Blame Welfare?

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Here we go. John McWhorter blames New Orleans’ problems, and the inability of people to evacuate the city, on… welfare:

The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.

Welfare recipients, he says, lack “survival skills.” Okay… question. How many New Orleans residents are actually on welfare these days? Poking around on this state government site, we find that in the Orleans area, 9 percent of residents received some form of cash welfare in 2003. That amounts to some 42,000 people—far fewer than the total number of New Orleans residents stranded after the flood, I believe, which was estimated in the hundreds of thousands. (In fact, even that 42,000 number seems high; according to the Department of Health and Human Services, only 60,000 people received TANF funds in the entire state in 2002, and only ten percent of Louisiana’s population resides in New Orleans.) Meanwhile, the U.S. census counts 27 percent of people in the city sitting below the poverty line. A distinct minority of the poor in New Orleans, then, was receiving welfare, and one would assume not all of those recipients were black. Fixing the blame for post-Katrina problems squarely on cash assistance (and white leftists!) seems like a bit of a stretch, unless you want to argue that the people who were once on welfare rolls and now aren’t somehow have lingering social problems that made them incapable of evacuating. (Rather than, you know, the fact that most people lacked the physical means to leave the city.) Perhaps that’s what McWhorter’s arguing. But it might help if he could actually point to examples of this sort of thing rather than just speculating.

On what is no doubt an entirely unrelated note, read this post from Digby.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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