#family welfare programs

[cksaksen-blog]

Big Changes to Singapore’s Welfare System: What Every Family Needs to Know!

The Singapore government has rolled out several key welfare initiatives aimed at improving support for the elderly, expanding housing grants for low-income families, and strengthening family welfare programs. These changes will provide increased financial aid in areas like healthcare, housing, and childcare, ensuring that vulnerable groups in society have better access to essential…

[alwaysbewoke]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Maggie Fox at The Fuller Project, via The Guardian:

As they prepare to take control of the White House and Congress next month, conservatives are eyeing cutbacks to federal programs that help tens of millions of women pay for healthcare, food, housing and transportation. Slashing or overhauling social support programs, long a goal of Republican lawmakers, could be catastrophic for women experiencing poverty. Supporters contend the social safety-net programs are already grossly underfunded.

“With this new administration that is coming in … I really am concerned about the lives of women. We are seeing so many policies, so many budget cuts,” said Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women. Republicans say they want to keep campaign promises to cut government spending, and three major programs make easy targets: Medicaid, the joint state/federal health insurance program for people with lower incomes; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a cash-allowance program that replaced welfare; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), widely known as food stamps. While conservatives frame cuts as making government more efficient and even restoring freedom, advocates for and experts on families with little or no income say reducing these programs will throw more people – especially women and children – further into poverty. “It is going to fall heavily on women,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a non-profit research organization.

Predicting precisely what Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration will do is difficult. Congressional leaders are close-mouthed about negotiations, and the president-elect has not finished putting together his advisory team. None of the spokespeople contacted for this story returned calls or e-mails. But organizations known to advise top leaders in Congress and the previous Trump administration have laid out fairly detailed roadmaps. Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the incoming administration, denies its proposed changes will harm women, saying instead that marriage and “family values” will improve their economic situations. “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways,” reads the section on proposed changes to TANF and Snap.

Numerous other groups that have studied the problem say forcing or even encouraging marriage will not make poverty disappear. And a recent study by a team at the University of South Carolina found that when state laws make it harder for pregnant women to get divorced, they’re more likely to be killed by their partners. Trump has promised not to attack the two most expensive and popular government programs: social security and Medicare. But he and Congress are up against a deadline to extend his 2017 tax reforms, which raised the federal deficit. They’ll have to cut something, and social spending programs, especially the $805bn Medicaid program, are low-hanging fruit for conservatives. Trump repeatedly tried to slash Snap during his last tenure in office: his 2021 budget proposal would have cut the program by more than $180bn – nearly 30% – over 10 years. Conservatives in Congress have continued these efforts and, with majorities in the House and Senate, they may be able to get them through next year. The Republican Study Committee, whose members include about three-quarters of the House Republican caucus, recommends more work requirements for Snap and TANF.

[...] Snap currently helps 41 million people buy groceries and other necessities every month. Women accounted for more than 55% of people under 65 receiving Snap benefits in 2022, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a gender justice advocacy group. About one-third of them were women of color, the NWLC said. Among other things, cutting these programs will trap women in dangerous situations, the NWLC said: “SNAP helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault establish basic economic security.” TANF, which provides cash assistance, overwhelmingly benefits women. In 2022, 370,000 TANF adult recipients were female and 69,000 were male, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Perhaps Medicaid is the most tempting target for conservatives because they can use it to undermine the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The GOP has been gunning for the ACA since it was signed into law without a single Republican vote in 2010.

Republicans and their he-man woman-haters club agenda blooms with their inane proposals to cut subsidies such as SNAP and WIC that are primarily used by women.

[dr-archeville]

TANF: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

"John Oliver discusses TANF – a federal program designed to help families with little to no income – who’s currently receiving these vital funds, who should be receiving them, and what it all has to do with Brett Favre.”  [22 mins 44 sec]

[neechees]

Hey if you're from the U.S and you care about Native kids & ICWA, The National Indian Child Welfare Association needs your help before September 17th 2024

Text SIGN PBAZHN to 50409 to send this letter to your US House Representative

Please support H.R. 9076 when it reaches the house floor. Native families deserve support from the federal government, especially when it comes to keeping Native children with Native families.

This bill includes critical provisions for tribes that receive funding under the Title IV-B child welfare programs, such as:

- Increasing funding for tribal agencies and courts.

- Reducing administrative burdens.

- Enhancing data collection on Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases in states.

Please sign and share, it takes about 30 seconds to use resist bot. Thank you!

[courtana]

📌 Mutual Aid, Fundraisers, and Actions

a white heart "🤍" denotes GFM campaigns who have reached out to me via in my inbox

I will be updating this as frequently as possible with new information, campaigns, and forms of supporting displaced and vulnerable folks in Palestine, Sudan, DRC, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Vetted GFM Campaigns 🤝

🤍 Donate to Khader and Ragheb - [€708 raised of €55,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Amira - [€5,118 raised of €20,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Fadi Ayyad - [$9,530 raised of $35,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Hani Al-Sharif [$445 raised of $50,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Mohammed Alanqer [€18,196 raised of €38,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Ahmed Alanqer [€16,338 raised of €35,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Kareem and Carmen [$6,971 raised of $50,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Walaa & her family [$3,405CAD raised of $50,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to the Shamaly family [$23,910CAD raised of $90,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Basel Ayyad [CHF1,828 raised of CHF60,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Ashraf Alanqar [€1,463 raised of €30,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Musab [€705 raised of €7,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Ahmed and his family [£5,253 raised of £30,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Alaa and her children [€2,995 raised of €20,000 goal]

🤍 Donate to Dr. Mohammed Aldeeb [€23,929 raised of his €30,000 goal]

Palestine 🇵🇸

Donate to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society - humanitarian org serving the health and welfare of the Palestinian people

Donate an eSIM for Gaza - helps Palestinians to connect to the outside world

Donate to Gaza Direct Aid - small volunteer-run program funding humanitarian aid in Gaza

Donate to Care for Gaza - supporting displaced families in Gaza

Donate to GazaFunds - find a struggling fundraiser to support

Sudan 🇸🇩

Donate to the Sudanese American Physicians Association - provides critical medical aid, food, and water

Donate to Sudan Solidarity Collective - provides direct financial assistance to civilian-led groups

Sudan Diaspora Network's Sudan Benefit Fundraiser - supports displaced Sudanese by providing medical equipment and food

Fight Hunger in Sudan: The Khartoum Kitchen appeal - feeds the hungry, up to 1,250 people daily, in the greater Khartoum area

Help Sudan- Sudan Relief Fund - helps people on the ground with immediate needs such as food, water, shelter and medication

Congo 🇨🇩

Donate to Focus Congo - partnerships with local grassroots organizations and access to resources necessary for survival

Support Friends of the Congo & the Basandja Coalition - provides food, delivers reporting, rescues children from the cobalt mines and supports diggers and miners demanding accountability, combats sexual violence and provides care for women’s health

Action Kivu - dedicated to repairing the harm done by years of violence and neglect in this region with focus on women and children.

Mutual Aim team fundraiser for Congo, Sudan, and Tigray - campaign collecting money that will be will be divided between the DRC, Sudan, and Tigray

Ukraine 🇺🇦

United 24 – main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine

Come Back Alive – provides support to service members in Ukraine

Prytula foundation – provides support to Ukrainian Defense Forces and affected civilians

Dzyga’s Paw – provides Ukrainian Defenders with high-tech equipment

[the-cimmerians]

Today, ProPublica reports on yet another big change that stands to solve a decades-long problem we first learned about back in 2016, closing a huge loophole that allowed states to divert federal antipoverty funds to governors’ pet projects, like promoting abstinence, holding “heathy marriage” classes that did nothing to prevent out-of-wedlock births, funding anti-abortion “clinics” to lie about abortion “risks,” sending middle-class kids to private colleges, and other schemes only tangentially related to helping poor kids. It’s the same loophole that Mississippi officials tried to drive a truck through to divert welfare funds to former sportsball man Brett Favre’s alma mater, for a volleyball palace. [ ]

The agency has proposed new rules — open for public comment until December 1 — aimed at nudging states to actually use TANF funds to give cash to needy parents, not fill budget holes or punish poor people.

One change will put an end to the scheme Utah used to substitute LDS church funds for welfare, by prohibiting states

from counting charitable giving by private organizations, such as churches and food banks, as “state” spending on welfare, a practice that has allowed legislatures to budget less for programs for low-income families while still claiming to meet federal minimums.

Another new rule will put the kibosh on using TANF to fund child protective services or foster care programs, which are not what TANF is supposed to be for, damn it.

And then there’s the simple matter of making sure that funds for needy families go to needy families, not to pet projects that have little to do with poverty:

The reforms would also redefine the term “needy” to refer only to families with incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Currently, some states spend TANF money on programs like college scholarships — or volleyball stadiums — that benefit more affluent people.

[batboyblog]

The governor was firm: Nebraska would reject the new federal money for summer meals. The state already fed a small number of children when schools closed. He would not sign on to a program to provide all families that received free or cut-rate school meals with cards to buy groceries during the summer.

“I don’t believe in welfare,” the governor, Jim Pillen, a Republican, said in December.

A group of low-income youths, in a face-to-face meeting, urged him to reconsider. One told him she had eaten less when schools were out. Another criticized the meals at the existing feeding sites and held a crustless prepackaged sandwich to argue that electronic benefit cards from the new federal program would offer better food and more choice.

“Sometimes money isn’t the solution,” the governor replied.

.......

The new $2.5 billion program, known as Summer EBT, passed Congress with bipartisan support, and every Democratic governor will distribute the grocery cards this summer. But Republican governors are split, with 14 in, 13 out and no consensus on what constitutes conservative principle.

One red-state governor (Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas) hailed the cards as an answer to a disturbing problem. Another (Kim Reynolds of Iowa) warned that they might increase obesity. Some Republicans dismissed the program as obsolete pandemic aid. Some balked at the modest state matching costs. Others hinted they might join after taking more time to prepare.

The program will provide families about $40 a month for every child who receives free or reduced-price meals at school —$120 for the summer. The red-state refusals will keep aid from about 10 million children, about a third of those potentially eligible nationwide.

......

As with Medicaid, poor states are especially resistant, though the federal government bears most of the cost. Of the 10 states with the highest levels of children’s food insecurity, five rejected Summer EBT: Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.

Like the school lunch program, it serves families up to 185 percent of the poverty line, meaning a family of three would qualify with an income of about $45,500 or less.

......

Some Republicans, in rejecting the aid, found critics in their own ranks. After Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina dismissed Summer EBT as a duplicative “entitlement,” State Senator Katrina Shealy, a fellow Republican, wrote a column with a Democratic colleague warning that “hunger does not stop during summer break.”

In an interview, Ms. Shealy said the state should not reject $65 million “just because Biden is president,” and perhaps just partly tongue-in-cheek wrapped her plea in Trumpian bunting: “Everyone wants to say, ‘America First’ — well, let’s feed our children first.”

Oklahoma initially said it rejected the program because federal officials had not finalized the rules. But responding to critics, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, sharpened his attack, calling Summer EBT a duplicative “Biden administration program” that would “cause more bureaucracy for families.”

Tribal governments, which have influence over large parts of the state, stepped in. Already feuding with Mr. Stitt, they promised to distribute cards to all eligible families on their land, regardless of tribal status, while bearing the $3 million administrative cost. The five participating tribes will cover nearly 40 percent of Oklahoma’s eligible children, most of them not Native American.

“I remain dumbfounded that the governor of Oklahoma would turn down federal tax dollars to help feed low-income children,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

-------------------------

some of the most stunning highlights of this story.

All I got to say is, let's feed the children? every single Democratic Governor took the money to feed the kids, every governor who rejected it, every single one, is a Republican. If you don't vote for Democrats you are STEALING food out of kids mouths.

[charlesoberonn]

Republican-to-English Dictionary

"Law and order" - Police should violently oppress marginalized people and protesters regardless of the law.

"Fiscal responsibility" - Cut all welfare programs for poor people and replace them with subsidies for the rich.

"Family values" - Heterosexual Patriarchy

"Judeo-Christian" - Christian

"Religious freedom" - Forcing Christianity on people and giving Christians special privileges.

"Marxism/Communism/Far-left" - Anything to the left of them (increasing all the time)

"The American people" - Only the people who vote Republicans

[pansy-picnics]

Emeryposting today….I mentioned a while ago that i never really talked about her lore so here it is 😵‍💫 “foster fail person edition” as my friend ky described it

as for How they actually ended up in corona: In short some of the first policies implemented by Eugene (who works in social work rather than as captain of the guard in my au) included two things: the very early workings of a foster care system, and a youth program, which allowed adolescents who aged out of the orphanage (around 13-14) to be assigned to apprenticeships, giving them shelter and a potential career when they may otherwise be tossed out, leading them to turn to crime to survive.

both of these programs actually ended up being so successful in corona that other kingdoms (specifically those with very large populations of orphans…) wanted to send kids in that direction as well!

Emery was born in ingvarr and orphaned when she lost her mother, Florence, at around three years old to a preventable illness. with no other known family available to take her in, she lived in an orphanage for a little less than a year. when this particular facility was preparing to send some teens over to corona for apprenticeships (think kind of like the 1850s orphan train program), emery ended up sneaking in with the group by mistake, and due to overcrowding in ingvarr’s child welfare system nobody really noticed until it was too late….😭😭😭 very worrisome for eugene who expected a group of teenagers and got a bonus little girl who was like. barely past toddler age 😭

i dont think whoever was running the orphanage was like, evil or anything though, just really stressed and overworked. they definitely worried when emery was gone, but eugene managed to get in contact and reassure them she was okay, and to save on travel costs they sent over the little info they had of her and entrusted her in eugene’s care.

In the meantime though, the twins (around 7 at the time) had a new playmate and were having the Time Of Their Lives, introducing them to everyone like she was a weird little wild animal they found or something like “Can we keep her 🥺” GAHAHAHAHA. Ilmari (10) also liked their weird little ass although they really didn’t want to admit it, they were very bossy and protective of her in that “older sister who thinks they’re hot shit” kinda way

meanwhile varian and hugo, now newly in their 30s, married, and still childless (and very happy about this decision mind you, they SAW what uknighted dream went through) are lowkey getting a little bored and looking to maybe do some travelling with nuru and yong again. They had heard about the ingvarr kids and, knowing hugo’s history, eugene had offered them to take an apprenticeship, but for a variety of reasons they had decided to decline for now…. …..And then they find out abt this four year old who apparently just Showed Up and now nobody knows what to do with her and var and hugo IMMEDIATELY get attached.

. So. obviously they didn’t have much else to do so why not.

[kcinpa]

TL;DR Project 2025

Project 2025 has crossed my dash several times, so maybe tumblr is already informed about the hellish 900-page takeover plan if Trump wins office again. But even the articles covering Project 2025 can be a LOT of reading. So I'm trying to get it down to simple bulleted lists…

Navigator Research (a progressive polling outfit) found that 7 in 10 Americans are unfamiliar with Project 2025. But the more they learn about it, the more they don't like or want it. When asked about a series of policy plans taken directly from Project 2025, the bipartisan survey group responded most negatively to the following:

Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime

Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry

Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions

Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires

Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families

Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer

Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors

Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age

Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control

Laurie Garrett looked at the roughly 50 pages within Project 2025 that deal with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other health agencies, and summarized them on Twitter/X in a series of replies. I've shortened even more here:

HHS must "respect for the sacred rights of conscience" for Federal workers & healthcare providers and workers broadly who object to abortions, contraception, gender reassignment & other issues - ie. allow them to deny services based on religious beliefs

HHS should promote "stable and flourishing married families."

Require all welfare programs to "promote father involvement" – or terminate their funding for mothers and children.

Prioritize adoptions via faith-based organizations.

Redefine sex, eliminating all forms of gender "confusion" regarding identity and orientation.

Eliminate the Head Start program for children, entirely

Ban all funding of Planned Parenthood

Ban birth control services that are "egregious attacks on many Americans' religious & moral beliefs"

Deny pregnancy termination pills, "mail-order abortions."

Eliminate Office of Refugee Resettlement; move all refugee matters to the Department of Homeland Security

Healthcare should be "market-based"

Ban all mask and vaccine requirements.

Closely regulate the NIH w/citizen ethics panels, ensuring that no research involves fetal tissue, leads to development of new forms of Abortions or brings profits to the researchers.

Redirect the Office of Global Affairs to promoting "moral conscience" & full compliance w/the Mexico City policy

The CDC should have no role in medical policies.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism," HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence & by what method.

I'm still looking for a good short summary of the environmental horrors that Project 2025 would bring if it comes to fruition…

[centrally-unplanned]

I will always be annoyed as a very pro-welfare person that my "camp" is not going to come around to Social Security being Bad, Actually. It is so antiquated! Most crucially, it probably isn't even welfare - the best analyses in my opinion generally view it as neutral, maybe mildly progressive, and maybe even mildly regressive. Maybe your own paper thinks it is more on the progressive side? But it is ~5% of GDP! I do not have to "debate the progressivity" of food stamps, they are obviously insanely redistributive; the opportunity cost of Social Security is huge in this regard because you do in fact have a limited tax budget to play with.

More importantly to me, it is a redistribution from the young to the old in a society where that is becoming quite costly. The "forces of social reproduction", from work to innovation to families, are pretty universally created by the non-retired, and while most people are Doing Fine that doesn't mean we aren't creating unnecessary frictions for all of that. Right now we would all socially be better off "front-shifting" more spending, giving the ~30 year olds more income and the ~70 year olds less - 70 year olds in America are quite rich, they really don't need it.

Meanwhile the reasons for the program have vanished. I get why it was a decent idea in the 1930's - it is an insurance program built around the idea that the elderly can't "bounce back" from economic setbacks since they have a limited ability to work. In a world where bank runs junking someone's savings were common this makes sense. And in a world of fertility rates hitting 4.0+ targets it was easily affordable. But nowadays the idea that the median someone "cannot save for retirement" is very silly, they absolutely can safely and reliably - banks are stable and insured, government bond programs exist, and so on.

Of course, there are those who are too poor to save, which you can address with, like, actual welfare? I won't go down the UBI rabbit hole but it is very silly to fix the problem of elderly poverty with a universal forced savings plan that pays out to people based on their past income. Just give poor people money and cut out all the middleman bullshit.

Which is the rub of course - Social Security works politically precisely because it isn't welfare, it is something "everyone" gets. Which, again as a big UBI proponent, I get, it is how politics works. But that doesn't change the fact that Social Security probably makes most people on net worse off despite how much they defend it, and limits the fiscal capacity for better alternatives. From an ideological lens it isn't a left program, and shouldn't be treated as such. (And it isn't a right program either, but in the US rightwing ideology is pretty incoherent so who knows)

But in the end winning elections is the actual determinant of policy, so may the Democrats continue to worship it - and hopefully get the courage to slip some changes in that people don't notice somewhere down the line.

[reasonsforhope]

Flint, Michigan, has one of the [United States]'s highest rates of child poverty — something that got a lot of attention during the city's lead water crisis a decade ago. And a pediatrician who helped expose that lead problem has now launched a first-of-its-kind move to tackle poverty: giving every new mother $7,500 in cash aid over a year.

A baby's first year is crucial for development. It's also a time of peak poverty.

Flint's new cash transfer program, Rx Kids, starts during pregnancy. The first payment is $1,500 to encourage prenatal care. After delivery, mothers will get $500 a month over the baby's first year.

"What happens in that first year of life can really portend your entire life course trajectory. Your brain literally doubles in size in the first 12 months," says Hanna-Attisha, who's also a public health professor at Michigan State University.

A baby's birth is also a peak time for poverty. Being pregnant can force women to cut back hours or even lose a job. Then comes the double whammy cost of child care.

Research has found that stress from childhood poverty can harm a person's physical and mental health, brain development and performance in school. Infants and toddlers are more likely than older children to be put into foster care, for reasons that advocates say conflate neglect with poverty.

In Flint, where the child poverty rate is more than 50%, Hanna-Attisha says new moms are in a bind. "We just had a baby miss their 4-day-old appointment because mom had to go back to work at four days," she says...

Benefits of Cash Aid

Studies have found such payments reduce financial hardship and food insecurity and improve mental and physical health for both mothers and children.

The U.S. got a short-lived taste of that in 2021. Congress temporarily expanded the child tax credit, boosting payments and also sending them to the poorest families who had been excluded because they didn't make enough to qualify for the credit. Research found that families mostly spent the money on basic needs. The bigger tax credit improved families' finances and briefly cut the country's child poverty rate nearly in half.

"We saw food hardship dropped to the lowest level ever," Shaefer says. "And we saw credit scores actually go to the highest that they'd ever been in at the end of 2021."

Critics worried that the expanded credit would lead people to work less, but there was little evidence of that. Some said they used the extra money for child care so they could go to work.

As cash assistance in Flint ramps up, Shaefer will be tracking not just its impact on financial well-being, but how it affects the roughly 1,200 babies born in the city each year.

"We're going to see if expectant moms route into prenatal care earlier," he says. "Are they able to go more? And then we'll be able to look at birth outcomes," including birth weight and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions.

Since the pandemic, dozens of cash aid pilots have popped up across the nation. But unlike them, Rx Kids is not limited to lower-income households. It's universal, which means every new mom will get the same amount of money. "You pit people against each other when you draw that line in the sand and say, 'You don't need this, and you do,' " Shaefer says. It can also stigmatize families who get the aid, he says, as happened with traditional welfare...

So far, there's more than $43 million to keep the program going for three years. Funders include foundations, health insurance companies and the state of Michigan, which allocated a small part of its federal cash aid, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Money can buy more time for bonding with a baby

Alana Turner can't believe her luck with Flint's new cash benefits. "I was just shocked because of the timing of it all," she says.

Turner is due soon with her second child, a girl. She lives with her aunt and her 4-year-old son, Ace. After he was born, her car broke down and she was seriously cash-strapped, negotiating over bill payments. This time, she hopes she won't have to choose between basic needs.

"Like, I shouldn't have to think about choosing between are the lights going to be on or am I going to make sure the car brakes are good," she says...

But since she'll be getting an unexpected $7,500 over the next year, Turner has a new goal. With her first child, she was back on the job in less than six weeks. Now, she hopes she'll be able to slow down and spend more time with her daughter.

"I don't want to sacrifice the time with my newborn like I had to for my son, if I don't have to," she says."

-via NPR, March 12, 2024

[folk-enjoyer]

Song of the Day

"Call of the moose" Willy Mitchell, 1980 As you might know, September 30th is Truth and Reconciliation day (more commonly known as Orange Shirt Day), a national day in Canada dedicated to spreading awareness about the legacy of Residential schools on Indigenous people. Instead of just focusing on a song, I also wanted to briefly talk about the history of the sixties scoop and its influence on Indigenous American music and activism.

The process of Residential schooling in Canada existed well before the '60s, but the new processes of the sixties scoop began in 1951. It was a process where the provincial government had the power to take Indigenous children from their homes and communities and put them into the child welfare system. Despite the closing of residential schools, more and more children were being taken away from their families and adopted into middle-class white ones.

Even though Indigenous communities only made up a tiny portion of the total population, 40-70% of the children in these programs would be Aboriginal. In total, 20,000 children would be victims of these policies through the 60s and 70s.

These adoptions would have disastrous effects on their victims. Not only were sexual and physical abuse common problems but the victims were forcibly stripped of their culture and taught to hate themselves. The community panel report on the sixties scoop writes:

"The homes in which our children are placed ranged from those of caring, well-intentioned individuals, to places of slave labour and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The violent effects of the most negative of these homes are tragic for its victims. Even the best of these homes are not healthy places for our children. Anglo-Canadian foster parents are not culturally equipped to create an environment in which a positive Aboriginal self-image can develop. In many cases, our children are taught to demean those things about themselves that are Aboriginal. Meanwhile, they are expected to emulate normal child development by imitating the role model behavior of their Anglo-Canadian foster or adoptive parents."

and to this day indigenous children in Canada are still disproportionately represented in foster care. Despite being 5% of the Total Canadian population, Indigenous children make up 53.8% of all children in foster care.

I would like to say that the one good thing that came out of this gruesome and horrible practice of state-sponsored child relocation was that there was a birth of culture from protest music, but there wasn't. In fact, Indigenous music has a long history of being erased and whitewashed from folk history.

From Buffy Saint-Marie pretending to be Indigenous to the systematic denial of first nations people from the Canadian mainstream music scene, the talented artists of the time were forcibly erased.

Which is why this album featuring Willy Mitchell is so important.

Willy Mitchell and The Desert River Band

This Album was compiled of incredibly rare, unheard folk and rock music of North American indigenous music in the 60s-80s. It is truly, a of a kind historical artifact and a testimony to the importance of archival work to combat cultural genocide. Please give the entire thing a listen if you have time. Call of the Moose is my favorite song on the album, written and performed by Willy Mitchell in the 80s. His Most interesting song might be 'Big Policeman' though, written about his experience of getting shot in the head by the police. He talks about it here:

"He comes there and as soon as I took off running, he had my two friends right there — he could have taken them. They stopped right there on the sidewalk. They watched him shootin’ at me. He missed me twice, and when I got to the tree line, he was on the edge of the road, at the snow bank. That’s where he fell, and the gun went off. But that was it — he took the gun out. He should never have taken that gun out. I spoke to many policemen. And judges, too. I spoke with lawyers about that. They all agreed. He wasn’t supposed to touch that gun. So why did I only get five hundred dollars for that? "

These problems talked about here, forced displacement, cultural assimilation, police violence, child exploitation, and erasure of these crimes, still exist in Canada. And so long as they still exist, it is imperative to keep talking about them. Never let the settler colonial government have peace; never let anyone be comfortable not remembering the depth of exploitation.

Every Child Matters

[collapsedsquid]

The decline in birthrates is often attributed to the cost of raising children. In the premodern world children went to work as early as six or eight, and thus constituted an economic benefit to the family; in the modern world they don't start working until they're teenagers, later if they attend college, constituting a huge upfront cost without much return for decades, if ever. "Surely this explains why birthrates are decreasing." It does not. Various countries have experimented with various degrees of income support for parenthood: paid maternity/paternity leave, childcare subsidies, direct cash payments. The effect on the birthrate of all these programs appears to be approximately zero.

I know this isn't everything that's going on here but whenever I see this I think "would you base this decision on a child-raising benefit that was legislated last year? That may or may not continue, either actually or effectively?" Can be an extent to which you don't want to trust any child welfare program until it's lasted multiple generations.

See a bit of the "redistribution vs predistribution" arguments, give people money or try to arrange the economy such that their wages are higher. Any redistribution in the current moment is going to feel very transient. Predistribution too, although perhaps we can be fooled into think this represents some sort of "natural" income that will last.

[juniperharvest]

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