[nfbmi-talk] part two

[joe harcz Comcast]

Part II:

3. Out of this invasion of welfare by the spirit of crime and punishment comes another vital challenge to our whole system of personal and social security--a
threat to the rights of the individual. To call the police is to invoke, not the general welfare powers of the Constitution, but its police powers. The
police powers are those that deal with maintaining order, preventing vice and crime, securing safety, and protecting health and morals. When problems of
poverty and need are handled under the police powers of the Constitution, they come to be equated with disease, immorality and disorder. The constitutional
powers of the police have in fact been generally relied upon to protect one part of the community against another--in blunt terms, to protect the comfortable
against the needy.

The classic illustration of this is seen in the notorious case to which I have already referred, that of New York v. Miln, decided by the United States
Supreme Court in 1837. "It is as competent and necessary for a state," said the Justices in that case, "to provide precautionary measures against the moral
pestilence of paupers, vagabonds and possibly convicts as it is to guard against... physical pestilence. Accordingly, the Court upheld--as a warranted
exercise of the police power-- a New York statute designed to exclude the poor and unwanted brought to New York from other states or from foreign countries.

So, by this doctrine, the constitutional power of the states to deal with the poor is the police power to preserve public order, to quarantine contagion,
to protect morals, and to maintain safety. Welfare programs founded in these conceptions focus on problems of behavior and morality, utilizing the instruments
of coercion and restraint. They are calculated to safeguard the health, safety, morals and wellbeing of the comfortable and the fortunate rather than to
relieve the distress and improve the opportunities of the unfortunate.

Not a few of these ideas survive to plague us today. If they do not have quite the dominance of a century ago, recent words and actions both official and
unofficial make clear that they are still alive and kicking. We see it all again in county resort ordinances conceived in prejudice and applied in discrimination
against aid-to-needy-children families. We see it in night raids, in polygraph tests, and in unwarrantable searches and seizures. We see it all again in
conditions of probation imposed by the judges that forbid mothers to secure public aid for their children, whatever their need or eligibility; that command
them to support their children on threat of imprisonment whatever their ability to do so, whatever the need of the children for their care at home, whatever
the scarcity of jobs for the unskilled and the economically marginal.

We see it all again in the unmistakable denial by these actions of the ccnstitutional guarantees of equal protection of the laws, of due process of the
law, of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, houses and effects, of the right to privacy and the right to counsel.

Justice Robert Jackson, in Edwards v. California , the 1941 counterpart of the Miln case, felt the impulse and found the words to capture the constitutional
hopes of the underprivileged: "Does indigence, " he asked, "constitute a basis for restricting the freedom of a citizen, as crime or contagion warrants
its restriction? We should say now, " he answered, "and in no uncertain terms, that a man's mere property status, without more, cannot be used by a state
to test, qualify or limit his rights as a citizen of the United States. Indigence in itself is neither a source of rights nor a basis for denying them.
The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact--constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed or color. "Such distinctions, he said, are "a
short-sighted blow at the security of property itself." For "property can have no more dangerous, even if unwitting, enemy than one who would make its
possession a pretext for unequal or exclusive civil rights."

What is most striking about this statement is not its eloquence, nor even its democratic recognition of the dignity and worth of the human person. What
is most striking is that it was a minority opinion. It could not command the allegiance of the majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United
States. The task that lies ahead of us--perhaps the greatest of all the challenges to the welfare of the blind and of all Americans--is to elevate this
doctrine from a minority plea to a majority command, to transform it from a promise into a reality.

4. The threats to our welfare system which I have thus far enumerated, may seem to you distant. They are not. But still more obviously immediate is the
next threat which commands our attention. It is that contained in federal support of community work relief projects, now made a part of the Public Assistance
Amendments of 1962. What these projects do in the end, after all the hedges and qualifications have been uttered, is to put the clients of welfare, or
their relatives, on labor gangs, imposing the ancient and infamous work test as a condition of their receiving aid.

Human labor, wherever it is voluntary, has a certain dignity and inherent value. But labor, where it is involuntary, is nor more than servitude. It has
always been regarded as a proper punishment for crime to be sentenced to involuntary labor. We all recognize the punitive character of the Statute of Labourers
of the 14th century, of the bondage of indentured labor in 18th-century America, of the infamous county work farms and workhouses of the 19th century.
Now, in the 20th century, we have devised our modern facsimile, our streamlined version--the work-relief project. They are all the same in principle, all
one in their intention and their effect: their effect upon the community and their effect upon the victim. Their intention is today what it has always
been; to render the acceptance of aid a humiliation, to ring it around with harassments and intimidation, to destroy utterly whatever thin veneer of decency
or dignity or normality may have come to be attached to the concept of public welfare over the past generation.

Do I put the case too strongly? Only recall the ignoble experiment put into effect just a year ago by the city of Newburgh. Its main feature was this notion
of work-gang relief. But it did not stop at that. All able-bodied clients of the department of welfare were to be subjected to a monthly "muster," a line-up
borrowed from the neighboring department of police. Applicants for aid were fingerprinted, quizzed, in effect given the third-degree--and then, if they
passed muster, were dispatched into the city dumps and gutters to labor for their alms. It does not appear that they were chained. But if they had been,
they could not have been more clearly marked and branded as beneficiaries of that city's unchristian charity.

What possible excuse can there be for so punitive and degrading a device in our modern programs of public assistance? Two very different excuses have been
heard, one of them out loud and the other in a whisper. Let us take the whisper first. It expresses the open secret, which can never be stated publicly
but only revealed in confidence, that the Administration's approval of the work-relief system is a strategic concession given in return for votes--a sacrificial
scapegoat thrown to the wolves of welfare. In short, the proposal is a political deal, an application of the familiar maxim of ward politics, "If you can't
lick 'em, join 'em. "

But there is another, and more public, line of explanation for this backward step into the work gang and the work test. Thus we are told that the work-relief
project is not just one of work, but also one of "training." It has allegedly a doubly constructive purpose. It gives employment and it rehabilitates through
training. Let us look more closely at this philosophy of excuse. What is the character of employment, and what is the quality of training, to be found
in these public work relief projects? The work must clearly be of a kind which will not compete or interfere with the normal labor force, skilled or un-
skilled. It must be accordingly noncompetitive and abnormal, as well as irregular. In short, the work-reliefers can do only those chores that nobody else
will do. Moreover, in performing them their rate of pay (applied against their aid grant) is not even required to conform to the national minimum wage.

Such is the character of employment under the work-relief provision. >From this it is not hard to guess the quality of the "training" ostensibly involved.
For such rock-bottom enterprises as are left available to the program, in so demoralized a setting as this, the very concept of "training" is violated
beyond redemption; its effect is no longer rehabilitative but debilitative.

Where have we heard this line of talk before? Does not this non-competitive program of make-work, with its spurious claims of employment and training, have
a drearily familiar ring to us? It does indeed. It provides an almost perfect parallel to the sheltered workshop for the blind. Indeed it might be dubbed
a sheltered work program for ADC'ers, and eventually, if it finds acceptance in its present form, for the blind as well. For are not the blind by our own
insistent argument "able- bodied" too? It is a short step from the one program to the other. Neither one provides meaningful training nor adequate employment,
but, in both cases, only an inferior substitute, an unreasonable facsimile, at once inconsistent with the conditions of modern society and with the principles
of modern welfare.

5. The threats to the present-day welfare system, and to its blind recipients, are not all on the side of public assistance. On its other side, that of
the social insurances, the danger takes the form of a movement of thought and law which, if not brought to a halt, can only end in undermining the original
character of the program and wiping out its most distinctive and progressive features. The attack on social insurance--specifically, on the Old Age, Survivors
and Disability Insurance program--is a triple-barrelled one. First, it would strip the program of its insurance characteristics by defining the regular
payroll contributions of future beneficiaries not as premium payments to a trust fund but only as another form of federal tax--and a regressive one at
that. Second, it would sweep aside as illegitimate and frivolous the time-honored assumption of Congress and the nation that the benefits of social insurance
are received as a matter of earned right. Instead it would regard them as a gratuity no different from relief, to be conditionally granted or withheld
by government at its discretion. Finally, this same movement has imported into the law of social insurance an ever-increasing battery of moral, political
and behavioral tests which were no part of the original law and which in effect convert its benefits into a reward for good conduct.

It is sad to note that the Supreme Court of the United States has now lent its sanction to this three-pronged assault upon the original mieaning of the
social insurances. It did so in the case of Flemming v. Nestor , two years ago, in which it swept aside the notion (once taken for granted by all) that
social insurance benefits have the character of an earned right. The program was held to be one in which the contributions of employed persons were not
to be regarded as premium payments into a trust fund, to be paid back to the insured upon maturity, but rather as a tax to be used in public relief of
the retired and disabled.

Insofar as this new doctrine comes to be accepted and enforced, these programs are no longer insurances at all but only charities-programs of relief to
which individual eligibility is never certain but forever contingent and revokable. There has thus been smuggled into the contributory social insurances
the moralistic normis and nigglings of worthiness, of deserving and undeserving, of good behavior and deviations from it, which traditionally have characterized
and distinguished the poor-relief programs of public assistance.

The challenge which is here laid down goes to the very root of the social insurances. If they are to retain their original and fundamental character--if
they are to justify the faith of those who fathered them and of those who now support them--this challenge must be met and turned back. The concept of
benefits as a matter not of charity but of right must be fully reinstated--and with it the consignment to oblivion of all personal tests of morality and
conduct.
*************
Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out,
you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves. --Eugene Victor Debs
1855-1926

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