As Democratic Party-aligned media justly bemoan the House of Representatives’ recent move to cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, no voice either in Congress or in any major media outlet has called this callous attack on the poor what it is: open class warfare. Instead, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, Connie Cass and Mary Clare Jalonick of the Associated Press, and others have laid the blame solely at the feet of Republican Party “partisanship.”
These complaints of partisanship ring hollow as Democrats have been behind some of the most viciously anti-working class “welfare reform” legislation in recent memory. Almost two decades ago, Democrat President Bill Clinton waged his own offensive on welfare, most notably in the brazenly anti-poor sentiment underlying the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. This so-called “welfare reform” severely reduced government assistance for the unemployed, underemployed and disabled and included provisions aimed at pushing welfare recipients into employment at a time when over 1.1 million were already unemployed.
The hypocrisy runs deeper in face of the recent threat to start yet another war in the Middle East. Instead of focusing on redistributing government funds to accommodate the needy in the face of a five-year economic slump, Congress and the president oversaw a bipartisan push to spend billions on bombing Syria. If Congress and Obama’s concerns about government spending were so great, why are food stamps—which feed one in seven people in the United States—under threat while a serious discussion about scaling back the U.S. military budget—nearly 40 percent of global military spending—would be laughed out of Congress?
This hypocrisy is especially apparent when talk of “big government” and “fiscal responsibility” pervades the rhetoric supporting the attacks on food stamps and welfare in general. While liberals in Congress might verbally oppose these attacks, no serious mobilization has taken place to sabotage this display of “partisanship.” This unwillingness to stand up for the poor and disaffected shows the true face of the Democratic Party—opposition to anti-working-class measures in word, sympathizers in deed.
What working people are left with is a government where one faction makes every effort to leave the poor to fend for themselves against job and food insecurity and the other faction makes no serious effort to defend them. The main point of disagreement for Congress over a costly, unpopular and illegal intervention in Syria, on the other hand, was “how big?”
According to a poll by Harvard University, 77 percent of people in the U.S. support maintaining or increasing funding for food stamps. However, both the Senate and the House of Representatives have voted to substantially reduce food stamps funding. In other words, this attack is blatantly anti-democratic and anti-working class.
What is needed is a government that serves the majority of people, the workers. Only a government of, by and for workers can bring about the changes needed to overcome hunger and the other many injustices leveled at millions around the world, the United States included.
