The real abusers were the welfare bureaucrats, who from 1970 through 1990 increased welfare administrative expenses by 5,390 percent (NOT a typo) even as they cut by two-thirds the actual value of stipends and services to the poor. The real welfare fraud was how those vicious bureaucrats (in cooperation with mass media) then -- to avoid getting blamed for the 5,390 percent nest-feathering thievery -- created the Big Lie that runaway welfare costs were the result of "hopelessly lazy" welfare recipients demanding ever greater benefits.
It was, in fact, our first glimpse of the New Order proclaimed by the Reaganoids: the Democratic Party as a Republican Fifth Column, and the chronically poor as the new scapegoats. The betrayal of the poor by Clinton and the Democratic Party was the greatest constituency-betrayal in American history -- and I know for a fact that since that time (and precisely because of those betrayals), there are an untold number formerly "lifelong" Democrats who will never vote Democratic again: "might as well vote Republican -- them Republicans come right out and admit how bad they gonna fuck us -- but at least they let us keep our guns": the real reason the GOP took Congress in '94, the real reason Bush is president today.
Note also in this context Clinton's pandering to white upper-middle-class women: the one group most likely to need (because of divorce) the temporary welfare now allowed by law. The need of bourgeois females is the ONLY reason ANY welfare AT ALL was left in place. As to the real chronic poor whether black or white (but especially the former) -- the policy of BOTH parties is extermination by neglect.
The atrocity of the aftermath of Katrina is merely the most obvious result.
Here by Paul Krugman is the ultimate truth about welfare in America -- the savage racism behind the infinitely damning fact that (of all the planet's industrialized nations) the U.S. is the ONLY nation since the Third Reich to adopt genocide-by-neglect as official policy:
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/091905.htmlAmerica's poor have been robbed not once but thrice: by the maliciously cunning welfare bureaucrats who, from 1970 through 1990, perpetrated the 5,390 percent administrative cost hike -- the fraud that perverted New Deal humanitarianism into the class-war selfishness of a jobs program for the bourgeois college elite; by Clinton and the Democratic Party in the guise of welfare "reform"; and by the obscenely greedy American people themselves who -- unlike the citizens of any other industrial civilization on the planet -- are so hateful they maliciously withhold stipends and services everywhere else willingly given.
This is the real "abuse" that should be decried and condemned on this site -- the methodical victimization of the powerless by the powerful -- NOT the absurd Reagan/Clinton/Bush/Goebbels Big Lie version in which the American
ubermenschen is somehow victimized by a black, poor and utterly disenfranchised
untermenschen -- an
untermenschen already condemned to death just as surely as if it had been shipped in stinking railcars through the dread gates of Dachau. This is the real abuse we should be denouncing -- and the fact that we are not is our own damnation.
Edit: angry typo.