The political right's fanatical desire to bar low-income Americans from preventative health care

(The description for this photo reads: "WPA Traveling Health Clinic of the Board of Health, NY City, shown in consultation and fitting glasses for patients at 74 West 124st Street." Photo courtesy of the National Archives and the New Deal Network.)

A lawsuit that threatens to derail the Affordable Care Act will soon be ruled upon by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawsuit has its genesis, of course, in right-wing circles. And if the lawsuit is successful it will, of course, hurt low-income Americans.

The moral & opinion leaders of the political right have shown that they will not rest until all low-income Americans remain uninsured. Indeed, such insurance goes against their survival-of-the-fittest, free market fanaticism. In their view, if you don't have health insurance because you don't make enough money, it's because you're too lazy or too dumb to deserve it (or you weren't lucky enough to be born into wealth). This is why a Republican official in Arizona called low-income Americans "lazy pigs," why Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney scoffed at the idea that low-income Americans had a right to food and medical care, and why Republican-managed states have refused to extend Medicaid to their low-income residents--despite the fact that the federal government will pay 100% of the cost for the first few years and 90% thereafter.

The right-wing argues that charity and the "free market" will handle our health care problems better than the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that charity and the "free market" have never adequately handled these problems.

Some on the political right will bypass the free market and charity arguments, and simply say that we, as a nation, can't afford to insure and care for the less fortunate. At the same time they are making this argument, we read how corporations are hoarding record profits overseas, how thousands of wealthy Americans are hiding money in foreign bank accounts (helping to deprive the U.S. of $300 billion in tax revenue every year), how we spend almost as much as every other nation combined on national defense & military ventures, how we run the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, and how billionaires like the Koch brothers keep adding billions to their personal fortunes. It is surreal to have, on the one hand, someone whispering in your ear, "we can't afford it," while, on the other hand, you see a mix of greed and white collar crime slinking off with hundreds of billion of dollars.

 

(Unlike today's political right, which belittles the value of (or need for) preventative health care for low-income Americans, New Deal policymakers encouraged all Americans to get their health checked before serious problems developed; they even provided traveling clinics to facilitate health check-ups for those of limited means. WPA poster, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

(WPA poster, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

The Fourth of July

 

(WPA poster, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

Pennsylvania Infrastructure and the New Deal

(Image courtesy of wpclipart.com.)

The American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave Pennsylvania infrastructure a letter grade of "C-", giving especially poor grades to its road system (D-).

During the New Deal era, when government was not as helpless, polarized, and leadership-deficient as it is today, policymakers upgraded Pennsylvania infrastructure on a colossal scale. For example, the WPA created or improved 18,000 miles of Pennsylvania roadway, engaged in over 2,000 bridge projects, and installed tens of thousands of culverts (Federal Works Agency, Final Report on the WPA Program, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946, p. 135).

Unfortunately, many Americans do not know (or care) about this history, and so are susceptible to the idea that if we just pamper the super-wealthy a little more, everything will be a-ok. Hence, our infrastructure will continue to crumble a little more every day while billionaires like the Koch brothers keep pocketing more billions.

Injustice and helplessness flourish when people forget, or have never been taught, the past

(Photo courtesy of the University of Maryland College Park Archives.)

"...most people in America today live in the moment and the moment alone. If they realized and cared about the past, if they used that realization and care to make the future better, they would not be able to live in the moment so well."

--Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired), "Empire's Age-Old Aim: Wealth and Power," Huffington Post, June 30, 2014.

This statement helps explains why there is not a new WPA for the long-term unemployed. Despite deteriorating infrastructure, despite hiring discrimination against the unemployed, and despite the proven track record of the WPA during the New Deal era (success that motivated even Ronald Reagan to praise the WPA), we did not, and will not, create a new similar program. Many American voters, and many of the people they vote for, do not realize or care about the past. Hopefully that will change someday.   

Burning and forgetting the homeless, when the New Deal points to a better way

 

(William Bastian, a homeless man, died in 1939 at the age of 64. Before William's passing, he had been working with the National Park Service on beach erosion control in North Carolina. Records at the National Archives, and communication with residents of Roanoke Island, indicate that Mr. Bastian may have lived in a WPA camp for transient workers at, or near, what is now Fort Raleigh National Historic Site {before 1941, Fort Raleigh was a state park}. Photo by Brent McKee.)

Journalist Christie Thompson recently wrote an interesting article about "What Happens To The Homeless When They Die." She found that, with respect to the homeless in Washington, DC, "many are left unclaimed at the city morgue. After 30 days, they are cremated by a private funeral home and often buried outside the city limits. There is no funeral, no head stone, just a name written in the ledger book of a Maryland or Virginia cemetery." 

There is nothing inherently wrong with cremation, of course.....but I think, in this case, we can safely assume that cremation is not performed per end-of-life request from the homeless person, but rather from a desire to quickly and efficiently get rid of the body and have the least amount of space used for his/her remains. The absence of a funeral (i.e., a ceremony), and the failure to place a headstone, would seem to confirm this.

This is not the mark of a civilized society. But then, neither is the allowance of homelessness in the first place, or the criminalization of homelessness. So, perhaps the burning of an unclaimed homeless person's body, and the placement of his/her ashes in an unmarked grave without ceremony, falls right in line with the survival-of-the-fittest mentality we've been fostering for the past 30+ years.

 

(A memorial stone for the homeless men--including William Bastian--who died while employed with the National Park Service in North Carolina, probably through the WPA. Photo by Brent McKee.)

    

During the New Deal, policymakers began to show us a better way to treat the homeless, especially those homeless people who needed a job more than anything else. Harry Hopkins, head of the WPA, reported that "By December, 1934, over two hundred and fifty work camps for transient men were in operation." Hopkins described transients as "jobless and penniless...homeless and friendless." He described their life and employment situation in the following manner:  

"Originally, there had been a strong disposition to view the transient as a man requiring 'casework techniques' and 'therapeutic treatment.' But some transients who stubbornly resisted the casework approach to rehabilitation emerged, under the more normal conditions of a work project, from sullen discouragement and inertia into highly effective workmen. There could be little doubt that what most of them needed was not casework, but a job." (See Harry Hopkins, Spending to Save, pp. 133-134, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1936)

So, on Roanoke Island, for those who care to see, there is historical evidence of a better way to address the problem of homelessness. Instead of neglect, criminalization, or band-aid policies, we see work opportunities, a paycheck, shelter from weather & physical assaults (see the report Hate Crimes Against the Homeless), a chance to get back on one's feet, and a proper funeral & burial for homeless people when they die. This is the type of thing President Franklin Roosevelt meant when he said, "We are going to make a country in which no one is left out" (The Roosevelt I Knew, Frances Perkins, 1946). Unfortunately, America has not followed Roosevelt's lead, but has instead embraced the ruthlessness of plutocracy. Hence, we burn, bury, and forget many of our homeless fellow citizens; placing them in a state of disregard even more complete than the one they lived in.

 (This WPA project card at the National Archives describes beach erosion control activities to be conducted  in cooperation with the National Park Service in the counties of Dare, Hyde, and Currituck {North Carolina}. This appears to be the tail-end of the project referred to on the memorial stone in the photo above {note that the project card is for fiscal year 1942, which would have started in July 1941, and would coincide with the dates inscribed on the memorial stone}. Photo by Brent McKee.)

WPA Poster: Funny Side Up

(WPA poster, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

WPA Poster: Goodbye to Hollywood!

(Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)