Search the archive.

By failing to recognize and engage settler-colonial frameworks, race scholars risk misunderstanding, mis-representing, or—worse yet—erasing key structures and events that contextualize race in the U.S. Academic enter-prises and sociology in particular have long exhibited dual tendencies toward social justice on the one hand, and legitimation of established social order on the other (e.g., Morris, 2017). Attending to settler-colonial structures is not only crucial for developing an understanding of the experiences of Indigenous peoples today; it fundamentally informs and enriches sociological approaches to race. Whereas the existing sociological work on race has engaged themes of colorblind racism, white supremacy, and labor, the integration of settler-colonial theory underscores how Indigenous dispossession and erasure have fundamentally structured the racialization processes of all peoples in the U.S. The central focus on land makes visible a complex set of racializing forces that have so far been largely ignored by the field, and thereby exposes the extent to which the attainment of “racial equality” integrates non-Indigenous people targeted by racism into settler systems and whereby they simultaneously participate in Indigenous disposses-sion and erasure. We have emphasized here how the theoretical framework of settler-colonialism challenges and enriches socio-logical theories of race. But we note that the absence of this theory to date is part of a larger problem - the general absence of Indigenous scholars and perspectives within sociology as a whole. To make way for an Indigenous Sociol-ogy (for lack of a better term), we must attend to the removal of existing barriers to Indigenous participation within our discipline. In addition to improving literacy on settler colonialism and Indigenous experiences and perspectives among sociologists, it is crucial to make sure the institutions and practices we partake in recognize and account for the value of Indigenous scholars and epistemologies. Just as empires and settlers presumed the North American con-tinent as terra nullis, so too have sociologists largely failed to account for the presence of Indigenous peoples in North America, inevitably leading to the erasure of Indigenous scholars, frameworks, and epistemologies within the discipline. Fortunately, the tension between settler colonialism and enduring Indigeneity, and the roles played by the natu-ral world within this dialectic, can be employed to address long overdue questions at the intersection of race, political and environmental sociology, and gender and sexuality. By understanding how the structure of settler colonialism shapes race and racism, particularly around Indigenous experiences and resistance, and by examining how this struc-ture fundamentally shapes the categorization and exploitation of all peoples and landscapes, sociologists can begin reversing Indigenous erasure within the subdiscipline and develop more accurate and nuanced analyzes.

Indigenous peoples need to be listened to and their values and knowledge must be acknowledged and honoured.

Settler societies are grappling with the violent legacy of colonization, as well evolving types of colonialism in technocratic, market-oriented, neo-liberal environmental policies and practices. Mascarhenas writes that ‘neo-liberalism represents a new, more subtle, style of colonialism; one where the discourse of expertise plays a far greater role than in previous assimilationist and displacement-type policies’ (Citation2007, 571). This is yet another attempt to silence Indigenous voices. And while Mascarhenas is writing about water rights of First Nations peoples, policies such as reconciliation, which we see taking place in Canada, will not likely be liberatory. Such policies continue to centre settler interests, primarily aimed at alleviating settler angst, or guilt. We agree with Tuck and Yang (Citation2012) analysis that decolonization cannot be a metaphor, but rather must continue to centre the repatriation of Indigenous land, upon which Indigenous cultural values are based – the restoration of Indigenous peoples to Indigenous land is the path to liberation for all peoples marked by the trauma of colonization. As Mascarhenas writes, ‘First Nations speak not only of injustice in terms of equity but also of injustice in terms of recognition – recognition of harm, and recognition of other ways of knowing’ (Citation2007, 571). Our project begins to acknowledge the harm that colonized ways of knowing and being cause, as well as to honor, and support Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

We return to the argument here that the liberation of Indigenous people, and all peoples will not happen through the policies of the U.S. nation-state, nor any other settler government. The U.S., like all settler colonial societies, is predicated upon Indigenous erasure. As Bacon eloquently describes, ‘the mechanisms of eco-social disruption are numerous: land is redistributed, privatized, polluted, and renamed with generally no input or consent on the part of the original inhabitants; the value of places and beings are redefined by the culture of the colonizers’ (Citation2019, 63). Cameron adds to this when she writes on the absence of a recognition of colonialism ‘in spite of the fact that the projects are carried out in communities profoundly shaped by colonization and movements toward decolonization and Inuit self-determination. Climate change itself, as a number of Indigenous leaders and scholars have made clear, is thoroughly tied to colonial practices, both historically and in the present’ (Citation2012, 104). Cameron further stresses that the current settler and governmental approach to how climate change affects humans and:

perpetuates the delimitation of Indigenous peoples to the “local,” by limiting the legibility of Indigenous geographies to the realm of the “traditional,” and by eliding the persistence of the colonial, understood not just in cultural, social, or historical terms, but also as the organization and re-organization of political-economic relations (Citation2012, 104).

Neoliberalism creates and relies on racial, gendered, and sexual inequality, but justifies this social inequality as a logical outcome of free choice, personal responsibility, and individualism. By redefining citizenship as ownership and freedom as freedom to consume, neoliberal eco -nomic policies have dismantled social welfare, enshrined a property-based right to privacy, and destroyed public sexual cultures accessible to poor, young, queer, and transgender communities of color. Building on the groundbreaking work of historians such as John D’Emilio, who linked gay identity to the rise of industrial capitalism, I focus on the ways that neoliberalism, in its relation to the culture of what Fredric Jameson has termed late capitalism, celebrates, endorses, and supports some aspects of sexuality, while at the same time limiting, policing, and punishing others. As a rationality, neoliberalism has narrowed the vision of much LGBT political organizing to what Lisa Duggan calls “homonormativity”: “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” Mainstream gay advocacy organizations have pursued individual and family-based rights and turned away from liberationist or radical demands for dismantling oppressive systems or promoting sexual freedom or pleasure. We can see this vision reflected in the primary goals of the national movement through the 2010s: same-sex marriage and family recognition rights, market/cultural visibility, access to the military, and hate crime/safety legislation. The following three cases show how homonormativity has guided the mainstream LGBT rights movement for the past three decades. Privatization of Social Services: Gay Marriage/The Welfare Queen A February 15, 1976 New York Times article entitled “ ‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” began: “Few people realize it, but Linda Taylor, a 47-year-old Chicago welfare recipient, has become a major campaign issue in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential primary.” The term “Welfare Queen” was popularized by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 stump speeches, where he used it to describe a poor black woman on welfare who was purportedly “cheating the system.” The figure helped to rally support and justification for the massive cuts to welfare and social services that Reagan pursued. The “welfare queen” trafficked in older iconographies of poor black women’s deviant sexuality that were reinvigorated after the 1965 Moynihan Report on the gendered and sexual “pathologies” of the black family. The Report depicted black single mothers as sites of “unrestrained sexual behavior”—and thus responsible for their own poverty. Relying on and reviving these imaginative links between race, poverty, and (sexual) pathology, the image of the “Welfare Queen” played a central role in portraying the poor as greedy, not needy. Harnessing sexual deviance to racialized poverty, the image helped shore up public support for the privatization and elimination of social services (in spite of the fact that most who needed welfare and child assistance were and are white).This image continued to do its work in the post-Reagan era. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, for example, dramatically cut funding to basic safety net programs and ended “welfare as we know it,” as Bill Clinton pledged. After public debate about welfare “abusers,” the act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and required welfare recipients to take low-paying jobs to qualify for benefits (workfare). It also aimed to limit the number of children women on welfare could have, adding “family caps” to benefits and giving extra money to US states that reduced the number of “out-of-wedlock” births without increasing abortions. The Act also supported state abstinence-only education programs (that have roots in much longer eugenic histories of the sterilization and reproductive control of poor women of color). As Priya Kandaswamy argues, “Although the law had negative impacts on a wide array of women, support for the law was framed specifically as a means of disciplining sexually promiscuous, lazy black (and more recently Latina) ‘welfare queens’ who supposedly used government assistance to live outside the confines of both the labor market and the hetero-patriarchal family.”8This history shows the connection between disciplining the racialized poor as sexually deviant and marshaling public consent for the neoliberal decimation of public assistance. The pathologization of non-(hetero)normative racialized sexualities justifies a central component of neoliberal policy: limiting and privatizing welfare benefits. By propagating an image of the underserving (and hypersexual) welfare mother, and linking social support to normative sexuality, these acts endorsed anti-queer (and anti-feminist) policies such as abstinence until marriage, heteronormative marriage and family forms, and control over the reproductive futures of “undesirable” populations (poor people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people). As Cathy Cohen argues, “many of the roots of heteronormativity are in white supremacist ideologies which sought (and continue) to use the state and its regulation of sexuality, in particular through the institution of heterosexual marriage, to designate which individuals were truly ‘fit’ for full rights and privileges of citizenship.”9Such arguments are ongoing: between2005 and 2015, federal programs privatizing carework (within the family) and cutting state support for poor mothers and children provided $150 million a year to promote “healthy marriages” and “responsible fathers.” For many queer critics, because marriage promotion is one way that non-normative gender and sexuality—particularly the sexualities of black and poor women—is disciplined by the neoliberal state, the mainstream LGBT movement’s emphasis on same-sex marriage was disappointing. Critics such as Michael Warner have long argued against state regulation in the form of marriage. In this most recent instantiation, the neoliberal withdrawal of public social support serves as an incentive to seek marriage as the source of care, support, and resource protection. As Cohen writes, “Same-sex marriage, far from ending ‘marriage as we know it, ‘preserves a narrow system for the distribution of benefits that is tied to heteronormative understandings of the family. It allows the state to continue to shift its responsibility for the well being of its citizens to some private form we label the family.”10In this context, the LGBT movement’s emphasis on same-sex marriage must be viewed as the success of neoliberal policies that offer marriage as a privatized solution to peoples’ needs for childcare, healthcare, economic stability, and social recognition. In the 2015 US Supreme Court case granting same-sex couples the right to marry, the Court argued that the right to marry is foundational to individual autonomy, liberty, and personal choice; that marriage “fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity”; and that marital status is the legitimate basis for both social recognition and material and state benefits, including inheritance and property rights, spousal privileges, medical decision-making, adoption rights, workers’ compensation benefits, health insurance, and child custody and support benefits.11Justice Anthony Kennedy concludes the opinion: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. . . [The petitioners’] hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”12Like other LGBT family-making strategies such as transracial and transnational adoption, new LGBT family rights are historically dependent on neoliberal transformations: the dismantling of social services, a shrinking social safety net, US migration and labor flows, and the racialized criminalization of poverty.13The call for the “dignity” of gay and lesbian marriage, like other pleas based on sexual respectability, depends on the regulation and policing of others—often the reproductive futurity of poor, queer, people of color. Such neoliberal family politics affirm the health and humanity of some, while helping to justify surveillance, exclusion, and poverty for others. In May 1982, the New York Times Magazine ran an essay called “Tapping the Homosexual Market,” in which Karen Stabiner reported that advertisers were now “wooing . . . the white, single, well-educated, well-paid man who happens to be homosexual.” As Katherine Sender details, this new “pink market” was prompted by market research that seemed to point to the wealth of gay men and lesbians; in the early 1990s, Overlooked Opinions, a gay-marketing firm, claimed the American gay and lesbian market was worth $514 billion. Throughout the1990s, gays and lesbians were described as ideal consumers: affluent, well-educated, fashionable, and “DINK” (double-income, no kids). As a 1995 article had it, “The gay and lesbian market is an untapped gold mine. Because gays are highly educated and usually have no dependants, they have high levels of disposable income. And because these consumers are disenfranchised from mainstream society, they are open to overtures from marketers.” Recoding citizens as consumers, neoliberalism proffers privatized consumption as its model of citizenship and community. In a neoliberal world, “freedom is reduced to choice: choice of commodities, of lifeways, and, most of all, of identities” while politics is treated as a “personal trait or lifestyle choice. . . measured increasingly by the capacity to transact and consume.”16The rise of the so-called “pink market” made gay men and lesbians visible as consumers and offered limited recognition to those who might “voice their politics through their spending.”17In this form of consumer citizenship, LGBT politics aligns with market politics: good citizens, as David Evans notes, are those who express their identities and politics through the purchase of lifestyle commodities. The ever-expanding marketplace of such goods and services has transformed sexual identities and communities throughout the US. For these reasons, LGBT communities cannot be understood as oppositional to capitalism. Instead, capitalism “depend[s] on and generate[s] community,” and communities—even alternative ones—can be “deployed to . . . facilitate the flow of capital.”18The growth of niche markets and consumer lifestyles is a boon for late capitalism. But it is less clear that the rise of the pink market has had positive effects for the majority of LGBT/queer people. Indeed, although marketers and the media paint gay men and sometimes lesbians as an affluent elite, research from at least the mid-1990s shows that this is a pernicious myth. As Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss point out, research from 2013 revealed that bisexuals, lesbians, and gay men experience higher rates of poverty then heterosexuals. One in four bisexuals receive food stamps, more than one in five LGBT people who live alone report an income at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 2.4 million LGBT adults did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family. Poverty is compounded by sexism, racism, trans -phobia, disability, and other forms of structural oppression: people of color, trans people, and women—especially those who have a disability, live in rural regions, and are older—are much more likely to be poor. A 2011 study showed that trans people are four times more likely than the general population to live in poverty, and poverty rates among transgender people of color are particularly high—34 percent of black and 28 percent of Latina/o transgender people have household incomes of less than $10,000 per year. A lifetime of discrimination and criminalization renders LGBT people more vulnerable to the precarious conditions that face so many today struggling in the aftermath of neoliberal restructuring: living paycheck to paycheck, with limited opportunities to care adequately for oneself and one’s kin, threatened by criminalized poverty and economic precarity. The myth of gay affluence, which promotes the image of the acceptable gay consumer-citizen, blots from view the many LGBT people “who are manual workers, sex workers, unemployed, and imprisoned,” queer and trans youth thrown out of their homes, homeless adults, and trans and queer poverty. When LGBT people are only visible in the marketplace, non-white, non-middle-class, non-gender normative queer and trans people are shut out or rendered invisible; when LGBT politics is formulated around the desires of the consuming citizen, the neoliberal policies that keep so many LGBT/queer people precarious remain in place. The mainstream LGBT movement assists with this when it welcomes multinational corporations to sponsor pride parades or celebrates gay consumer or popular cultural achievements while ignoring the needs of the LGBT/queer poor and working-class people who make the rainbow paraphernalia and work in low-wage service or retail jobs and street economies in gay neighborhoods.20When LGBT activism has promoted the gay consumer-citizen at the cost of more radical and marginalized voices, it has sought political goals that benefit the wealthiest LGBT people at the cost of most. In December 2010, the New York Times reported that “After 30 Years, Times Square Rebirth Is Complete.” The project was a success. “Crime is down significantly from the days when pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts and dope pushers prowled Times Square and the Deuce, as that stretch of 42nd Street was known. The number of tourists is up 74 percent since 1993,to an estimated 36.5 million last year Morgan Stanley, Allianz Global Investors, Viacomand Condé Nast now make their corporate homes there. And while many billboards in Times Square were blank in 1979, today the area is a kaleidoscope of moving images depicting financial institutions, automakers and fashion houses, with the best spots on 1 Times Square’s facade commanding as much as $4 million a year in rent.” Tim Tompkins, president of theTimes Square Alliance, told the Times that while “this place represents . . . the epitome of free-market capitalism . . . its transformation is due more to government intervention than just about any other development in the country.” The upward state redistribution of resources in the form of tax incentives and corporate welfare that defines “free-market” neoliberalism has had profound effects on US LGBT life. Begun in 1980, the Times Square 42nd Street Development Project follows similar paths to other US urban redevelopment projects.21The state condemned land parcels, evicting and razing businesses, and offered developers large property tax abatements and benefits such as zoning law changes to build new luxury skyscrapers and shopping malls. These transformations recreated the city as a landscape of consumption, orientated toward tourists and shoppers. Although gentrification in urban centers is not new, in the 1970s and 1980s neoliberal policies connected redevelopment to the privatization of other formerly public goods and services(education, healthcare, the arts, and even public parks). Newly privatized spaces of consumption drove out residents who could no longer afford to live where they worked. Rather than “gentrification,” Martin Manalansan encourages us to use the phrase “neoliberal urban governance” to describe these processes, emphasizing that such transformations are not organic, but are orchestrated and enforced by the corporations and property owners who profit fromthem.22The redevelopment of Times Square has resulted in the destruction of public sex cultures. Samuel Delany writes about the old Times Square—the sex workers, peep shows, and cruising places that redevelopment replaced with family- and tourist-friendly shopping experiences. Starting with the 1985 criminalization of bathhouses in New York City, Delany writes, “a notion of safety” ushered in safe sex, safe neighborhoods, safe cities, and safe (that is, committed and monogamous) relationships. “In the name of ‘safety’ ” (or family values), developers, with city support, destroyed the publicly accessible institutions that supported unplanned and complex social and sexual encounters between different kinds of people—especially the cross-class and interracial intimacies that make for a thriving public sexual culture.23Delany’s workmakes clear that the “Disneyfication” of Times Square was not about safety, but about profit-making. In 1993, New York City began implementing more extensive “quality-of-life” interventions. Police targeted minor offenses such as jumping subway turnstiles, panhandling, and loitering. The next year, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced new zoning policies to restrict strip clubs and erotic video stores and theaters to isolated nonresidential neighborhoods, prohibiting their proximity to schools, houses of worship, and other similar commercial establishments. By the end of the decade, Michael Warner warned, “a pall hangs over the public life of queers. . . . As in other US cities, sex publics in New York that have been built up over several decades—by the gay movement, by AIDS activism, and by countercultures of many different kinds—are now endangered by a new politics of privatization.”24The commodification of urban space meant that sexual cultures—including gay spaces—have been increasingly reduced to privatized spaces of consumption. Gay neighborhoods such as New York City’s Village or San Francisco’s Castro became tourist attractions and shopping/entertainment enclaves, capitalizing on the image of gay and lesbians as affluent, stylish consumers and taste-makers. Rather than representing vice or perversity as they had for most of the twentieth century, gays at the turn of the new millennium, David Bell and Jon Binnieargue, were increasingly “cast as model citizens of the urban renaissance, contributing towards the gentrification of commodifiable cosmopolitan residential and commercial areas.”25At the same time, spaces for queers of color, queer youth, or poor queers—such as New York City’s Chelsea piers—were razed and replaced with locked and gated parks and new condominium complexes. Redevelopment “is about fencing off unwanted colored [and queer] bodies,”Manalansan writes, yet, rather than a target for intervention, it is celebrated by much of the LGBT press as “positive outcomes and developments for all queers.”26Like the rise of the same-sex marriage movement and the gay consumer-citizen, the reorientation of cities toward the wealthy obscures the queer poor people, street youth, people of color, people with disabilities, and trans people shut out from acceptable neoliberal citizenship. In cities across the US, LGBT activism since the 1980s has pitted the interests of white gay (and lesbian) middle-class residents/property-owners against young, queer and trans people of color, using “safety” as the language of power. In her history of gay and lesbian anti-violence activism, Christina Hanhardt shows how gay visibility and community has been used to justify the policing, targeting, and profiling of those assumed to be dangerous. In these imaginaries, wealthy gay consumers are good investors, cruising spaces and sexual zones should be privatized, and poor queer people, people of color, youth, trans people, and people with disabilities are rendered “risky,” detrimental to “quality of life” and a potential threat to capital. We therefore cannot look only at gains in “cultural visibility” for LGBT people to measure political and social progress. Historically, increased media visibility has been “directly connected to the criminalization of black people, trans people, people of color, and people doing sex work,” Reina Gossett argues, because visibility projects tend to reinforce existing modes of sexual respectability.27This same dynamic exists today: the rise of media representations of trans women of color in 2014 and 2015, Gossett argues, corresponds to the highest recorded murder rates of those same women. LGBT campaigns for visibility—in the form of media visibility, marketing recognition, new gay-orientated business developments, or social recognition—have depended on the invisibility, criminalization, and abjection of queered others. As such, they have benefited from and reinforced neoliberal capitalist restructuring: the massive cuts in social programs (and their incomplete replacement by non-profit organizations shored up by corporate and major donor philanthropy), the privatization of public institutions and spaces, and the coercive policing of immigrant, racialized, and criminalized bodies that have occurred alongside the development of gay and lesbian commercial marketplaces and neighborhoods. As with marriage rights and consumer citizenship, gay gentrification marks the triumph of the neoliberal distortion of gay liberation and social justice movements from the 1960s. As Duggan argues, in the era of New Homonormativity, “ ‘equality’ becomes narrow, formal access to a few conservatizing institutions, ‘freedom’ becomes impunity for bigotry and vast inequalities in commercial life and civil society, the ‘right to privacy’ becomes domestic confinement, and democratic politics itself becomes something to be escaped . . . Welcome to the New WorldOrder!

Normative ethicists and political theorists generally propose solutions to global poverty that are redistributive in their aim: more development aid from rich states, increased philanthropy, and the reform of international trade, tar- iff, taxation, and debt policies that disadvantage poor countries. But as a growing number of thinkers come to see poverty as bound up with the subor- dination, exploitation, and domination of the poor, more “political” solutions have begun to emerge. The recognition that needs scarcity cannot be grasped in abstraction from the social relations and structures of power that sustain it echoes the insights of critical poverty and post-development thinkers.2 Yet whereas the latter see grassroots, poor-led collectives and social movements as essential to overcoming the subordination of the poor, theorists with a similarly structural view of poverty have accorded little significance to impoverished communities’ struggles to simultaneously reduce their depriva- tion and powerlessness.3 Focused instead on transnational, institutional dem- ocratic reforms as a means to enfranchise poor populations, they overlook the importance of popular, place-based struggles from below. In so doing, they unwittingly reinforce normative approaches to poverty alleviation that fail to treat those living in poverty—as Sen writes—“as active agents of change, rather than as passive recipients of dispensed benefits.”4

In what follows, I argue that proponents of transformative, poor-centered approaches to chronic and severe poverty have much to learn from poor-led social movements and organizations in the global South. In particular, critical theorists, deliberative democrats, and neo-republicans who argue that global jus- tice requires the political inclusion of marginalized, impoverished populations should be deeply interested in the ways that their movements view poverty and its remedies. Grassroots poor collectives and struggles are uniquely placed— epistemically, ethically, and politically—to identify and challenge oppressive, poverty-perpetuating social relations. While excluded from formal institutions of power, poor movements politicize the underlying causes of needs deprivation and put more radical, pro-poor prescriptions onto the public agenda. Theorists could help to advance these solutions by delineating solidarity-based political responsibilities for individuals and institutions with resources and influence to actively support and assist progressive, poor-led social movements.

Manning- Miller 1994 [Carmen L, associate professor at UMississippi, Media Discourse and the Feminization of Poverty, Carmen L. manning-Miller Environmental Engineering Science}, 1994}, Vol 17}, Pgs 79-88 // CPSW-PA

Robert Stallings claims that an isolated incident and a series of like events are quite d ifferent in terms of the logic req uired to make them sensible. The isolated i ncident is easier to d ismiss (and to disown) as an aberration, an exception , or a resu lt of improbably ci rcumstances that are unlikely to be dupl icated. A pattern , on the other hand , impl ies regu larities, repeated occu rrences that are difficu lt to dismiss as chance.23 Maintai ning the singularity of circumstance can be an i mportant aspect of what Fraser calls depol iticization.24 Journalists, aided by their news sources, facil itate the depol iticization process through the creation of images in the public arena. Media accou nts which link women to singular events (i.e., childbeari ng outside of wed lock, choosing welfare benefits) preclude an understanding of the systemic reasons for which such "choices" are made. Consequently, the plausi bility of poor women being labeled as deviant i ncreases , 25 and the lack of concern for their issues as political matters increases . Further, the media favors personal or psychological explanations over pol itical and social explanations in poverty discourse. These explanations are most likely to be prevalent because they suit the needs of the contributo rs to media discourse. Finally, focusing on the individualistic aspects of poverty simplifies the commun ication process for jou rnal ists . Featu re and event-oriented treatments of poverty are simply easier to write than those containing more complex, socio-economic explanations. Through such explanations for pove rty, the media powerfully constructs a val ue-laden framework on social issues.26 In the reports on pove rty in the New York Times, efforts were made by journalists to use poor people as sou rces. One might assume that as the use of diverse sou rces in news coverage grows, social and pol itical explanations of poverty would also i ncrease. However, the story emphases of the newspapers studied did not vary in significant ways . Thus, newspaper representations of poor people occur with in a gerrymandered framework. Through pol itical sensibilities and commercial pressu res, newspaper stories selectively construct the boundaries within which i mages of poor people are constructed and mai ntained. The conclusions d rawn from my content analysis offer further support to the claims of theorists that reporters select med ia events and issues to fit their audience's expectations. Exposu re to the resulting stereotypes over time may make poor women and people of color appear consistently th reatening and burdensome, demanding and u ndeserving of accommodation by government. If humane welfare pol icy is to be further advanced in combi nation with trad itional democratic liberties , the 85 Explorations in Ethnic Stud ies enduring public anger about poor people must be corrected . Such a pol itical approach implies a media d iscourse that makes connections between hard economic issues and personal "choices." Because mass commun ication is a fluid process, sou rce d iversity models suggest that by using more non-official, non-conventional sources for news stories in a statistically representative manner, the prevailing negative perceptions about the poor could be g reatly undermined. Fu rther, by identifyi ng and highl ighting news story "elements" that sh ift responsibility to d ifferent actors (i.e., the government and the social forces such as unemployment) , d ifferent pol itical solutions can be brought to light. In concl usion, this study finds that when med ia portray people in poverty, it focuses on the individual, rather than related institutions. Newspaper representations are ideological to the extent that the assumptions u nderlying media discourse (i.e., i ndividualism and meritocracy) shift our understanding away from social processes to matters of individual, rational choice. Such rep resentations appear natu ral and i nevitable rather than the resu lt of social and pol itical struggles over power. In most instances, when newspapers report on poverty, governmental pol icy is not challenged and the u nderlyi ng social and economic forces go u nexamined. Th us, the med iation of real ity remains a major problem for poor people in the U n ites States' "democratic" society.

Poverty has always been stigmatized or criminalized in the United States. In the context of capitalist social philosophy, it is the failure of the individual and can only be alleviated by redistributing personal wealth, income, profits of productive people; an anathema to the prerogatives of individual capitalist accumulation. Taken to its logical extremes in the practical application of labor policy in US capitalist political economy, poverty was seen as a social deviation that needed to be punished. This underlying, ideological foundation of US capitalism was first generalized through the development of the “poorhouse,” a municipally funded housing tenement system for incapacitated or unemployable workers and other sections of the population structurally or cyclical squeezed out of the wage labor economy and into poverty for extensive periods of time. In exchange for shelter, the workers could be made to perform labor as punishment or sold to local farmers or other employers to work off the costs of their occupancy. The threshold of tolerance, support, and funding for poorhouses in nineteenth-century US was so meager, that the poorhouses themselves were maintained at a level of degradation to discourage indigence. According to Michael B. Katz (1996: 3): Poorhouses, which shut the old and sick away from their friends and relatives, were supposed to deter the working class from asking for poor relief. They were, in fact, the ultimate defense against the erosion of the work ethic in early industrial America. Miserable, poorly managed, underfunded institutions, trapped by their own contradictions, poorhouses failed to meet any of the goals so confidently predicted by their sponsors. By the turn of the twentieth century, the paltry welfare and healthcare programs that existed for poor and destitute working-class people were increasingly stripped of dignity and privatized into a humiliating form of individual charity. Municipal governments then began to expand punitive measures toward family impoverishment by targeting non-productive 5 THE PUBLIC CHARGE: THE CAPITALIST POLITICS 121 male heads of households, especially those that abandoned women and children. Male family desertion was referred to Domestic Relations Courts, created in 1910, which were given jurisdiction over matters involving “all persons charged with abandonment or non-support of wives or poor relatives.” Defendants were charged with being “disorderly persons” and were subject to criminal penalties, including imprisonment. Furthermore, the courts put the burden on locating the deserter on the family, typically the women, effectively out-sourcing enforcement to the impoverished family itself. If a woman had any property or possessions that charity workers believed she could sell, she was required to do so. Destitute women and children received only the minimum support necessary from local government, such that the stigma of being on relief became a feared and despised status. “Welfare” is hated by the prosperous and the poor, by the women who receive it and by those who feel they are paying for it. It stigmatizes its recipients, not least because they are so often suspected of cheating, claiming ‘welfare’ when they could be working or paying their own way. It humiliates its recipients by subjecting them to demeaning supervision and invasions of privacy. Yet it does nothing to move poor women and their children out of poverty and often places obst

In discussions about poverty, welfare reform, the low-wage labor market, and child care, one has to discuss each topic. What we want to emphasize, however, is the interconnectedness of each of the areas. A single mother is a low-wage worker; she periodically becomes un- or underemployed; she is a mother; she and her children have health problems; they lack affordable housing; they live in less-than-desirable neighborhoods; their children often have inadequate health care and go to inferior schools. Their lives are fluid, and their circumstances change. As we pointed out in Chapter 2, this is true of poverty. In a very important sense, the term “poverty” is misleading. It not only is seriously inadequate, but its gives the impression that it is a bright line: below it is bad, above it “everything is OK.” But families barely get by with incomes substantially above the “poverty” threshold. Yet, we are constantly told that after welfare reform, things are not so bad because the poverty percentages of single-mother families and their children have not increased substantially. However, we have to account for the near poor as well as those officially below the poverty line and those in “extreme poverty” (half of the official threshold). As we have argued, in this country, there are very serious problems of inequality and hardship for families who work hard, play by the rules, but live day by day, barely making it. People move in and out of “poverty,” but they rarely move very far, and one bump sends them back below the poverty threshold. Therefore, when we discuss the various conclusions and recommendations, we want to always keep in mind the interrelatedness of the lives of these people. Improving the low-wage labor market ought to improve income, but this depends on the costs and quality of child care, transportation, health care, housing, and education. As we discuss, raising the minimum wage and reforming the unemployment system are essential, but the mother also needs reliable, good child care, and she and her children have to get good health care. The families need income, but income alone is not enough without decent housing, child care, health care, better schools, and safe neighborhoods. All of the recommendations are necessary, but each one separately is not sufficient. The topics have to be discussed separately, but they are not separate. Welfare leavers disproportionately work in low-wage, low-skilled, nonstandard jobs. Most of these families are “playing by the rules.” It may seem odd that we would use that phrase, but just as we want to reject the use of “poverty” as a standard, we reject the labels of “undeserving poor,” the “African-American welfare queen,” and in a prior age, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Jews, and others from southern Europe, and today, undocumented immigrants. Ever since the beginning of our Colonial history, when the first poor people asked for help, they were blamed for their condition. It did not matter that jobs were not available, that many were indentured tenants at the mercy of their landlords, that many were sick, that husbands and fathers died during the wars or at sea.1 Poverty was still their fault, and that aid, if given, would have to be carefully supervised lest deviant behavior be encouraged. America still adheres to these views. As discussed in Chapter 4, the single mother continues to be demonized. The nonaged childless adults are treated even worse. In many states, there is no aid at all; in others, it is miserly and short term. They are usually confined to single hotel rooms (SROs) and shelters. We try to avoid them as they beg on the streets. Workers who lose their jobs or claim that they are disabled are suspect. Are they trying hard enough to find another job? Unemployment insurance is low and short term; it must not encourage idleness. Disability is strict; most claims are rejected.

This rather extensive chapter provided an overview of money metric approaches to measuring poverty, which are considered the most precise and restrictive, and serve as the cornerstone of various development goals by most international organisations. The aim was to demonstrate how even these approaches are inherently arbitrary, to the extent that they are unable to provide any reliable indication of whether basic needs are being met and how this might be changing over time. This is before consideration of all of the problems associated with international poverty comparisons, with reference to the ever-altering, one-dollar-or-whatever-a-day purchasing-power-parity poverty lines of the World Bank. Even if we accept the arbitrariness of a line but then adopt this as a means of evaluation, this merely kicks the problem forward into the classic quandary of whether poverty trends over time reflect actual changes or else errors of adjustment and even of conception. This intrinsic arbitrariness is ideological given the fundamentally normative and political character of the wide range of choices that are involved in producing data sets, and in setting lines and adjusting them over time. The fact that they are so arbitrary also renders them prone to political manipulations in application. The evaluative emphasis of these approaches essentially sidesteps the problem that, once applied to the social and political economy realities of policy-making and actual distributions of benefits and poverty relief, the problems of these poverty measures become compounded by social and power relations. Indeed, in this respect, official poverty lines need to be understood first and foremost as the outcome of complex processes of political contestation and the balance of power between various contending power factions that find an interest in weighing in on these measures. Money-metric poverty measures nonetheless remain attractive because they yield exact, seemingly objective and scientific statistics, in a technical manner that can be compared and analysed with an ever-expanding battery of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques. Yet, we must ask what we are buying into when we adopt these approaches. At the very least, we must engage in them with awareness of their fundamentally ideological and political nature, as well as with transparency, honesty and humility as to their limitations. This is all the more important because these measures do remain as one valuable means to aggregate within one important dimension of poverty, among a range of other imperfect options, and aggregation is also a problem with other approaches. They do have biases and it is essential to understand these biases in order to compensate for them, but they reveal very important information, even though they do not reveal all of the information that is relevant to understand poverty, nor were they necessarily conceived to do so. The danger of diluting this information with attempts to add in different dimensions and elements intended to better reflect wellbeing or other objectives is that this original information then becomes obscured or even lost. Indeed, this obscurity might even advantage powerful economic interests and, despite the progressive intentions, dilute our ability to understand and contest certain core aspects of power and wealth in modern economies as they manifest for poor people. In the third section of this chapter, an elaboration was given on how the standard absolute money-metric poverty measures are arguably prone to a secular tendency to gradually underestimate absolute poverty over time in the context of structural and institutional changes associated with development and in particular during the recent neoliberal phase of change. One fundamental source of bias is based on declining terms of trade for food, which gives greater relative prominence to non-food essential needs over time. The second is in terms of the shift from self-provisioning to commoditised consumption, which in many respects overestimates the value of the latter relative to the functional value of previous subsistence modes of livelihood. The last is more proximate to the neoliberal era of commoditised social provisioning, in particular the substantial commoditisation and privatisation of health and education. A fundamental problem with money-metric measures of poverty is that they are biased by design against universalistic and decommoditised forms of social provisioning, such that a move towards greater commoditisation can actually be reflected as an improvement in poverty, all else held constant. Indeed, in the face of global productive capacity, if anything it is surprising that so much of the world’s population still subsists under or just above such minimally defined food-based poverty lines. Part of this is undoubtedly related to agrarian conditions in much of the Global South, where peasant farmers struggle to get by on the low food prices received for their output on shrinking per-person plots of land (if they produce a surplus), relative to rising prices in the range of other social needs (such as in health care and schooling, or else in inputs to production). However, much is not agrarian, particularly as poor people increasingly move out of such conditions, albeit bringing their poverty with them. Rather, as discussed in Chapter 6, much of it is related to the valuing of labour more generally, even as it is integrated into value chains that generate enormous value for those who control them. In this sense, workers integrated within such chains are still living under the predicament posited by classical economists such as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, who assumed that workers’ wages would always be squeezed down to a level of subsistence, that is, subsistence minimally defined by the price of food. Because absolute poverty lines continue to be established by the price of food, such tendencies could ironically be reflected as declining poverty rates correspondent to declining real prices for food. This brings us back to the crucial question of social needs and how these are calculated by absolute lines. The mission is not impossible, but it is one that requires much more nuance and context specificity, as well as a much greater broadening of the scope of what we should include in the basket that is used to set the poverty line, all of which the World Bank has refused to do up to the present, despite some of the recommendations from its own high-level Commission (WB 2017a). As a result, we are left with poverty standards that are minimalist, whittled down to the necessities for mere food survival and that are arguably depreciating over time because of the logic of their construction, rather than anything that approaches a standard of decency or that can match the profound transformations that have been witnessed around the world over the past half-century. However, even with the inclusion of a broader range of social needs, the fundamental weakness of these lines remains with the question of social goods such as health and education. Such goods render the comparability of absolute lines very questionable across contexts with very different welfare and social provisioning systems, in particular between those with more universalistic provisioning, free at the point of use and funded progressively through direct taxation, versus the less-universalistic systems, with user fees at the point of use and high degrees of stratified privatised provisioning. Ultimately, such differences cannot and should not be resolved through comparative poverty measures but instead need to be subjected to social and political debate regarding the types of societies we wish to inhabit together. For these types of reasons, the international comparison line based on the PPP conversions used by the World Bank are to a large extent meaningless for the purpose of actually understanding local realities facing poor people in any particular context. At the very least, they muddy the water much more than they clarify, especially for the comprehension of ordinary people, and they render intangible and inaccessible a subject that should be a matter of national public debate and deliberation. In particular, making the arbitrariness of poverty lines more apparent would provide the basis for contestation by the poor or those representing the poor, whereas the opacity and obscurity of these measures has a tendency to disempower such contestation if only through the force of sheer incomprehension.

The newspapers also used over twice as many visuals of women of color in poverty as whites in poverty. Out of the ten photographs used, seven of the photographs were of women of color. Only three photographs were of white women. Such visual choices further reinscribe images of the poor as women of color. In addition, the majority of the coverage was feature-oriented. Of the thirty-eight stories, 73.68% of the coverage was feature-oriented and 26.32% of the coverage was issue-oriented. These results suggest that very few of the articles discussed the societal realities that contribute to poverty. Furthermore, these data reveal that media reports on poverty adopt a very narrow perspective of poverty and its causes, particularly for women. Placing the Newspaper Coverage of Poverty in Context, Robert Stallings claims that an isolated incident and a series of like events are quite different in terms of the logic required to make them sensible. The isolated incident is easier to dismiss (and to disown) as an aberration, an exception, or a result of improbably circumstances that are unlikely to be duplicated. A pattern, on the other hand, implies regularities, repeated occurrences that are difficult to dismiss as chance. Maintaining the singularity of circumstance can be an important aspect of what Fraser calls depoliticization. Journalists, aided by their news sources, facilitate the depoliticization process through the creation of images in the public arena. Media accounts which link women to singular events (i.e., childbearing outside of wedlock, choosing welfare benefits) preclude an understanding of the systemic reasons for which such "choices" are made. Consequently, the plausibility of poor women being labeled as deviant increases, and the lack of concern for their issues as political matters increases. Further, the media favors personal or psychological explanations over political and social explanations in poverty discourse. These explanations are most likely to be prevalent because they suit the needs of the contributors to media discourse. Finally, focusing on the individualistic aspects of poverty simplifies the communication process for journalists. Feature and event-oriented treatments of poverty are simply easier to write than those containing more complex, socio-economic explanations. Through such explanations for poverty, the media powerfully constructs a value-laden framework on social issues. In the reports on poverty in the New York Times, efforts were made by journalists to use poor people as sources. One might assume that as the use of diverse sources in news coverage grows, social and political explanations of poverty would also increase. However, the story emphases of the newspapers studied did not vary in significant ways. Thus, newspaper representations of poor people occur within a gerrymandered framework. Through political sensibilities and commercial pressures, newspaper stories selectively construct the boundaries within which images of poor people are constructed and maintained. The conclusions drawn from my content analysis offer further support to the claims of theorists that reporters select media events and issues to fit their audience's expectations. Exposure to the resulting stereotypes over time may make poor women and people of color appear consistently threatening and burdensome, demanding and undeserving of accommodation by government. If humane welfare policy is to be further advanced in combination with traditional democratic liberties, the enduring public anger about poor people must be corrected. Such a political approach implies a media discourse that makes connections between hard economic issues and personal "choices." Because mass communication is a fluid process, source diversity models suggest that by using more non-official, non-conventional sources for news stories in a statistically representative manner, the prevailing negative perceptions about the poor could be greatly undermined. Furthermore, by identifying and highlighting news story "elements" that shift responsibility to different actors (i.e., the government and the social forces such as unemployment), different political solutions can be brought to light. In conclusion, this study finds that when media portray people in poverty it focuses on the individual, rather than related institutions. Newspaper representations are ideological to the extent that the assumptions u nderlying media discourse (i.e., i ndividualism and meritocracy) shift our understanding away from social processes to matters of individual, rational choice. Such representations appear natu ral and i nevitable rather than the resu lt of social and pol itical struggles over power. In most instances, when newspapers report on poverty, governmental policy is not challenged and the u nderlyi ng social and economic forces go unexamined. Th us, the mediation of real ity remains a major problem for poor people in the U n ites States' "democratic" society.

Todorova 09 [ Zdravka is Assistant Professor in the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University, Dayton, USA. ] Employer of Last Resort Policy and Feminist Economics: Social Provisioning and Socialization of Investment Center for Full Employment and Price Stability Working Paper Series ER 2009/04/07 (ELR=Employer of Last Resort] //CPSW – PA

Thus, access to ownership of property or to wage income offer solutions essentially grounded in individualism. As discussed above ELR has a potential to move away from a market-based approach to empowerment. One could take however a “modernist” – dualistic understanding of the relation between gender and markets – and view ELR only as a vehicle of increasing market participation of women. Alternatively, what are the conditions of possibility for formulating an ELR policy in a way that abandons the rigid traditional/modern dualistic understanding of empowerment? A broader question: how can we do that without “collapsing into relativism” (Charusheela 2001, 206)? Feminist economists can address some of the issues in implementing ELR across various economies and cultures. While the problem of economic instability and depressed effective demand is central across regions subject to capitalist production, we need a consideration of the consequence of adopting any blanket macroeconomic policy that assumes a desire to preserve (or enhance) these very capitalist relations. To the extent that local communities may already engage in other ways of organizing their social provisioning (not necessarily based at all on wage work), it is legitimate to ask would ELR be in conflict with these values. The decentralized character of ELR’s administration distinguishes the program from other policies of the capitalist state, nonetheless, it is the institution of wage work – the main feature of capitalist relations - that is at the center of ELR. Consequently, in addition to the different macroeconomic realities such as market competitiveness of “developing” economies, the problem of what constitutes development cannot be ignored. Since the objective of an ELR is to reduce instability in capitalist production, there is of course an assumption that capitalist development is the end-in-view (albeit transformed), while in fact developing countries and local communities, at least theoretically, have other options for social provisioning, even under the conditions of capitalist globalization. Conclusion The idea of socialization of investment prompts the formulation of an ELR macroeconomic stabilization policy based on a gendered Post Keynesian theory. The possibility of full employment, price stability, and stabilization of effective demand is complementary to the possibility of socialization of unpaid care work and transformation of gender relations. ELR clearly warrants an input from feminist economics. Given the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in feminist economics, a clear distinction should be made between market vs. social provisioning approach towards incorporating feminist input in ELR policy formulation. ELR policy provides a way to move from marketization of housework to social provisioning. Yet such “transformation” is not obvious and straightforward given the heterogeneity of approaches within feminist theory regarding conceptualizations of empowerment and gender. In the context of ELR gender can be discussed either as a variable, or as a process; empowerment can be envisioned either as better access to market activities or as a structural change of valuation depending on are we taking a marketization or a social provisioning approach to unpaid care work. Thus, it is important to delineate the theoretical grounds of our feminist inquiry before we embark on engendering any policy formulation. My interest as explicated in this paper is in the broadly formulated social provisioning approach, (as opposed to marketization) which I see as coherent with the Post Keynesian/Institutionalist research program that works towards full employment, price stability, equity, and alleviation of socially created scarcity

Alessandrini 13 [Donatella, Professor of Law Director of Postgraduate Research Co-director Social Critiques of Law “A Social Provisioning Employer of Last Resort: Post-Keynesianism Meets Feminist Economics.” World Review of Political Economy, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, pp. 230–54. JSTOR, . //CPSW–PA

I have argued that the UK government’s approach to “recovery” is not only unable to deliver what it promises, that is increased investment, employment and growth, but it is also likely to augment those inequalities that have triggered the current global crisis. This is for two reasons: first because it places a massive bet on private sector led job growth which has been a constant, but unsuccessful, feature of governments’ policies since 1979; and secondly because it does so while the major source of the lack of demand, that is inequality, is increased through unprecedented cuts to public spending that threaten social reproduction. In other words, unless the private sector is able to re-absorb the job loss in the public sector, create new jobs and increase the share of national income that goes to workers, not only will the lack of demand that triggered the financialization process not be addressed. Inequality and economic and social insecurity will also increase. A different investment strategy, and one that aims to reverse the trend towards inequality and insecurity threatening social reproduction, is therefore needed. In this respect, and drawing on Lerner’s concept of functional finance as well as Robinson’s critique of government spending per se, I have considered the potential of feminist economists’ engagement with ELR proposals articulated by post-Keynesians. I have argued that the adoption of the social provisioning approach has the potential to enrich these proposals by intervening in the job “design” of the program, thereby transforming the concept of “work” and productive activity as well as the current system of (pecuniary) valuation that regulates investment decisions. Rather than laying down a blueprint of the ELR I have sought to emphasize the potential for meaningful social transformation of a program that is based on, while trying to radically affect, the institution of wage labor, with a view to generating further discussion on the desirability and feasibility of the program. Obviously, there are important questions that have not been addressed here and that require thorough additional research, starting with those concerning the resources necessary to fund the program. In this respect Lysandrou’s proposal for a global redistribution of wealth through taxation (2011: 340–341) is important not only because it suggests how resources can be procured, and in a way that reduces inequality, but also because it points to the fact that concerted efforts at the international level might be necessary for these strategies, including the ELR, to succeed. More importantly, additional research needs to be carried out to ensure that, while government funded, the administration of the program is decentralized as much as possible in both its design and implementation (Todorova 2009: 18) so to enable effective participation. However, I have argued that as a project that aspires to eliminate the reserve army of labor; offers a socially desirable floor for wages; provides for mobility through training and, importantly, instills values other than the profit motive in investment decisions, the program goes a long way to address economic and social uncertainty; challenges social created scarcity and gradually changes the meaning of “work.” It thus represents an alternative to current investment thinking and strategies that are based on the privatization of social reproduction and a narrow conception of production and productive activities and as such it deserves further exploration.

There is a widely shared belief that foreign direct investment (FDI) will get poor countries out of their development crisis. All they have to do is to improve the conditions to attract investments. An interesting example of this strategy is the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), adopted by the African Union in 2001 (Nyong’o et al. 2002). It says: Political events in a number of African countries have for a long time discouraged foreign direct investors. [What is needed is] . . . improved environment, trade liberalization, strengthening of the rule of law, improved legal and support institutions, better governance, improved transparency. On their TV screens, company executives have seen civil unrest, starvation, epidemic diseases and economic disorder. Investment conditions until the early 1990s discouraged many companies from setting up shop in African States, especially as some companies found themselves subjected to expropriation when political winds changed. On similar lines, at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the developed countries of the West highlighted the promotion of investment and free flow of capital as one of the WTO objectives under the so-called ‘Singapore Issues’, introduced at the First Ministerial Conference in 1996. However, the case for FDI is not as simple as mainstream economic literature and much popular perception makes it out to be. Even a first-year basic university course in Economics treats investment capital as only one ‘factor of production’, the other two being land (a catchphrase to cover all natural resources) and labour. While capital is an important factor, the underlying cause of asymmetrical distribution of wealth and welfare is the undervaluation of labour and natural resources and the overvaluation (gigantic overvaluation) of money capital. This is true in both the North and the South. Rethinking Global Investment 33 (The ‘North’ and the ‘South’ refer here to the approximate division between the Western imperialist countries and the rest of the world.) Misconception about the Capitalist–Imperialist Dystopia There are misconceptions about capitalism as a world system even in mainstream Marxist literature. Marx’s analysis of the fundamental laws of motion of capitalism in Capital: Critique of Political Economy is impeccable. It has stood the test of time since it was first published in 1867. However, Marx, along with his peers, was caught up in his own Eurocentric worldview. He presented capitalism as a ‘progressive force’ in its times. Yes, but it was ‘progressive’ only in a technical sense. To be sure, under capitalism what Marx called ‘the productive forces’ did grow colossally; the industrial revolution beginning approximately in late eighteenth century was an epochal game changer. But before capitalism reached its industrial maturity, it passed through five centuries of pre-capitalist birth and gestation. Marx provided a vivid picture of ‘primitive accumulation’ that provided the basis of capitalism in England: the massive dispossession of the lands and property of the English and Irish peasantry (the so-called ‘Enclosure Movement’) and the appropriation of ‘the commons’ by a rising landed gentry. Well before that, however, the most colossal primitive accumulation took place during three interrelated historical developments: the Crusades, the slave trade, and colonialism. These fuelled the birth of capitalist–imperialist dystopia. The Eurocentric narrative of capitalist development glosses over this existential reality about our epoch. We must challenge this narrative

The underlying structural source of global maldistribution is capitalism. A system of surplus accumulation – where the economy is geared towards acquiring ever greater material wealth – is inherently bound to generate the sorts of large inequalities that were starkly summarized in Scholte’s opening chapter. When capitalism operates globally, it will inevitably produce stark economic gaps between countries and people on a world scale. Reformist and regulatory policies are not an answer to this situation, because its roots are historical and systemic. This is not to dismiss attempts at regulating capital and its many economic and social manifestations. Proposals such as Piketty’s global wealth tax are not wrong per se (Piketty 2014). The problem is that reformative attempts – such as regulating capital – are only palliatives. They have reinforced the asymmetric growth of society, the polarization between the rich and poor within and between nations, as well as between humanity and nature. And so I advance the thesis that veritable development requires resistance to the capitalist roots of modern maldevelopment (see also Tandon 2009, 2015). 32 Yash Tandon My chapter focuses on the role of capital investments in creating global maldistribution of wealth and welfare, and what role investments can play in an alternative development model. The discussion is in three parts. In the first part, I analyse the concept of investment capital, including its historical and systemic roots.

CADTM : Are we witnessing a crisis This is a major crisis of the globalized capitalist system, the worst crisis since those of the years 1914-1945 Éric Toussaint : Yes. All the warning lights are flashing: there is a very significant economic slowdown (stagnation in the Eurozone in the last quarter of 2022-first quarter 2023) without any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage; the drastic effects of the ecological crisis, especially as manifested by climate; a huge increase in public and private debt; high inflation and loss of buying power for the working classes; rising job precarity; the explosion of inequality, with the colossal increase in private ownership and the revenues of the richest 1%; a falling Human Development Index in many countries, especially of life expectancy, the North included; harsher trade wars; a serious world food crisis; wars in Europe, in Sudan, in the Horn of Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, in the East of the DRC, and more; a rise in authoritarian forms of government practice (ever harsher repression of protest, the sidelining of legal process, etc.); attacks on basic human rights such as the right to abortion; increasingly restrictive and lethal migration policies; electoral successes of the far right, and so on. The only economic sector that has seen enormous progress in productivity is the military sector. This is a major crisis of the globalized capitalist system, the worst crisis since those of the years 1914-1945. CADTM : At what phase of the crisis is the world economy now Éric Toussaint : There is no sign yet of the end of the tunnel. Things are going to get worse: speculative bubbles may burst at any moment producing a sudden aggravation of the economic situation. There may be even more serious warlike incidents than the present ones. There is every reason to believe that climatic and environmental catastrophes will worsen. The health crises are not over, far from it. Governments and central banks are taking no measures calculated to give humanity a chance to come out of the crisis, quite the opposite. The concentration of strategic tools of production and finance in the hands of an ever-smaller number of large private share-holders continues in the energy sector, extractive industries, the marketing of food and other raw materials, in the pharmaceutical sector, the banking sector, etc. CADTM : What are the causes Government and central bank policies of injecting massive liquidities and the rapid increase in debt have maintained or led to the emergence of new financial bubbles. Éric Toussaint :Despite the enormous accumulation of wealth by the richest 1%, and despite the colossal gains of a series of large corporations particularly in the food and energy sectors, “Big Pharma”, the shipping industry and the arms industry, globally profit rates are not high enough to enable Big Capital to launch a huge wave of productive investments. One should never lose sight of the fact that Capital seeks to maximise its profits. When it cannot do so, it concentrates especially on speculation. This is one of the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. Apart from the big companies that make extraordinary profits by taking advantage of crises such as pandemics, energy shortages, and wars, the majority of companies are confronted with falling profits and falling productivity, despite aggravated conditions of exploitation of the work-force and increased job insecurity. There is also a problem regarding the supply side of goods: confinement measures during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020-2021 (up to and including 2022 for China) led to breakdown in the supply lines. The semi-conductor sector, with production concentrated in a small number of countries, has run into production problems and has trouble in meeting demand. This phenomenon is accentuated by the trade and technology war between the United States and China. We are seeing a phase where Washington is becoming more aggressive in trying to limit China’s economic and commercial expansion. In the real-estate sector, supply is outstripping demand. There was a new phase of over-investment in building construction relative to solvent demand. This was the case in the United States, Great Britain and China. It has been particularly obvious for commercial buildings (offices and commercial premises). A speculative bubble developed between 2018 and 2022, triggering a new mortgage crisis. Government and central bank policies of injecting massive liquidities and the rapid increase in debt have maintained or led to the emergence of new financial bubbles. This is evidenced in stock-market capitalization, the debt bond market, in the housing sector of several countries, in the markets for raw materials and in cryptocurrencies. The 180 degree turn in policy since 2022, passing from Quantitave Easing (QE) to Quantitave Tightening (QT), has triggered great financial insecurity. In short, the decision by governments and central banks to raise interest rates to fight inflation is leading to stagnation, perhaps even a recession, and to further financial crises, without managing to reduce inflation in any significant way. Indeed, the financial crisis that has already led to the bankruptcy of several cryptocurrency firms in 2022 and of four major banks in the United States and Europe in March 2023 could well resurface causing further banks to collapse or serious financial accidents in other areas such as the stock-markets, the property sector especially commercial property, the bond sector and so on. For more on this topic, please read : Does the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have enough resources to deal with a major banking crisis? And what about Europe? CADTM : Is there a new debt crisis in the South? Éric Toussaint : A new debt crisis is affecting a whole series of countries of the South for example, in Asia (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh), in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Zambia), in North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt), in the Near East (Lebanon), in Latin America (Argentina), in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba), and more. Some of those countries have suspended payments, or did so previously, as in the case of Sri Lanka. Further suspensions of payments are likely. Generally speaking, this crisis is triggered by a succession of external shocks which have a serious impact on the economies of the South. These external shocks result from actions and events in the North: There was the Coronavirus pandemic that started in the North (China, Europe, North America) before spreading to the South. The effects of the pandemic on debt are clear: increased public indebtedness to fund the fight against the pandemic and a reduction of resources in hard currencies required to ensure repayment of external debt. The latter was largely due to the abrupt fall in tourism from 2020 until 2022 as some economies have become highly dependent on tourism, for example Sri Lanka and Cuba. The war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had significant effects. Cereal and fertilizers rocketed prices whereas a whole series of countries of the South had become net importers of cereals and chemical fertilizers under pressure from organizations like the World Bank, the IMF and governments of the North to concentrate on other types of agricultural production, such as tropical fruits, coffee, tea, cotton and transgenic soya for cattle-fodder. This huge increase in the price of imported cereals and fertilizers led to a shortage of financial resources and thus to problems repaying debt and the unsustainable accumulation of fresh debts to be able to carry on importing. The war in Ukraine has also caused an increase in the fuel prices; yet a large number of countries of the South import fuel. For countries like Egypt, Sri Lanka and Tunisia which import both cereals and fuel the debt situation has become unsustainable. The third major external shock comes from the effects of climate change and the environmental crisis. This is particularly true for Pakistan which fell victim to catastrophic floods in 2022. The fourth major external shock has been the cost of rescheduling debt, caused by the unilateral decision of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to massively increase interest rates. Countries of the South that were borrowing at annual interest rates of 3 to 6% are now confronted with rates for fresh loans climbing to between 9 and 15%. This too is unsustainable. CADTM : They say that the IMF has changed. Is that so? Éric Toussaint : The IMF’s policies have not changed, any more than those of the World Bank. They are as pernicious as ever. And because many countries in the South have once more been obliged to resort to IMF loans, they have to apply even more stringently antipopular neoliberal policies. In this context, it is important to give full collaborative support to the CADTM’s call for a counter-summit in Marrakesh from 12 to 15 October 2023 on the occasion of the IMF’s and the World Bank’s Annual General Assembly. The call : Call for a global counter-summit of social movements to the IMF-WB Annual Meetings to be held in Marrakech from 9 to 15 October 2023 CADTM: Why do you say that this is the worst crisis since 1945? The ecological crisis is the product of two centuries of capitalist production as the dominant system Éric Toussaint: Since 1945, there has never been a crisis on such a scale and with so many facets as the current crisis. The ecological crisis and its climate dimension are on a scale never seen before. The ecological crisis is the product of two centuries of capitalist production as the dominant system. In the space of two centuries, this mode of production has profoundly affected and degraded life on the planet, and we have now reached a critical point. We can add to this the health crisis from which we are just emerging and which could rebound. This health crisis has caused more than 7 million deaths. Its scale is also linked to the capitalist system itself. Let’s add that, compared with 1945, the nuclear arsenal has proliferated, and the level of international tensions could lead to a holocaust. From other points of view, the capitalist crisis is indeed the most serious since 1945, particularly in terms of economic collapse. The trend towards more authoritarian and violent forms of government is affecting all continents to varying degrees. The global rise of extreme right-wing forces is the strongest since 1945. Repeated violations of human rights are on the rise, particularly with regard to migration and the right to asylum. Faced with these facts, we must not give up; we must redouble our efforts to bring about a genuine self-emancipating revolution.

This book examines collective im-agining about poverty and the poor in the institutional forums of public policy debate. Members of a political community come together through public policy debate to formalize agreed-upon rights, responsibilities, and obligations; debate also presents an opportunity for new understandings of these areas to emerge. In public policy and other forums, the modern paradox of seeing the poor has been evident. The vision of debate participants has narrowed considerably. In the mid-1960s, participants declared unconditional war on poverty, recognizing poverty as a multifarious phenomenon affecting diverse types of people. In the 1980s and 1990s, participants renounced federal interventions, viewing poverty as "dependence" on government public assistance — "welfare" — programs by a black, urban "underclass." A policy trajectory that ended in the repeal of the principal government public assistance program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), developed contemporaneously with this narrowed vision. This repeal trajectory began in the early-i98os with budget reductions in AFDC and other programs. It proceeded in the mid-1980s with a reorientation of AFDC that placed new demands on adult recipients. This trajectory culminated in the 1990s with legislation that repealed the AFDC program. Together, this narrowed vision and repeal trajectory constituted a retrenchment era in welfare policy discourse. Retrenchment was one of four eras that make up the larger history of AFDC. The program developed successively through periods of enactment, early operation, expansion, and retrenchment. Title iv of the 1935 Social Security Act (SSA) —the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which was renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1962 — in effect federalized mothers' pension laws that had been enacted by forty-five states. The Committee on Economic Security (CES), President Roosevelt, and the Children's Bureau all viewed ADC as a noncontroversial component of the SSA. In its report to the president, the CES recommended that ADC families "should be differentiated from the permanent dependents and unemployables."6 Suspicious of "relief," FDR did not regard ADC mothers as relief recipients because he did not view them as part of the potential paid labor force. The program avoided controversy in its early operation between 1936 and i960 because local administrators decided to exclude from the rolls potentially eligible cases that may have drawn the ire of local constituencies. Writing in 1939, Jane Hoey, director of the Bureau of Public Assistance, complained that many of the local administrators applied rigid character tests for granting aid "on a basis of 'promoting' the 'nice' families." She reported that only 2 percent of children receiving ADC lived with an unmarried mother.7 Racial discrimination also limited distribution of aid. In the South, ADC coverage by county decreased as the percentage of black residents increased. Nationwide, the average payment per child by county decreased as the percentage of black residents increased.8 Yet events during this era presaged future conflict as amendments to the SSA in the 1940s and 1950s altered the composition of the ADC caseload by making greater numbers of "worthy widows" eligible for social insurance programs. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, AFDC expanded dramatically and public hostility toward the program emerged. Governmental, community, and judiciary forces combined to prompt a large increase in the percentage of families that applied for public assistance through the 1960s. The most telling statistic of the decade concerned the sharp rise in the number of eligible families who actually were assisted. In the early 1960s, 33 percent of eligible families participated in AFDC; in 1971,90 percent participated.9 At the same time, AFDC came under increasing scrutiny as a flawed program. State and local governments engaged in highly publicized efforts throughout the 1960s to reduce AFDC caseloads. In 1969 President Nixon proposed a Family Assistance Plan (FAP) that embodied these divergent tendencies. His speech introducing the FAP rebuked AFDC as a program corrupted by the increased power of the federal government. Yet his solution in effect would have established a national minimum income guarantee. Though benefit levels dropped by 30 percent in inflation-adjusted figures through the 1970s, retrenchment commenced in earnest in 1981 as Ronald Reagan and his supporters sought to reduce federal spending by removing reputedly non-needy recipients from the AFDC rolls. In the following chapters, I present an overview of the eras preceding retrenchment and trace the policy debates of the retrenchment era and the images of the poor that circulated therein. In so doing, I tell the story of how the least controversial component of the 1935 Social Security Act became the only component to be repealed. Imagining, Controversy, and Tensions of Representation The repeal of AFDC transpired in the imagining of policymakers as much as in the votes legislators cast on the House and Senate floors. Affirmative votes in these two chambers would not have been recorded without significant shifts in processes of collective imagining. In light of its import, imagining in its multiple meanings as mental faculty, social force, and representational process merits closer scrutiny. In a quotidian and fundamental meaning, imagining denotes forming mental images and impressions or conceiving or pondering matters, as in a faculty of the mind.10 Although conceiving or pondering often operate jointly with perception, imagining as a mental faculty also focuses on things not present to the senses. On this functional understanding, imagining appears as the method by which most Americans come to know their poorer compatriots. Americans increasingly live and work in economically segregated settings. The daily lives of middle- and upper-class Americans place them less frequently in any significant contact with the poor. Importantly, imagining, as a method of coming to know others, is not an idle, inconsequential activity. Its consequence emerges in other meanings of the word. Imagining engages a creative energy. If imagining can conceive of things that are not present to one's senses but perhaps existing elsewhere, then it also invokes actions or events not yet in existence. Imagining looks beyond the bounds of the existing and the limits of the Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. 10 VISIONS OF POVERTY established order to create and consider that which is not yet. Moreover, the energy of imagining engenders an expectation: that which is created in one's imagination is anticipated, viewed as likely to come into existence. These additional meanings reveal that imagining and the imagination may act as a social force. In this way, imagining is a productive act with consequences for imaginers and others subjected to their imagination. Some commentators, such as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, see the manifest force of the imagination as a positive, recent development. He maintains that "there is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today."11 Appadurai attributes its newfound power to the exposure of more and more of the world's population to global media channels. He believes that as a result people who live even the most dreary of everyday lives may regard their present circumstances not as an inevitability, but as a compromise between imaginative play and existing opportunity. That is, such individuals may live their lives significantly in the imaginative space that emerges between circulating media images of glamorous lifestyles of pleasurable consumption and the constraints imposed on them by their subordinate socioeconomic status. Retrenchment-era welfare policy debates suggest an ominous alternative role for the imagination: imaginative "play" may disempower some people by representing them through disabling images. Imagining may be a means by which established interests sustain and perhaps even strengthen their positions of privilege. This ideological use of the imagination has functioned crucially in constructing and maintaining dividing lines over social justice in the U.S. welfare state. The 1935 Social Security Act bifurcated social welfare into public assistance and social insurance programs. Public assistance programs occupy an inferior position in the U.S. welfare state in comparison to social insurance programs. Public assistance programs are federal-state programs administered almost completely by state governments. They disperse meager grants that vary in each state and some localities, do not keep pace with inflation, and require satisfaction of corollary conditions. Social insurance programs are administered by the federal government and distribute generous grants that maintain uniformity across geography, index to inflation, and require no further actions from recipients. Recipients of social insurance —"social security" — have been portrayed as independent citizen-workers rightfully claiming money earned. In contrast, public assistance recipients have been depicted as clients benefiting from public charity.12 Performing their ideological function, these contrasting images occlude the similarities between social insurance and Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. IMAGINING OTHERS IN PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE 11 public assistance. The practice of social insurance belies its honorific contributory status.13 Retirees receive benefits out of proportion to their contributions. Money paid by current workers is not held in millions of separate accounts but used as general revenues. Moreover, whole classes of workers have been excluded from social security since its inception. Imagining as a social force indicates that its creative energy is not coextensive with our social world generally, with what some theorists have referred to as the "social construction of reality."14 Imagining may participate in constructing our shared social world, but it is not the only participant. In this way, Charles Taylor situates the collective imagination as a mediator between the realm of social habit and that of explicitly articulated ideas, doctrines, and ideologies.15   To advance this distinction, however, is not to insist that imagining cannot order our shared social world. This is precisely the role ascribed to the imagination by political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.16 He holds that some imagined notions —he references such concepts as the "citizen," "justice," "money," and others — serve a central role in structuring societies.  Collective understandings of these intertwined central notions order relationships among the people and objects through which they are represented.  People and objects, in turn, make these notions tangible. The controversial history of welfare reform suggests that "welfare" often functions in this manner. Our collective understanding of welfare informs relations among potential recipients, proposed programs, prospective administrative agencies, and, often in the guise of the financier, the general public. These people and objects, in turn, represent welfare as a material practice. However, these valuable formulations of the imagination as a structuring force risk circumscribing a passive, background role for imagining: imagining in this mode exists in the background of public debate at a level below that of explicit argumentation. Imagining as a social force, though it often establishes an implicit context for topics identified as "public issues," may operate actively, especially in those historical moments when imaginings shift. The controversial history of welfare reform has countenanced significant shifts in collective imaginings of appropriate public assistance recipients. These shifts have occurred within and without the retrenchment era. From the enactment of AFDC to its repeal, images of the adult female recipient highlighted variously her often competing roles as family caregiver and paid worker. In important respects, the controversial nature of welfare reform has contributed to shifts in collective imagining. As a Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. 12 VISIONS OF POVERTY quality of some public arguments, controversy raises the stakes of engagement for debate participants and those affected by debate outcomes.17 Controversial issues often are highly visible issues that rally widespread support and opposition and stir strong feelings. This import of controversy belies traditional scholarly understandings that treat controversy as something to be avoided because it putatively departs from or perverts formal rules of disputation or reason. Against this orientation, G. Thomas Goodnight advances a view of controversy that acknowledges its significance for explicit issues under debate and beyond.18 Goodnight explains that controversy may call into question unspoken rules and procedures that inform public argument as well as contexts of understanding drawn through public argument: controversy may make explicit and potentially alter previously taken-for-granted relationships between communication and reasoning, and controversy may reveal and potentially reconfigure contexts through which people understand issues. These functions operate significantly in welfare policy debates as, for example, some advocates regard certain types of evidence, such as social scientific program evaluation data, as inherently superior to other types. Also, advocates holding different views of the appropriate role of government action draw contexts placing differing emphasis on matters regarding the family, the workplace, and the public good. These qualities of controversy suggest that it engenders moments especially amenable to shifts in imagining. Controversy unsettles collective imagining as a background understanding and engages imagining as an active social force. The active role of imagining in moments of controversy betrays another meaning of the term, one that has informed my discussion thus far but has not been addressed directly, namely, imagining as a process of representing people, objects, or ideas. This process is by no means innocent. Increased critical scrutiny of representation has drawn attention to a "politics" of representation.19 To assert that representation enacts a politics is to assert that all representation is tendentious. We do not represent people, objects, or ideas to ourselves and others in a transparent, valueneutral fashion. No one-to-one correspondence exists between the representation and the person, object, or idea represented. Representing entails contest and struggle as participants in public debates and controversies seek to sustain, modify, or supplant representations that circulate through public discourse. Representing engages the creative and consequential force —the powerful force —of the imagination, and yet representations exhibit qualities that occlude this character. As Frank Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. IMAGINING OTHERS IN PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE 13 Lentricchia explains, the authority of any representation lies in its assertion of an inherent, ontological claim, "used like a hammer, that some part of the whole really does stand in for the whole." Representations insist that they depict people, objects, or ideas as they truly are. Representing thus becomes a "cover-up" in concealing itself as "an agency of specific political power" and in obscuring "social and cultural difference and conflict."20 This political dimension informs the images of the poor that circulate in welfare policy debates. Such images purport to be natural, essential, and universal renderings of the people they imagine. The political nature of representation is obscured further by a fundamental tension in representation between absence and presence, between standing for something and embodying that something. In his Keywords, Raymond Williams notes that representation historically has meant, and not without considerable overlap in meaning, "standing for something that is not present" and "making something present to the mind."21 Representation as presence emerges, for instance, in aesthetic theories that judge paintings and other artworks by their ability to portray in a lifelike manner the elements of our physical world. Representation as absence informs certain theories of democracy whereby elected officials in parliamentary or legislative bodies speak on behalf of their constituents. Yet neither invocation dispenses with the other.22 The representation is and is not the person, object, or idea represented. In retrenchment-era welfare policy debates, recipients of public assistance suffered doubly from this tension in representation: representation as "standing for" kept many recipients out of the debates and representation as "making present" brought recipients into the debates through disabling images. For the most part, those claiming to speak for the poor, not the poor who were likely affected by changes in public assistance programs, participated in welfare policy debates. But the poor were by no means absent from the debates: vivid images of current and potential public assistance recipients elicited intense scrutiny from most participants. Tensions of representation also arise in discussions in the "public sphere," a term that signifies the social space generated when members of a political community come together to discuss issues of common concern. The social space they generate is a discursively constituted space. As Jiirgen Habermas explains, "[t]his space stands open, in principle [if not always in practice], for potential dialogue partners who are present as bystanders or could come on the scene and join those present."23 In important respects, the public sphere is an imagined space, for its Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. 14 VISIONS OF POVERTY manifestation does not require participants to occupy the same physical location nor does its appearance mandate that discussions proceed contemporaneously. The newspaper reader perusing a letter-to-the-editor, for example, brings a public sphere into being when this person imagines oneself as part of a larger audience and in this manner engages the views expressed by the letter writer. Motivated significantly by a concern for who may secure representation and how one may be represented, scholars in a wide range of disciplines have sought to conceptualize the public sphere more inclusively. Their efforts bear upon the institutional forums of public policy debate, since lines between the public sphere and governing institutions often blur, especially in settings such as congressional committee hearings, where citizens interact communicatively with state officials. Scholarly efforts toward conceiving greater inclusiveness have envisioned public debate as multiform and fluid. From this perspective, observers see public debate as an activity that occurs across multiple constellations of partly overlapping public spheres rather than in a singular sphere, enables the thematization of differences among participants as a resource rather than as an obstacle to meaningful social dialogue, and constitutes and clarifies notions of the public good in processes of debate rather than as a priori stipulations.24 These various prescriptions for greater inclusiveness support Harrington's view that engaged political debate may offer the best hope for producing new periods of political creativity—in this case to alleviate the debilitating consequences of representation. Deliberation holds the promise of perspective-taking, which may engender among more powerful political actors recognition of the struggles and aspirations of poor people without resorting to disabling representations.25 This potential for perspective-taking arises in the ways that deliberation may unsettle and make available for examination individual desires and suggest their possible transformation. Deliberation asks participants to judge critically their own claims and the claims of others. This critically reflective dimension has been illuminated by Seyla Benhabib, who advances three reasons to support the claim that deliberation may generate democratic legitimacy.26 First, deliberative processes impart information. No single person can articulate all the perspectives through which social and political issues may be perceived by different people nor possess all the information relevant to a decision affecting many people. Second, deliberation does not proceed from a methodological fiction of an individual with an ordered set of coherent preferences. Deliberative Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. IMAGINING OTHERS IN PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE 15 processes enable participants to discover, clarify, and/or alter their views and preferences through communicative interaction with others. Third, the very act of articulating a view in public imposes a certain reflexivity on individual preferences and opinions. The publicity of deliberation prompts participants to support their positions with good reasons or risk the dismissal of their views as unsupported assertions. An embrace of nondeliberative alternatives for policymaking such as bargaining processes and patronage rewards relies on the very resources that the poor lack— money, access, and power.27 Without attending to the circulation and functioning of images of poor people in welfare policy debates, efforts to reconfigure a deliberative public sphere more inclusively may not be enough to counter the doubly disabling tendencies of representation. That is, images may disable even if more citizens participate in public policy debate and even if deliberation is open to various topics and different ways of speaking. Images of the poor link up with the arguments of participants in welfare policy debates to bolster or weaken policy initiatives and to advantage or disadvantage participants. Images may help sustain particular configurations of power, but the creative energy of imagining suggests that any one configuration, for better or worse, will not persist indefinitely. Especially in moments of controversy, imagining may unsettle established evaluations of policy initiatives and positions of advantage and disadvantage. The anticipatory quality of imagining signals further that the outcomes of debates in these controversial moments may be crucial for setting in motion a particular policy trajectory. The retrenchment era of welfare policy debate appeared as one such instance of unsettling and anticipating—and its key episodes set in motion a repeal trajectory.

I opened this article by asking about both dominant and contested strategies for r senting homelessness in the public sphere. By looking at the dominant discourse rounding a local homeless movement, we have seen how those experiencing homelessness were attached to deviant attributes through the deployment of powerful cultural tropes Descriptions of camps and the people who live in them revolved around how dirty spaces were, the proliferation of drugs, and the danger that the assumed housed au experienced by their very presence in the neoliberal city. Those representationa tices often associated with racism (Van Dijk, 2000a), anti-Semitism (Reisigl and Wo 2001 ), and anti-immigration discourses (Santa Ana, 1999; Van Der Valk, 2003; Van 2000b) were also of central importance in the discursive dehumanization of hom persons, serving to further the reproduction of the categorical inequalities that str much of modern institutional life (Massey, 2008). Those linguistic strategies that held particular resonance when producing homeless subjectivities fell under three bas lytic categories: the use of metonyms and processes of synechdochization (Reisig Wodak, 2001 ; Van Leeuwen, 1996), the use of metaphors (Lakoff, 1987), and the (o lexicalization of deviant attributes (Fowler, 1991; Stubbs, 2001; Thurlow and Jawor 2006; Van Dijk, 1991). Looking across categorical domains at linguistic strategies may help to inform cross-issue organizing efforts that highlight common problem an integrated critique of dominant social institutions. To best understand how groups of people were characterized as deviant 'dr and druggies', or as 'dirty', 'scary homeless people', we need to look beyond dominant discourses that serve to marginalize and stratify, and examine also those strategies that participants employed to change the stories that structured their lives. I described how This content downloaded from All use subject to https:/ 804 Discourse & Society 25(6) SHARE/WHEEL and Nickelsville 'self- pants to speak to each other about th social policy through symbolic action on structural determinants and context public dialog, however. Instead, particip tive deviance, drawing primarily on tw labels that were attached to homelessn own right, and they were replicated in  dence of how people living outside we figuratively 'swept' under the rug (Baw residents at places like Nickelsville cons homes that directly countered dominan claim that the camp was 'clean' and 'sob violence', ensuring a 'safe' environme strategy is a form of normative refram ing "fit" of the existing norm to the r terms of an alternative norm that they context' (p. 200). Attention to the conte our analysis from one that privileges po recognize the value of peripheral/subor social change. This analysis has focused on the lingui some of the nuanced ways in which  course by balancing a critique of dom across organizational spaces and textua did serve to shift some of the ways tha accounts of homelessness, but they still experiencing homelessness were or were take seriously the insight that a semant then effective use of those discourses m factors that perpetuate the material po erty, debt, housing costs, low wages, etc infatuation away from personal respo might actually foster a more just and e normative reframing (Raymond et al.,  for shifting the focus of debate through and change the norm itself, rather tha illustrated, however, that even as parti the self-managed community clearly of poverty, the social context of dominant continued to be a powerful cultural tro to our alignment with those discourses  then our efforts at strategic interventio those discourses as we weave together a research should focus on how we cing, 2008). I described how This content downloaded from 104.28.153.123 on Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:52:26 +00:00 All use subject to https:/ 804 Discourse & Society 25(6) SHARE/WHEEL and Nickelsville 'self- pants to speak to each other about th social policy through symbolic action on structural determinants and context public dialog, however. Instead, particip tive deviance, drawing primarily on tw labels that were attached to homelessn own right, and they were replicated in  dence of how people living outside we figuratively 'swept' under the rug (Baw residents at places like Nickelsville cons homes that directly countered dominan claim that the camp was 'clean' and 'sob violence', ensuring a 'safe' environme strategy is a form of normative refram ing "fit" of the existing norm to the r terms of an alternative norm that they context' (p. 200). Attention to the conte our analysis from one that privileges po recognize the value of peripheral/subor social change. This analysis has focused on the lingui some of the nuanced ways in which  course by balancing a critique of dom across organizational spaces and textua did serve to shift some of the ways tha accounts of homelessness, but they still experiencing homelessness were or were take seriously the insight that a semant then effective use of those discourses m factors that perpetuate the material po erty, debt, housing costs, low wages, etc infatuation away from personal respo might actually foster a more just and e normative reframing (Raymond et al.,  for shifting the focus of debate through and change the norm itself, rather tha illustrated, however, that even as parti the self-managed community clearly of poverty, the social context of dominant continued to be a powerful cultural tro to our alignment with those discourses  then our efforts at strategic interventio those discourses as we weave together a research should focus on how we cing, 2008). I described how This content downloaded from 104.28.153.123 on Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:52:26 +00:00 All use subject to https:/ 804 Discourse & Society 25(6) SHARE/WHEEL and Nickelsville 'self- pants to speak to each other about th social policy through symbolic action on structural determinants and context public dialog, however. Instead, participative deviance, drawing primarily on the labels that were attached to homelessness own right, and they were replicated in blogs, editorials, and academic reports as evidence of how people living outside we figuratively 'swept' under the rug (Baw residents at places like Nickelsville cons homes that directly countered dominan claim that the camp was 'clean' and 'sob violence', ensuring a 'safe' environme strategy is a form of normative refram ing "fit" of the existing norm to the r terms of an alternative norm that they context' (p. 200). Attention to the conte our analysis from one that privileges po recognize the value of peripheral/subor social change.. This analysis has focused on the linguistic production of deviance, and illustrated some of the nuanced ways in which  course by balancing a critique of dominant discourses with social efforts across organizational spaces and textual genres. These normative reframing efforts  did serve to shift some of the ways that social stigmas were describes in journalistic acccounts of homelessness, but they still left the semantic attention of whehter people experiencing homelenssnes were or were not ‘filthy’, ‘drunk’ ‘criminals’. If we are are to take seriously the inisght that a semantic approach to issue contestation might offer, then effective use of those discourss  most able to illustrate the underlying structural factors that perpetuate the material poverty of homelessness – unemployment, poverty, debt, housing costs, low wages etc – might be more likely to shift our collective infatuation away from personal responsibility and toward those social policies  accounts of homelessness, but they still experiencing homelessness were or were take seriously the insight that a semantic then effective use of those discourses m factors that perpetuate the material poverty, debt, housing costs, low wages, etc. infatuation away from personal responsibility might actually foster a more just and e normative reframing (Raymond et al.,  for shifting the focus of debate through and change the norm itself, rather that illustrated, however, that even as participatory collective sense-making practices in the self-managed community clearly of poverty, the social context of dominant continued to be a powerful cultural trope. If our ability to speak and be heard is tied to our alignment with those discourses  then our efforts at strategic intervention  require a more complicated engagement with those discourses as we weave together alternative explanations for participants’ poverty, the social context of dominant media environments ensured that devianced continued to be a powerful cultural trope. If our ability to speak and be heard is tied to our alignemnt with those discourses that are powerful in a given cultural moment, then our   Future research should focus on how we can effectively connect our rebuttal of deviance  as a measure of social importance to structural understandings of social stratification that might more readily translate into effective public polic

News media seek to reduce the complexity of the issues by presenting them in easy-to-understand interpretive packages. Framing Responsiserves as a packaging process, which involves selecting certain aspects of reality and making them more salient, while leaving other aspects out of the package.26 It is in this selection process that the media promote a particular problem definition, leading the audience to make attributions of respon~ibility.~~ Attributions of responsibility can be categorized into two types: causal  and treatment responsibilities.28 Causal responsibility deals with the source of the problem, while treatment responsibility focuses on who has the power or the responsibility to alleviate the problem. More simply put, causal responsibility addresses the question of who causes the problem, while treatment responsibility identifies who should be held responsible for solving it. These two definitions of responsibility are particularly useful in understanding public dialogues on social problems. Social problems are inherently political in nature, involving compromise and conciliation of competing intere~ts.2~ Itis critically important for these competing interests to be able to successfully define the responsibility because it will eventually determine which interest (eg., the government, industry, or individual citizens) should be held responsible for fixing the problem.30 The discussion of responsibility involves two conflicting views.31 One view holds that a social problem is caused largely by the deficiencies of individuals, often those who are affected by the problem. Because the problem is considered as resulting from flaws in individual behaviors, change efforts tend to focus on modifications of the problematic behaviors. According to the other view, a social problem results pri marily from flaws in social and environmental conditions, such as unequal distribution of economic resources, unsafe environments, or unethical business practices. Remedies require changes in government policies, business practices, and/or other larger social forces.32 News media are often criticized for reducing important social issues to mere individual-level problems.33 Social responsibilities are largely ignored, while individual causes and solutions are repeatedly emphasized. There are several reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, the emphasis on individual responsibility may well reflect the strong individualism of the American culture.% Second, societal approaches are often considered too radical either politically or economically, and are thus rejected in news coverage in favor of less drastic measures, like changing individual behaviors.35 Prescriptions for such ”societal remedies” include, for example, new laws, new taxes, and new regulations. Finally, news coverage of social problems is typically episodic, focusing largely on a specific event that has happened to certain individuals? It is in this act of presenting a specific event that the media necessarily divert attention from social conditions and instead focus more on individual accountabilitie~.~~ While some researchers assume that the media play an active role in shaping people’s understanding of who is re~ponsible,~~ a recent study by Kensicki brings into question the media’s r01e.3~ Her content analysis of news articles about poverty, pollution, and incarceration indicated that news coverage was overwhelmingly ”neutral,” and rarely suggested any causes, effects, or responsible agent for the problems. Through the overwhelming uses of neutral frames, she concludes, newspapers have promoted general political apathy among readers, creating a disconnection between the problem and actual ramifications. That is, the unbalanced emphasis on social responsibility was considerably smaller among conservative newspapers, indicating that organizational pressures can also play a role. The political orientation of the organization may become a powerful influence as it becomes a form of organizational pressure. It is likely that conservative publishers’ deeper financial and organizational resources for skilled management put a limit on how far to the left their employees can go on the ideological Episodic framing of the issues, or focusing on personal stories rather than social backgrounds, is a kind of professional routine for the American news media.51 A necessary consequence of episodic framing is to displace attention away from larger social conditions, placing people-rather than society-at the center of discussing how to solve a problem. We hypothesized that if this routine practice does affect which frames will be selected, television would be less likely than newspapers to emphasize societal causes and solutions. Compared to newspapers, television is much more event-oriented. Television is a story teller. By and large, it does not cover the issues; it tells It is in this process of telling stories that television diverts attention from systemic and institutional resp~nsibilities.~~ Supporting the hypothesis, we found that television was slightly less likely to assign responsibility to society. Though the finding was only marginally significant, it provides at least some evidence that the professional routine of news media-as being episodic and event-oriented-may affect the media’s selective use of one frame over another. While previous research has focused largely on stereotypical portrayals of the our study offers an analysis of how the media present the question of responsibility. In particular, we examined an important function of news framing: diagnosing the causes and suggesting ~olutions.~~ What then are some potential effects of such framing on the audience? Does news coverage of poverty affect people’s perceptions of who is responsible? Is this perceived responsibility in turn related to the public’s attitudes toward the poor? More important, do the different ways to talk about poverty influence people’s support for government aid to the poor? Future research building on our findings needs to explore such consequences of responsibility framing, looking directly at the impact of news coverage on the public’s perceptions and attitudes. It will also be important to examine whether the typical ways poverty is framed are driven by politicians. To what extent do the media parrot what politicians tell them about poverty? Or is there a mutually reinforcing relationship between politicians’ and the media’s uses of frames? According to the indexing hyp~thesis,~~ news professionals tend to “index” the range of viewpoints according to the range of views expressed in the mainstream government debate. Other studies, however, reported that news media operate somewhat independently, often adopting a set of frames different from that of politicians and interest groups.57 Future research needs to explore in detail the interplay among the media, politicians, and interest groups TALKING ABOUT POVERTY 577 in the process of framing building, looking at how these players influence one another to shape the public discourse on the poverty issue.

Postmodern policy analysis offers the prospect of interrogating how public policy discourse helps construct identity and difference. Such analysis is part of what William Connolly (1991) sees as the democratizing potential of 'critical histories of the present,' or what Michel Foucault (1991) called 'genealogy' or 'eventualization.' Analyses such as these highlight what discursive practices have made it possible for things to happen and do so in such a way as to denaturalize those discursive processes, thereby leaving them open to contestation. For Connolly, agonal democracy thrives on genealogy. Rather than accept the 'official story,' or the state's version of how policy relates to problems, analysts examine public policy for how it is implicated in the reality it ostensibly takes as given. Interrogating welfare policy for its constitutive role 266 in the marginalization of single women with children provides a basis for rethinking social policy and the biases it helps reinforce. Without such an examination, welfare policy can continue be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Without an interrogation of the embedded distinctions of welfare discourse and how they help reproduce prevailing structures in society, welfare policy will continue to be part of the discursive practices serving to blame female-headed families for their problems. This insight points toward the necessity of a discursive politics as a first step that paves the way to challenging existing welfare policy, not just as benefits but as a cultural formation. Such interrogations can open up possibilities for alternative understandings of self-sufficiency/dependency, deserving/underserving, family/promiscuity and other dichotomies in less gendered and less destructive ways. This not to say that change will flow easily once welfare politics comes to be a cultural politics centered on what welfare signifies about families. Given its active involvement in promoting two-parent families, the welfare state has vested interests in perpetuating its own cultural construction. To recognize the legitimacy of affirming and supporting, rather than marginalizing and blaming, alternative family arrangements would necessitate seriously entertaining alternative policies. Therefore, welfare policy discourse continues to construct poverty as a problem of family structure and seeks to find its solution in the two-parent family. In fact, discursive moves on behalf of the twoparent family intensify especially as that ideal becomes harder to sustain. Denial of the economic and social forces at work during the current postindustrial transition confine policy space to the familiar discursive structure. Insisting the family breakdown is a cause rather than a symptom of growing poverty allows social policy to continue to legitimate itself even as it becomes less and less able to address the social problems it is ostensibly designed to attack. To be sure, blaming female-headed families for growing poverty provides a convenient and culturally ascendent way to deflect attention away from the deleterious effects of postindustrialism on poorer segments of society (see for instance Murray, 1993). The scapegoating of family structure for problems embedded in the sexist, racist and economic exclusionary practices of the 'contemporary postindustrial society of economic decline' propels popular resistance to public assistance and aggressively silence attempts to articulate a family policy which could ensure that all families have the resources to be able to avoid poverty. Moving from a 'culture of poverty' argument which blames the poor for their problems, policy discourse stresses what could be called a 'culture of single motherhood' (Thomas, 1992) to further promote a punitive approach to poor women with children. The dwindling economic opportunities associated with the current economic transition can thus be ignored. In the current climate, the prospects for affirming support for all families is not good. Yet, challenging the embedded biases welfare policy discourse therefore remains an important part of attempts of achieving a more equitable, pluralistic and democratic welfare state.

The right to social security encompasses the right to access and maintain benefits without discrimination in order to secure protection from:

a lack of work-related income caused by sickness, disability, maternity, employment injury, unemployment, old age, or death of a family member;