judges these elected officials by what the actual results of their policies would be. After Wellstone's death, he was memorialized in newspapers and editorials around the county. It was all very respectful, as it should be - all accounts point to someone who was a kind, generous, good person and a genuine idealist who stuck to his principals. As I searched for his statements on Welfare Reform, I ran across quite a few of these editorials and couldn't help but have some thoughts about some commonalities. Here are excerpts from a typical commentary titled He was A Rare Person in Politics from the Charlotte Observer (164):

But when Wellstone died, the politicians seemed to brush off the speechwriters and speak in their own words. President Bush called Wellstone "a man of deep convictions, a plain-spoken fellow." Sen. Trent Lott said his death was "too heartbreaking for words." Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura said: "This loss seems especially cruel ... his dedication to his state and nation was profound." Here's the interesting part: Those folks disagreed with Wellstone 99 percent of the time.

Wellstone was the Senate's most liberal liberal. To get to the left of him you'd have to run off in the ditch. He voted against giving President Bush authority to use force against Iraq. He voted against welfare reform. He never saw a problem that couldn't be solved by spending more money.

He never apologized for his views. He never had to. He voted the way he believed. That made him a rare person in politics. So many politicians act like traders on the Wall Street floor. They're willing to swap their souls for a key vote or a favor down the line or (especially) a wad of cash.

We've got plenty of politicians who are good at deals. We're awfully short on politicians who have ideals. But he shared Helms' belief that you ought to have principles, you ought to make them clear, and you ought to stick to them. The politicians were so heartfelt in their respect for Wellstone on Friday.

I want to be clear I mean no disrespect to Senator Wellstone or any of his admirers. I am using this to illustrate, in a non-personal way, an important theme in this paper. I want to return to an earlier point regarding the 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' where we discussed how compassionate destruction via welfare and government dependency can sometimes be more dangerous then open, unbridled, more easily combated, racism. In a similar sense, men like Senator Wellstone can be equally, if not more, destructive then racists - precisely because of the aura of honesty, goodness, and conviction that they have about them. Yet if their ideas and policies were actually enacted, they would surely result in a national disaster of epic proportion. These ideas and policies can be compelling, stimulating and exciting - just like the ideas of socialism and communism are (and were, at first, to me). Conservative ideas about a flat-tax, personal savings accounts and Welfare Reform are yawners - uninspiring and boring. Yet, when we dig beneath the initial emotional gloss and really analyze, not what should be, but what will be, the results of different policies, we find that an amazing juxtaposition has taken place. Conservative ideas are suddenly positive and forward looking and our initial exuberations towards the proposals of the other side have fade to disinterest, distaste and, finally, abject fear.

Although we can certainly commend Senator Wellston's character, honesty and integrity, we must ask a practical question; What is the use of a moral fool?