Ending Welfare - Rilegato

Deparle, Jason

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670892750 ISBN 13: 9780670892754

Casa editrice: Viking, 2000

Riassunto

A critically acclaimed reporter for The New York Times provides an in-depth study of the conflict between government social policy and the realities of life in post-welfare America, focusing on the lives of three women in a single extended family. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore:

Jason DeParle, a reporter for The New York Times, has also written for The New Republic, the Washington Monthly, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune. A former Henry Luce Scholar, DeParle was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and 1998 for his reporting on the welfare system.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

The Pledge:
Washington and Milwaukee, 1991

Bruce Reed needed a better line.

A little-known speechwriter in a long-shot campaign, he was trapped in the office on a Saturday afternoon, staring at a flat phrase. A few weeks earlier, his boss, Bill Clinton, had stood on the steps of the Arkansas Capitol to announce he was running for president. One of the things Clinton had criticized that day was welfare. “We should insist that people move off the welfare rolls and onto the work rolls,” he said. It wasn’t the kind of thing most Democrats said, which was one reason Reed liked it; he thought the party carried too much liberal baggage, especially in its defense of the dole. But the phrase wasn’t particularly memorable, either. With Clinton planning a big speech at Georgetown University, Reed tried again.

“If you can work, you’ll have to do so,” he wrote.

Mmmmm...still not right.

At thirty-one, Reed had a quick grin and an unlined face, but he was less of an innocent than he seemed. Five months earlier, when Clinton was still weighing the race, Reed had struck a hard-boiled pose. “A message has to fit on a bumpersticker,” he wrote. “Sharpen those lines and you’ll get noticed. Fuzz them and you’ll disappear.” Now the welfare rolls hit new highs with every passing month. And Reed lacked bumper-sticker stuff. At 5:00 p.m. he joined a conference call with a half-dozen other operatives in the fledgling campaign. Clinton wasn’t on the line. He was in such a bad mood he wanted to cancel the speech. His voice was weak; he didn’t feel ready. He wanted Mario Cuomo, the rival he most feared, to define his vision first. He was angry to hear that invitations had gone out and it was too late to turn back.

The group reviewed the latest draft, which outlined Clinton’s domestic plans, and agreed the welfare section needed work. How about calling for an “end to permanent welfare”? Reed asked. That was better. Not quite right, but better. They swapped a few more lines, and the following morning Reed sent out a draft with a catchy new phrase. If Clinton spotted the change, he didn’t say. On October 23, 1991, he delivered the words as drafted: “In a Clinton administration we’re going to put an end to welfare as we know it.” By the time it was clear the slogan mattered, no one could say who had coined it.

At first, no one noticed. The New York Times didn’t cover the speech, and The Washington Post highlighted Clinton’s promise to create a “New Covenant.” But soon the power of the phrase made itself known. End welfare as we know it. “Pure heroin,” one of the pollsters called it. When Reed reached the White House, he taped the words to his wall and called them his “guiding star.” In time, they would send 9 million women and children streaming from the rolls.

One of those women was Angela Jobe. The month Bill Clinton announced that he was running for president, she stepped off a Greyhound bus in Milwaukee to start a new life. She was twenty- five years old and arrived from Chicago towing two large duffel bags and three young kids. Angie had a pretty milk-chocolate face and a fireplug build—her four-foot-eleven-inch frame carried 150 pounds—and the combination could make her look tender or tough, depending on her mood. She had never seen Milwaukee before and pronounced herself unimpressed. “Why they got all these old-ass houses!” she groused. “Where the brick at?” Irreverence was Angie’s religion. She arrived in Milwaukee as she moved through the world, a short, stout fountain of exclamation points, half of them capping sentences that would peel paint from the bus station walls. Absent her animating humor, the transcript may sound off-putting. But up close her habit of excitable swearing, about her “cheap-ass jobs” and “crazy-ass friends” and her “too-cool, too- slick motherfucker” men, came off as something akin to charm. “I just express myself so accurately!” she laughed.

The cascade of off-color commentary, flowing alongside the late-night cans of Colt 45, could make Angie seem like a jaded veteran of ghetto life. Certainly she had plenty to feel jaded about. She grew up on the borders of Chicago’s gangland. Her father was a drunk. She had her first baby at seventeen, dropped out of high school, and had two more in quick succession. She didn’t have a diploma or a job, and the man she loved was in jail. By the time she arrived in Milwaukee, she had been on welfare for nearly eight years, the sum of her adult life. The hard face was real but also a mask. Her mother had worked two jobs to send her to parochial school, and though Angie tried to hide it, she still bore traces of the English student from Aquinas High. Lots of women came to Milwaukee looking for welfare checks. Not many then felt the need to start a poem about their efforts to discern God’s will:

I’m tired
Of trying to understand
What God wants of me

Worried that was too irreverent, Angie substituted “the world” for “God” and stored the unfinished page in a bag so high in her closet she couldn’t reach it with a chair. The old red nylon bag was filled with her yellowing treasures: love letters, journals, poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, the hospital bracelets that each of her kids had worn in the nursery. Stories of street fights Angie was happy to share, but the bag was so private that hardly anyone knew it existed. “Don’t you know I like looking mean?” she said one day. While it sounded like one of her self-mocking jokes, Angie segued into a quiet confession. “If people think you’re nice, they’ll take your kindness for weakness. That’s a side of me I don’t want anybody to see. That way I don’t have to worry about nobody hurting me.” In welfare terms, Angie could pass as a paragon of “dependency”: unmarried, uneducated, and unemployed. But Angie never thought of herself as depending on anything. She saw herself as a strong, self-reliant woman who did what it took to get by. She saw herself as a survivor.

No one survived on welfare alone, especially in Chicago, where benefits were modest but rents were not. Sometimes Angie worked, without telling welfare, at fast-food restaurants. Stints at Popeye’s, Church’s, and KFC had marked her as a chicken-joint triathlete, a minimum-wage workhorse steeped in grease. She also relied on her children’s father, Greg, a tall, soft-spoken man in braids who looked out at the world with seductive eyes. Greg, not welfare, marked the major border in Angie’s life. Before Greg, she wore a plaid jumper and went to parochial school. After Greg, right after Greg, Angie was a teenage mother. Their relationship hadn’t completely passed as a portrait of harmony. Once, when he went without feeding the kids, she tried to shoot him. But unlike most teen parents, they stayed together, and by the time their oldest child was entering school, Greg was making “beaucoup money” in the industry employing most men Angie knew. Greg was selling cocaine. His arrest, in the summer of 1991, hit her with the force of a sudden death. She had never even lived alone, never mind raised kids by herself. Without Greg, she couldn’t pay the bills: rent was more than her entire welfare check. Ninety miles away, the economics were reversed. You could sign up for welfare, get an apartment, and have money left over. So many poor families were fleeing Chicago that taxpayers in southern Wisconsin griped about “Greyhound therapy.” Higher welfare, lower rent—that’s all Angie knew about Milwaukee when she stepped off the bus.

A few days later, Greg’s sister arrived. Since Angie and Greg were all but married, Jewell was her all but sister-in-law. She was also Angie’s closest friend. Jewell’s boyfriend, Tony, had been caught in the same arrest, so Jewell faced a similar problem: she was twenty-two, with a three- year-old son, and unless she moved to the projects she couldn’t live on welfare in Chicago. Plus she was six months pregnant. On the outside, they formed a study in contrasts. While Angie groomed herself for durability, Jewell arrived in cover-girl style. She was a half foot taller, with a curl in her hair, perfect teeth, and art gallery nails; with a gleaming pair of tennis shoes, she could turn sweatpants into high couture. She wasn’t married, but Tony’s letters from jail came addressed to “my sexy wife.” Still, there was nothing brittle about her beauty or soft behind her reserve. While Angie swore away her frustrations and cried after too many beers, Jewell treated pain as a weakness best locked inside. Jewell was a survivor, too.

They went about settling down. Piling in with Angie’s cousin for a week, they signed up for welfare at a three-story fortress of local fame known by its address, “Twelfth and Vliet.” Like the shuttered homes around it, the building had traced the parabolic journey of American industrial life; launched as a department store near the century’s start, it had sparkled with the city’s blue- collar prosperity before being padlocked in 1961 and sold off to the county. By the time Angie and Jewell arrived, the building overlooked an eight-lane gash that funneled the prosperity to the suburbs north and west, and there was nothing left inside but long forms and hard chairs. The thirty-one-page application asked if they owned any stocks, bonds, trust funds, life insurance, farm equipment, livestock, snowmobiles, or boats. It asked nothing about the tragedy that had brought them to the county’s door. Welfare dispensed money, not advice.

A few days later, they had their checks and started the apartment hunt. Jewell got a tip from a neighbor. If they moved into a homeless shelter first, the Red Cross would pay their security deposit and first month’s rent. (“Getting your Red Cross” it was called.) “Homeless shelter” may conjure a vision of winos in a barracks, but the Family Crisis Center, in a converted monastery in the heart of the ghetto, had a cheerful air. It offered private rooms, a play area for the kids, and a chance to meet new people. From the shelter, they resumed the search for housing, and Angie found...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0670892750
• ISBN 13: 9780670892754
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 320