Poverty is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

[daredtowork]

10. The War on Poverty didn't fail - the money was rerouted to the Vietnam War

Sure there was fussing and hand-wringing in Congress about accountability: and the main issue was people of color got to control a lot of the money, and Federal money was circumventing usual crony-capitalism routes and going directly into communities.

Since Reagan and the "trickle down economics" era, we are back to the Bad Old Days of the money going to the (white) superrich and gradually trickling down via claims of "meritocracy" and "hard work" shielded by some notion that as long as the money is in the hands of white people then "metrics" must have been involved to "account" for the effectiveness of the money's use.

I've seen this B.S. in action at the local level.

A grant goes to the city: it goes to a high priced consultant and the pseudo "result" is a fancy report with a lot of statistics. This can be sent back to the Feds to win more competitive funding, and it is called "accountability" though not one single poor person was helped. Some rich consultants got paid, though.

Meanwhile, a really effective community agency that gives homeless kids job skills, confidence skills, leadership skills, social skills - smooths their way back into education, community integration, and future goals - almost gets defunded because they don't have the proper metrics. The results can be seen right there in the caliber of the kids that go through their program, but yet they don't waste money on lobbyists or schmoozing, so their program is danger. This is ridiculous! The results that count should be the results that are signified through people, not who can produce the shiniest report *about* poor people.