The War on Poverty was an extension of the welfare rights movement. It focused on fair access to economic opportunity.
The War on Drugs was a reaction to the civil rights movement. It was nominally “against drugs” and substantively against African-American men.
Portugal, Portugal, Portugal. Their experience can be a model for any country which wants to deal with drugs as a public health problem rather than a criminal problem. I suspect Uruguay’s experience in the next few years will be another example.
Did someone try to feed you a vegetable or something? Jeez, peace out, man. 
We actually started making real inroads on the war on poverty. In a couple of years… well… It was going really well. Back in the 70s America woke up to hunger here on one TV program… And they thought… Fuck this! We are better than this. Hungry people in the greatest country on earth? No fucking way.
And so we actually fed everyone for a while.
We had to stop that one. It was winnable.
So we got rid of the idea of helping people and started demonizing then.
They are people with drug addictions.
They are drug addicts. You can say fuck drug addicts… Cause it looks like they have a choice.
But when you say ‘fuck hungry people’ and ‘fuck poor people’ everyone gets weird…
The war on drugs plays soo well in the media.
Unfortunately the 1 in 6 Adults in the US and the 1 in 4 kids who go hungry regularly in the US aren’t all doing drugs too. The downside of the war on drugs. We need a new way to demonize the poor…
What we need is a way to call poor people something everyone hates. Not Hitler… Um… What do we call them.
Racists and sexists on this side of the fence. I mean… Have you heard those uneducated unsophisticated pieces of human refuse talk? Its almost as if they reason poorly, completely lack in critical thinking skills, have poor information, have heads full of propaganda…
Fuck those stupid hungry ignorant people… Amirite?
Course not.
Immigrants, inner city poor, rural poor. What do they have in common?
Poverty.
Oh. And they have no voice or representation. Complete disenfranchisement.
In our capitalist democracy… If you have no money, have no job, and do not vote… You don’t matter. Your existence is a problem… For all the smart well fed and educated folks with money to spend and big decisions to make.
Lucky for us all, we all get to pick our own titles.
What’s your favorite label to dehumanize poor and hungry people?
Of course not. Self-destructive people need to be diverted to mental health treatment. People who like to get high need to be left alone. How do we differentiate them, and divert the ones who need treatment? And how do we measure someone who likes to get high, if they step over the line and become a danger to themselves or others?
We’ve come full circle in some ways. Sen. Sanders is a very popular democratic socialist. Democratic socialism was founded in the U.S. by Michael Harrington. He wrote The Other America which is abook credited with launching The War on Poverty.
Yes… They have cost taxpayers trillions.
They have MADE a ton of people rich.
When you steal from someone… You take their shit.
When you steal from everyone… Well the only trick is to make them think it’s for the public good… Then skim money off the top.
We set acceptable profit margins on the wars American government fights… It’s 4% roughly for the war in Iraq.
Sadly the US government isn’t as open about the profit margins on wars fought against its own people. Cause ya know… It’s politically difficult to talk about.
So the silver lining is… Only about 19/20ths of the money we waste making humans suffer more is completely wasted. Luckily a little less than 4% ends up in the hands of the war profiteers and other forms of crony capitalists. So that’s not completely wasted.
That money goes back into the political system to buy laws and give them competitive advantage in their next ventures… And do it all over again…
Sen. Sanders is my choice too…
He’s roughly as liberal as the conservative general who fought in WWII and ran the country for awhile.
What am I saying… that dude taxed the rich at 92%.
Eisenhower was WAY more of a liberal socialist than Bernie.
You’re talking about stuff I’ve never heard of. Michael Harrison. Democratic Socialism in the US.
Thank you!
I have some googling to do.
Any tips on where I can start?
The same way we do with alcohol now?
Mind you, if I had my druthers we’d have a far more advanced mental health system and our society would embrace our variety rather than forcing us to be clones…but we’ve actually got a passable system in place for the worst drug of all.
We don’t really handle that very well. Far too often we hear about someone stepping over that line into a tragedy rather than finding a way to divert them into treatment.
There’s Wikipedia. There are many interesting books about the period. There’s a terrific biography of Michael Harrington by Maurice Isserman. Robert Caro’s book about LBJ as Senate Leader won a Pullitzer.
Who dares speak ill of Hippies? You mean the folks back in the 1960s who said that the Vietnam War was a load? The very ones who said that police can’t always be trusted? Those crazy clowns that said that organic food might be preferable? The ones who made such delightful music that Republicans can’t help but appropriate it? The infants who pointed out that square jobs were square and crooked politicians were crooks? That people of color are our brothers and that we should all party together? Those fools?
The only thing wrong with Hippies is that they were young and, like all young people, they underestimate the monolithic forces of adult laziness, apathy and fear of change.
When you take Hippies out of the context of their times, they seem dumb. When you view them within the context of the 1960s-1970s, the establishment seems far, far stupider. Nixon himself seems dumber than a drum circle.
Oh, like I said, we could DEFINITELY do better. I spent most of the last ten years of my life doing analytic work for DHS over in Wisconsin and spent a disproportionate amount of time working with the various semi-connected Local, County, State, and Federal programs… but in the grand scheme of things we’re far better at identifying alcohol addiction issues than a huge number of other ailments. The methodologies we used always worked best with non-alcohol addiction issues (alcohol has more coding chaff) so that’s not really where any problems reside.
The thing is, Alcohol is NASTY and does an insane amount of damage. It quite literally wouldn’t be possible for any but a tiny number of the existing drugs to be competitive (Meth and Heroin come to mind immediately). Marijuana, MDMA, LSD, Mushrooms, and so on just aren’t capable of shredding people like alcohol can. Sure, they can be problems, but it’s kind of like the difference between a regular headache and a migraine.
People don’t appreciate where alcohol falls on the spectrum of ‘safety’. It’s one of the worst of the lot.
*lolz!
If you are looking for a system that prevents every possible tragedy, I don’t know if that’s something that will be possible.
Why not try a War with Hippies?
The USA makes the greatest hippies in the world, and we should deploy them to the EU refugee camps armed with the strongest cheeba we can supply. Burners are the new Navy Seals, and the Bonnaros are the new Berets.
That might be true, if the economy was a zero-sum game - but it’s not. It’s entirely possible to lift up the poor without tearing down the rich. The rich just refuse to believe it.
As for the white men, we make up a plurality of the poor. Social programs are not our enemy.
