I've got a few in my garden I'd like to get rid of. Is it like killing slugs, where you just sprinkle some salt on them and they disintegrate? Or is it more Xena Warrior-Princess-like? Cuz I'd sure love to get in on some of that action :)

you know im really not quite sure yet.

but i cant wait to find out! every night im here just itching to do a few!

artemisia and laura got one earlier, that was the one who told me "iron my shirt bitch".

i slept through that one though.

heehee.. god i cant wait!

Binti Pamoja

...nobody takes care of them, they must take care of each other... Judy, 18

iron my shirt??How about iron my shorts?How about starch and iron your dick so it will stand up?GEESH ,sorry, but that burns my ass.:)

dream felt that the proper comeback was

fix my car, jerk!

Binti Pamoja

...nobody takes care of them, they must take care of each other... Judy, 18

Who may not realize it, but is one of my heroines, recently told an asshole to "piss up a rope." I like that one.

that poor people are criminals, if not in fact then in intent.

which is really funny because the majprity of the "welfare funds" do not go to the poor but to the staff cutting the checks.

Could I say some shit about that! Ever since our friend Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, things have gotten worse for poor families but the non-profits have gotten incredibly rich. Here in Milwaukee we have privatized welfare, with huge corporations like Maximus and co-called non-profits like YWCA and Goodwill (which has since lost its W2 contract because of fraud) raking in the money while dropping women off cash assistance as fast as possible. And what's even more ridiculous is that the statewide cost of W2 is so much larger than AFDC was. For example, in 1995 it cost $314.8 million to serve 214,400 clients. In 1999, three years after welfare reform, Wisconsin spent $589 million for only 40,000 clients. Where'd the money go? I can assure you that almost none of it went to the poor clients it was supposed to be helping, unless you call sending moms out on "job searches" and making them do free forced labor in exchange for their cash grants counts.

I really could go on and on about how welfare reform has been a boon for non-profits and poverty pimps and nothing but disaster for poor moms. How few of us are making family supporting wages after being forced off. How nobody gets to aim for higher education anymore because work comes first, even if it's work at McDonald's. How poor moms never see their kids anymore because they're always in daycare and the moms are always at work or looking for work. I could talk about moms getting evicted because of getting a full-family sanction (that's when your caseworker decides you haven't been compliant enough and cuts off 100% of your cash grant) and doubling up 2 or 3 or more families to a house. Families where grandparents are raising the kids because the moms are working, and working, and working, and getting absolutely nowhere.

But it's 3 in the morning. I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted just thinking about it, and selfish and twisted as this is going to sound, I'm glad I finally got too disabled to have to depend on welfare anymore and now have social security. Because now I only have to go to that ugly welfare building once a year to get my foodstamps. But I haven't forgotten what it's like, especially not when almost all of my neighbors are still going through the same thing.

the only work programs should be giving jobs that are fit to peoples circumstances.

they waste money with resume building (may help some) and subsidizing wages (my dad got fired when the subsidy ran out)... they'd be better... I mean we'd be better just giving people work. I don't know how disabled you are needing oxygen, but if you can stand in line then there is work they could let you do at home, keep you out of line, and get something done.

I wish we'd have a Guaranteed Work Program. Does that sound realistic to you.

Unless they come along with guaranteed family supporting wages. I'm an advocate of one radical solution: Government Guaranteed Child Support. Period. The government guarantees that no child under the age of 18 will be without support. It's humane, it's effective, and its a damn sight cheaper than the system we have now.

what are the problems.

"The government guarantees that no child under the age of 18 will be without support. It's humane, it's effective, and its a damn sight cheaper than the system we have now."

Damn straight. Men can spread their seed and run and the women who care for the results are called whore.

I know you're mad- I'm mad too. But I work at a YWCA, and they decentralized awhile back so that kind of abuse wouldn't occur. Did that fix all of them? Hell no. But I can tell you we're running ours on a shoestring so that all the money goes to our clients. We pay rent for some of them. I did a toy drive for some families and delivered the toys (when the kids weren't home, of course) and I made sure they were customized to the child and up to date. I had to try to get foodstamps and an 'emergency' check before I got this job (I am a children's counselor for the sexual assault division) and they told me the wait was a month. Thats EMERGENCY? So I make sure I listen to everyone who calls our center and stay late and work long to help them. We're not all bad. I know it can feel that way when it is just face after face, but some of us are trying.

Tired. Tired of poor women being treated, first of all, like their time is worth nothing, and tired of the constant babble of how lazy poor moms are, when it's a huge amount of work just to stay afloat.

You sound like you're one of the good workers, and that is really appreciated by all of us who've had to be in the system. But for every worker who spends extra time and effort to care about her clients, there are many, many more who are so burned out themselves that they're just marking time.

I was there, though not now. So maddeningly humiliating!
I once had a social worker kindly explain to me that if I could not read what I was signing,then someone could read it to me.I was fucking POOR not illiterate,geez.

And the nastiness.

Store clerks that would announce "We have no change for food stamps on ilse two" and smile at you sadistically. Or the fact that you could buy beer, but not toilet paper with them (so we were always steeling toilet paper out of public bathrooms) - not to mention toothbrushes and shampoo. Or waiting with your little brother behind the store until all your classmates families were done shopping so that they wouldn't see you. And my mom fighting with creditors every single day.

And the scary people that lived near you.

Oh yes, and the people who used to shame me and my kids..."You'll be out of here pretty soon!" "You don't belong in this neighborhood."

"Is your daddy in jail?" asked one nosy 'counselor' who deemed that my children being late was cause for major alarm and license to put her nose where it didn't belong.

But then poor people have no boundaries to respect.

I wrote a seven page letter to the school. They learned I had some. But that was after regularly dealing with their bullshit for so long.

How about the caseworkers who will grill a woman for having a decent hairdo, or jewelry, or getting her nails done? Like she's supposed to slouch around in house shoes and look like dirt all the time, just cuz she's poor. And how do the caseworkers even know where the woman got the money to get that hair or those nails done? Maybe her mama paid for it, or it was a birthday present.

I was never on welfare during the days when caseworkers could come into your home and inspect your closets for men's clothing (proof of a man in your life) or look in your cupboards to see that you were using your foodstamps for food, not beer and cigarettes, but I've heard enough horror stories. And it's largely due to early welfare rights activists like Johnnie Tillmon and the National Welfare Rights Organization, that the caseworkers and welfare offices were forced to back down a bit--just a bit. They're still incredibly intrusive though. And I had it better than most because I'm white and because I'm educated and aware and politically active. Many, many, many women are still being lied to about what benefits they're entitled to receive, are being denied benefits, or have had their benefits cut, all based on one caseworker's word.

YOu know what they started doing to women last I heard, here? They had them fill out a five page 'questionaire' about their sex life if they wouldn't or couldn't name the child's father. Such questions as:

How many partners have you had this month/week/year?
Have you had sex with more than one partner at a time?
What sexual positions did you use?
Where were you having this sexual intercourse?
Was foreplay involved?
Was oral sex involved?
Did you have more than one partner in a night?
Do you have sex for money?

and on and on.

I remember that when I took my ex to court for contempt of his child support order, the state's attorney on child support showed up to 'help'. Only later when I recieved nothing but a 'receipt' for the 4,000 I had intended to collect was I informed that I had signed away all rights to any and all child support payments when I signed up for AFDC (the fine print somewhere that I don't recall reading).

I said in a phone call to inquire where my children's money went; good then don't expect me to expend my efforts in finding him anymore. The worker on the other line replied, "I don't blame you."

I felt like telling her she should send my kids a thank you note for paying her frickin' salary for the next two months.

Yeah, the old sex questionaire. How about when you are forced to comply with child support enforcement, and they ask you who the kid's father is, when was the last time you had sex with him, how often you had sex with him, during what time period you had sex with him, hehe. I guess if you get intimate with a potential father you're supposed to keep a journal of how, when and where.

For telling it like is, and giving those who have never had to experience this kind of systematic dehumanization a front line view. This is the norm for poor women in America, and for poor women of all ages and it is getting worse. I had my share of it too, as a single Mom. MY husband died when he was 35. He had no life insuance, only (Not insurable: juvenile diabetic). I was left with nerly 35K of his medical debt and two little kids. I was strong and healthy then, and too "proud" to look for any assitance,so I fought my way through to a two year RN degree, adding thousands more to my debt load. Worked as an RN for the next 25 years to get the kids raised, and the debts paid, then at age 42, suffered a permanent back injury, (you don't lift 200 pound patients every day, beause there's not enough staff, without paying for it) which rendered me, eventually, at age 56 unable to work at all in any nursing job. Not one I could get with only a two year degree anyway.

That's when I found myself in one of those lovely job retraining programs, being talked to like I had borderline intelligence. Oh yes, they had a job for me. It was data entry, 35 miles (one way) from my home, $5.00 an hour. (Gee, thanks,but I can only tolerate about a half hour at a time in a upright, seated position, my car is deteriorating faster than my spine and not up Minnesota winter driving) Hmm. I'll just have to pass it up that wonderful opportunity to remain "gainfully employed".

So now, after a total of 40 plus years beng a "responsible" women and mother who did stay in the tax paying work force, I have been promoted to the "poor elderly and disabled" group of American women.

It is amazing how many of us who end up in this group raised kids alone and worked hard all our lives, without welfare assistance, for whatever reason. We are invisible in the statistics. We just obligingly wore out our bodies in that grueling process, instead. Our reward for this, is to be promoted to yet another porblem population demographic called the "poor and elderly disabled."

Now now here we are, getting by on usually a thousand a month or so SSDI to cover housing, food, clothing and whatever medical expenses NOT are covered by Medicare. (Too much income to quality for Medical asisstance, you see.) So, we need to squeeze out money to pay for glasses, dental appliances, OTC meds and ever larger co pays to hospitals. docs, labsm XRAY, etc which, at todays obscene costs, place all medical care but dire medical emergencies totally unaffordable to most of us. Preventative health care? HAHAHAHAHA. Forgot about that years back. Now it's getting harder and harder to even locate clinic who will accept new "Medicare only" patients. (This is after waiting two whole years AFTER disability is granted, to even get MEDICARE! Two full years of paying all of ones own medical expenses (which disabled people tend to have a lot of!) out of pocket sure can run through savings in one hell of a hurry)

So there you have a pretty complete picure, from BOTH ends of the lifespan of low income women's lives, and of how this country values women and mothers, once you strip away all rhetoric, the pathetically inaacurate statistics, and look the bare-fucking-realities.

I don't think this system is fixable. Politican/governmental systems are based on the values held by a culture. As long as a culture continues to devalue women and their contributions, and base the established systems on values that benefit powerful white males the most, this will continue to be the result. In a top down system, those who have the power and are reaping the most benefits do NOT want it changed.

Add to this the powerful rise of the religious right, with it's investment in stripping women of rights we have already spent decade and decade to gain, plus a Democratic Party that can't toss us over the side fast enough, and the only conclusion I can come to at this time is that women are being not shoved, but propelled right back to the kind of Stepford life I once lived back in the 50's and 60's.
Sorry, but thats how I see it.

ONward!

scribe

This is exactly what my Mom is saying - that soon women will only be able to get jobs as teachers and nurses and that the pay for those jobs will go down.

OK, I have to quit doing this or I'm going to get in trouble at work.

Later

In Japan when women were barred from holding Management positions they protested by declining to have children. Something to think about.

I wish! You have to go to school to be a teacher or a nurse. Poor women dream of someday being certified nursing assistants, which is usually a 6-week course that they can take while working. For women in the brave new world of welfare reform, the idea of actually being able to go to school to be a teacher or a nurse is so far out of reach as to be impossible.

I agree with you and your mother, though, that any work that is done almost exclusively by women is devalued (both economically and in terms of status) and will continue to be so.

When widowed in 69, i had only a night scholl education. I DID go to the county offiuces then, to see of there was any fiunding to help me with tuition for nursing school. At that time, there WERE fuds avaialbe, but only if I was content becoming a LPN, which only require one year of training. I knew LPN's made little more than nurses aids,and I had two kids to support, so I wanted a two years RN program so I could make the larger RN salary. Sorry, they said. No can do.

F*ck you I said, and proceeded to dive nearly 10 K deeper in debt than I was, via school loans, plus worked a full time nurses aid job while carrying 18 credits a quarter for two full years. Darned near kiled myself off. Of course I hardly ever saw my children for that time, two little girls who not only lost their father to death, but most of their mother as well, to the sheer struggle for our shared survival. Not only for those two years either, but the the many years that followed after I became an alcoholic in order to even try to cope.

ONward!

scribe

I was a welfare activist during the Welfare Reform debacle that Clinton signed (throw away poor women for political expediency -- and no one noticed).

I started my own organization of other women like me trying to survive, juggling children, trying to get an education/training, getting a job or chrise -- just raising the flippin' kids that their father won't support.

Yes, that's right. My ex didn't pay anything. I was on welfare for about three years and then I jumped off, got a job driving cab, then another one doing something else and so on. I fixed up my apartment to keep the landlord happy.

Today I have my own construction company. I found a man who had skill in the trade who had nothing to lose by teaching me and working with me and I started a business, run it and do work in the field as well. I went to school to get a degree in construction tech (an assoc.). I haven't finished it yet, but I'm close. Business got too much to handle.

My kids have grown and are becoming independent and are damn glad I stayed home with them when I did. They were a handful as they had plenty of emotional issues thanks to good ole' dad who left them high and dry.

I want to make this brief: but here's some points I want to make. Although I don't know right now what you want to do Kactus I want to post some points for everyone else that never get attention.

I was so damn sick and tired of the welfare office trying to push me into a frickin nursing job or a secretarial job. I had no interest in waiting on sick people or wiping their asses and had no desire to dress up everyday and wait on some professional men and their clients either.

I really resent that women are still forced into traditional roles as the only things out there to make a living.

1) You will succeed Kactus at whatever you want, just don't listen to the 'noise' I know its hard, but GIRL KEEP YOUR HEAD UP!

2) If any woman wants to support her family, ,look into the trades. If dull witted uneducated men can make a living without a college degree, so can girls. Here's a sampling of how men work with no or minimal time in school and still earn good money:

1. Truck driver or CDL driver: you can take a CDL license test and get your license to drive light delivery trucks. Good pay. Male dominated. You can find out about getting a CDL license usually through your local DMV. Its not dirty, its not unglamorous. Its a living.

2. Carpenter. Apply as a carpenter's helper. YOu will ahve to be determined as men who will hire a woman are not everywhere. You also have to be able to stand rejection until you get in. Try a temp agency and start out as a laborer (NOT day labor places). You can also check out your local union.

3. Plumber. Plumbers make unbelievably good money. usually entry is controlled by the local union and will require an apprenticeship, but this will give all the training you need and you get paid and you are working to boot. And no, you won't be chasing turds all day either, nor do they all have 'plumbers crack'.

4. Heating and air. Heating and air conditioning techs make very good money as well. They are called 'tin knockers' in the trades because they work with tin in making ducts for heating and air conditioning systems. OF course today they use other materials as well. It requires some training which can be learned either at your local tech college or in the field as an apprentice.

5. Electricians. Electrical work by far is cleaner and doesn't require any heavy lifting (although none of the trades do these days). The work is cleaner than the other trades and requires a little more education. Most electricians must have some class time as well as on the job training. Unions offer apprenticeships for those who finish their minimum class instruction.

6. Drywall hangers and tapers. Drywall hanging requires a little muscle as a 4 x 8 sheet of drywall can get kinda heavy after awhile. But if you like some exercise and like to move, then you could probably try it. Most 'hangers' get paid by the sheet. Taping is an art form and is something you learn by working with others in the field. Taping is one area where I have seen some women enter.

7. Painters: Painting is an area where a lot of women have entered. Again, it pays well and like all the other trades mentioned, offers work in commercial, union, residential and self employment opportunities.

There! Now c'mon ladies. I want to see more women in the trades. Why should the guys make all the money?

While we're at it, I'll dispell some myths men wish to keep alive about the trades (to further their own egos mostly).

1) That the trades require muscle. Fact is that OSHA regulations do not even allow that heavy lifting beyond fifty pounds be required of anyone. I can tell you that the men I know and work around aren't anymore interested in heavy lifting than you are. Most trades do not require it, or if they do, only on a limited basis. Also, we don't live in the stone age; there are tools to assist any job and men use them ALL THE TIME.

2) That men will treat women poorly who work with them.
Don't be so quick to think that. When I worked in commercial construction and even now that I have my own residential construction company, the feedback I'd say in 90% positive. Most men will defend you if anything and will support you all the way. What I find is that they are just tickled to death to find a woman is interested in what they do, they want a woman's attention and frankly, most men prefer working with women and aren't all about machismo. Although, keeping them all at arm's length is always the best policy -- friends and nothing else.

3) I need connections or to know someone
True, I got into my business with the help of a lonely old carpenter who was just waiting for someone to put his skills to good use, but you don't need that. My first job I worked for Manpower, a national temp agency as a laborer on a commercial construction job. It was a hoot. I rank it as one of my best all time jobs. I worked like a dog but everyone was great and being around people who were enthusiastic and proud about their job was fantastic (compared to the boring service jobs I had to hold before to support my kids).

4) Find a mentor once you get in. You will find that men will want to teach you -- most. Don't tolerate a jerk, move on.

5) Check out your local tech school. Boys are always directed to the tech school to get their required training if needed after high school for auto mechanics, electrical, heating and air, welding. Why can't you? Yes, it may be odd to be in a classroom with a bunch of boys, but young guys are a little more liberal than the older men and you will find that if you are sociable, they'll take to you and be respectful as well. Often they are just as scared of you as you of them (I learned this myself when gonig to the tech for construction).

6) I will not be seen as a woman by my peers. Who needs friends like that? Ditch them! Seriously though, I have found other women supportive. Make a difference, set an example for your daughters.

Ladies come on! Anything relating to the building industry is a growth industry and pays very well. The trades are begging for people to fill positions, but they don't look to women. Women are going to have to get there on their own.

As well, many other traditionally male jobs pay well and don't require shitloads of school time to learn and they pay MUCH better than a 6-week CNA job ever will.

CNA's are paid little money. Why? Because they are able to exploit poor women's need for a job.

We have seen such a zoom in the amount of women who are stuck working either in nursing homes, daycares or temp jobs since old Billy signed his welfare deform bill. I'm curious to know what groups you were active in--we may have crossed each other's paths without knowing it. I've done all my welfare rights work in Milwaukee with the Welfare Warriors, but have been involved in coalition work with the Minnesota Welfare Rights Committee, Community Voices Heard, JEDI Women, Kensington Welfare Rights Union, and too many others to remember. Sadly many of them are struggling to stay afloat, just like moms and kids on welfare now.

I was never so happy as the day I got Social Security and was able to say goodbye, forever, to welfare. Now all I have to worry about is food stamps, but I'm freed of the constant pressure to work, look for work, drag my tired body from place to place, meet their demands, and chafe under their assumptions about me and my position.

Thanks Kactus:

Actually, I may have seen you but it has been so long...I was at a conference in Wisconsin and saw Acorn and some people from Welfare Warriors. Went to a little meeting of Welfare Warriors once, a women about in her fifties with long grey hair played a guitar. THat's all I remember.

I don't know how on earth lived through those days. Not only was I organizing, but i was going to school fulltime (communications then, then switched to human services at another school, then quit and progressed to construction years later). I quit working in '94 and got on welfare a few weeks after and started my first semester of school in Feb of '95 when the governor here announced his six weeks and out to work program. I was on fire. I waited for years for the chance to go to school, now i was being told that becuase I was poor, because I had three kids, Because my ex abandoned his responsibility, I was to be relegated to low wage work forever (I know the reality of how little upward movement occurs in service work).

I was horrified and angry.

I started testifying before the state legislature with a woman who organized women to testify on welfare issues. She was older and afraid of my anger. My anger motivated me. I talked to women at the welfare office, I talked to women at the university, going on their degree programs that were soon to be fazed out, I talked to women everywhere. THe name of my group was "Low Income People for Power".

I was told I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get funding from local funders, another organization wanted to absorb us. I wanted us to stay independent.

Then I was diagnosed with manic depression (couldn't have just been exhaustion could it?) and my activism ended abruptly. Shortly after Clinton signed the whole thing away. We one small victories on the state level. I don't regret it for a minute. As for the manic depression diagnosis, well that was thrown out a year later when I got my life more manageable, I stopped the meds after six months because they were making me sick and fat.

Anyhoo. that's the short and some long of my story.

THanks for liking my post. Women need to get out of the office, the hotels, resturant floors and everywhere we've been 'relegated' and get out where the action -- and cash --- is.

sounds to me like you're doing really well these days. and that's great. thanks for sharing. i already feel better about my day after reading the dialog.

enjoy!

Binti Pamoja

...nobody takes care of them, they must take care of each other... Judy, 18

Whenever I hear somebody on the left praise Clinton I think of welfare reform. No matter what else he did I can't get past that. Am I wrong to judge pretty much his entire presidency on the fact that he signed that bill? I don't think so, because while it was politically popular it was, and continues to be, a catastrophe for women and children. And then my sister, a major right-wing ditto-head, has the nerve to call Clinton a socialist-communist president! When she first said that to me I was too surprised to say anything (was also in a hospital bed after having a pacemaker/defibrillator implanted). The second time I said "but Clinton's the president who ended welfare as we know it. Does that sound like the actions of a socialist-communist?"

Well, welfare reform sure was a popular horse to beat for many, many years. And now folks who don't really know act like it's all a done deal and women are now self-sufficient at last--as if. They have the nerve to praise Clinton for signing that death-dealing act. I still get angry, frustrated beyond belief, and tired, so very tired. That's why I blog about poverty issues almost exclusively--to keep it in people's minds and to keep my righteous anger alive. I can't go out on the streets and picket anymore (unless it's in a wheelchair) but I can write and try to be a rational voice for so many women who don't have a voice of their own.

in fact i feel that in the future historians will date the death of the democratic party from around the time of his presidency. he formulated the values sellout and his "push to the middle" has now led us to today where we have anti-choice democratic candidates and anti-gay candidates along the lines of Tim Kaine in Virgini and Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania, etc etc. The list really just goes on and on.

I think though, that the democratic party was only progressive for a very brief period of time and what they're doing now is simply returning to their roots. One has to keep in mind that when the civil rights movement began, and the police were calling the dogs out and the national guard was on the march that all those states had democratic governors, democratic legislatures and democratic majorities. George Wallace was a democrat, as was Orville Faubus and all those white citizens councils in the south at that time were filled with democratic party types.

They're just returning to their roots. FDR doesn't win anymore, although if you look at what made this country great it was the social programs of the new deal. They've thrown all that overboard though and clinton was part of it. It doesn't play with the racist whites whos votes they need to attain power.

And this is the reason I'll never vote for Hillary. She's just like Bill. She'll do whatever she needs to do to gain power. Look at how easily she supported Bush at the beginning of his Iraq war and how she preaches "safe, legal and rare" and her laughable vote on flag burning. She'll sell out the unenfranchised as quickly as her husband did and sleep like a baby afterwards.

I'll play no part of it.

Binti Pamoja

...nobody takes care of them, they must take care of each other... Judy, 18

We all know that old saw; I think that it can be taken a step further--the desire for power begins the corruption. It takes a strong character indeed to resist such temptation.

I wanted to add, too, how enormous a loss Paul Wellstone's death was. He was one of only a handful of politicians who were actively on the side of the disenfranchised. We welfare rights activists loved him and saw his compassion--he was one of us up to the day he died.

Women have to go for non-traditional high paying jobs that are dominated by men. I was not born to be in servitude just because I am a woman. All credit to women who do traditional work, especially nurses who have worked hard to bring the RN field where it is today, but that is just my thing and I'll be damned if some squirrelly government worker or any other person is going to tell me I have to.

yeah its a hackneyed old phrase better applied to corporations these days, isn't it? halliburton, the welfare queen of the bush maladministration.

muy appologies to queenie :::

Binti Pamoja

...nobody takes care of them, they must take care of each other... Judy, 18

I like that. In fact I think that from now on that should be Cheney's new title: Welfare Queen Dick Cheney today sat on his lazy ass and collected $1.8 billion in unearned income from honest tax-payers so that he could drink beer and scream at his kids from the porch. LOL.

You get a tax break, you're a welfare queen.

I won't use up valuable space reposting what I put on mediagirl over the last month or so, but my experiences with public assistance are recorded here:

how-to-get-food-stamps

more-on-getting-public-assistance

the-pre-criminalization-of-the-poor

social-services-something-for-nothing

And this is why I have to be in a hardcore punk band. I want to write the damn lyrics, and hell, I play 2 chords. What's one more?

Social Security Sadist

Fingerprint the innocent
Beat down the beaten down
you won't be so smug
when your turn comes around.

Here comes the revolution
Here comes the downsize now

The hungry wait 30 days
b/4 they get something to eat
welfare pays $214
to keep you from the street.

here comes the revolution
Here comes the landlord now.

I paid all my taxes
Federal, state and city
I ain't asking for no handout
I ain't asking for no pity

Here comes the revolution
Whose side are you on now?

Government supports big bizness
they get every break
and now that bizness is in my business
Saying *I* am on the take

Here comes the revolution
Who's got the guns now?

Run, rich! Run!
Boom, boom.

I will gladly purchase this song once produced! GREAT LYRICS!

I am stunned. Looking for something else, came upon this.

The exciting news for Australians is that our present Federal government wants to move to the "American model" for Social security. Goddess help us!!!

Presently the type of welfare being discussed on this forum is provided by agencies such as St. Vincent de Paul and The Salvation Army. The queues for food vouchers etc with these agencies that you talk of don't seem to exist here as the current system of social security provides supporting parents with pensions. Wilst they are below the nationally accepted 'poverty level'incomes, at least this miserable sum enables women to provide the neccessities for themselves and their children... if their expectations are low and they are wonderful managers!! (or they have a part time job that pays a pittance in cash - 'criminalisation of the poor' in action.)

Being in the Welfare or Social Security system anywhere is demoralising, dehumanising and damned humilating, and once in their clutches, nothing, but nothing is secret or sacred. Am on an aged pension and 'they' have access to my bank account details - for what that's worth, must cause sniggers in the Centrelink lunchroom, and no permission on my part is required. I must phone them fortnightly to let them know if my financial circumstances have changed and to tell them if I have had anyone else staying in my home in the preceeding 2 weeks.

Now the Bureau of Statistics has got in on the act..they need info from me every month about the hours I work(who the hell is going to employ a 67yr old deaf woman with a dickey heart I ask.) Now they also want to know what sort of phone I have - cell or standard, and last time wanted to know if I was going to be at this address 'on your own tonight'. I am a 'lady'(?) through and through but that last question resulted in me telling the questioner that he could get stuffed and ending the conversation. For me, that one raised significant safety issues.

I worked full time for 34 years whilst raising 6 kids and a grandchild, paid my taxes and never received one cent of government support whilst I was about it. How it was considered by the powers that be that I was earning too much in clerical jobs, to be entitled to any govt support, is beyond me. We lived at 12 different addresses during that time, always looking for a place that was large enough and easier to afford.

I felt sad looking back that I had not been able to provide a stable physical environment for my children, and said this to my eldest daughter. Her reply made the struggle worthwhile. "Mum, in the years I was working away and I said 'I'm going home for Christmas', it meant that I was coming home to you. It wouldn't matter where the place was - tin shed on a river bank..whatever. Where you are has always been 'home'" I suppose you strong, feisty women might find that a bit kitsch, but it made my day:)

Kitschy I may be, but I could never have coped emotionally if I'd had to do what you women are forced into doing ... I think I would have become violent. I know that's not very constructive, but that's me.

Mary:)