Don’t get me wrong. I really love Bernie Sanders for forcing Medicare for All to the fore. But poor people need more than healthcare to survive, we also need livable incomes. While Bernie has endeared many women to his side, he also alienated a lot of women with his “worker” rhetoric when he publicly said he absolutely won’t consider a UBI and instead supports a job guarantee because “people want to work and be a productive member of society” — a huge insult to a sizable number of women who’ve been full-time unpaid homemakers, moms, and caregivers.

What Sanders was saying, was that all the UNPAID caretaking and homemaking work that most older women — who are now beleagured with disabilities and health issues — have done out of necessity amounts to “nothing”, implying that we’re now usless eaters because all the years of our unpaid labor doesn’t meet his definition of “work” and being “productive members of society.”

We’re sick and tired of being taken for granted. We deserve better than being socially discarded. No society on Earth would even exist today if not for centuries of all the “nothing” that women did (and still do). Organized labor never acknowledged this. Socialists and self-styled progressives don’t acknowledge this. Neoliberal bourgeois feminists don’t acknowledge this. Conservatives sure as hell won’t acknowledge this, even as they express entitlement to the fruits of all that unpaid work. Only one person in the 2020 presidential race acknowledged it and plans to address it with a truly inclusive economic plan: Andrew Yang.

Let me repeat: Sanders and Stephanie Kelton, the FJG architect leading his economics “dream team”, view long-term full-time homemakers/caregivers the same way as the Social Security Administration views us: as “not having worked a single day in our lives.” Even though NO society on Earth would even exist today at all without all this “nothing” that (mostly) women have been doing for centuries (and are still doing), often without adequate financial support or other options available to us that would make working outside the home feasible for us and our families.

Many younger women saw and internalized all this and figured that motherhood, homemaking, and caregiving is just not worth it. One young friend publicly admitted on Twitter that she’s perfectly happy as a self-employed game developer and being a single “toad mom” (she dearly loves toads, and keeps a few as pets). She’s not even remotely interested in marriage — she’s got pet toads that are much safer to kiss. I don’t blame her.

Young women without full-time caregiving obligations, and who are fully-abled, have more job opportunities available to them that were unavailable to the majority of poverty class women my age when I was young and healthy because job discrimination against women was far worse in the 1980’s than it is today. The second-wave feminist movement helped upper-middle class/rich women (who could afford law school, medical school, and other PhD degrees) break glass ceilings while poor women of my generation (Gen-X) got the glass floor shattered beneath us courtesy of Welfare Reform while we were also being denied all but the lowest paying jobs, usually without any health benefits or pensions.

We got denied entry to most of the good paying blue-collar jobs and told “Why don’t you find a husband?” and “women don’t need jobs — they can get welfare.” It didn’t matter that welfare was never enough to live on even when benefit amounts were at their most generous. Many of us got death threats if we tried to enter skilled trades union jobs as we were told by our working class union “brothers” that we had no right to “take away a man’s job.” Even other working class women were often critical of us for not staying in “our place” if we dared to try for something better than a sub-minimum wage waitress job without any benefits.

That’s not even getting into the lack of child support when ‘Prince Charming’ took a powder, which is less problematic today due to technological advances. When I was a young woman, older women who were part of the “second-wave” feminist movement had a saying: “Every woman is one man away from welfare.”

Nobody’s doing anything for poor older women who suffered lifelong injustice and struggled in poverty all our lives.

Consider all the poor struggling women who are older than the Millenials — Gen-X women who are now in our 50’s, many battling disabling health issues, most whom like myself grew up on the losing side of the digital divide, who did NOT have options outside of homemaking and caregiving when we were young and fully-abled. We won’t even get a livable social security old age benefit in our own right, nor do we get ANY income support now even though many of us can’t really work outside the home at this late stage in our lives. We’re not being taken care of economically and we need support now that we’re in our 50’s after many years of thankless unpaid work taking care of everyone else. This is somehow fair?

Anti-UBI critics claim that the UBI plan offered by Andrew Yang is a Trojan horse that will be used to eliminate what remains of cash/cash-like transfer welfare programs for the poor (TANF, SSI, and SNAP) when in reality, the FJG plan Bernie is offering will be a backdoor measure to do just that. Because the minute you earn as little as ONE DOLLAR above the ridiculously low cut-off limit for being “poor enough” to qualify for SNAP or TANF or SSI, you lose ALL your benefits. So, working at a slightly-above minimum wage job puts you further down in the poverty hole — and that’s without taking into account the extra costs you have to incur just to be able to get and keep a job, even a “guaranteed” one.

There’s a minimum degree of economic stability and access to resources you need to already have in order to be employable — even at a “guaranteed” job.

Most impoverished older women like myself are NOT “digital natives.” Trying to learn to code late in life has not worked out very well for poor older women who were forced onto the losing side of the Digital Divide from the get-go. We never were able to figure out the secret that so many 20-something millionaires seemingly learned through osmosis about how to make piles of money off of Patreons and YouTube channels, and it’s not like any rich younger people who are wiz-bangs at this stuff have offered to help us out by taking lots of time teaching and mentoring us for free out of the kindness of their hearts.

Many older women like me are literally too poor to be able to afford to get and keep a job and know nothing about how to start and succeed at running a business in today’s economy. I needed a helping hand up 30 years ago, but never got a break despite going into unaffordable debt for a college degree as a poor marginalized woman from generational poverty (and also a human trafficking survivor) who didn’t even have a computer, much less know how to use one, until I was in my mid-40s. By the time an employer finally offered me a job as an older woman trying to re-enter the workforce, I got slapped with two major medical shitsandwiches which put the kybosh on that, resulting in losing what very little I had. If UBI was already in place, I’d have had the basic economic stability I desperately needed in order to have a fair fighting chance at finding a clear path up out of poverty after enduring an entire lifetime of having so much stacked against me.

Critics say that UBI merely props up capitalism but ignore the fact that capitalism is and always has been propped up by a lot of free labor — often forced onto entire groups of oppressed people against their will. The main reason capitalism has been able to succeed is because it has always had a lot of free labor from half the population — the female half.

Devaluing women, thus devaluing homemakers and caregivers, distorts the whole picture of the capitalist economy. It really amounts to a lot of transfer payments from (mostly) women to others. You don’t get social security, health benefits, a paid vacation, a 401(K) or even an income to compensate you for your time and sacrifice.

When you have to give up paid employment to recover from pregnancy and childbirth, raise special needs children, or be a full-time caregiver for an elderly or disabled spouse/family member so they won’t have to go into the county nursing home — depleting the family’s assets, including the modest marital home you and your now-infirm spouse worked hard your entire lives for— that paid job that you had to give up to be an unpaid caregiver goes to someone else who gets your place on the economic/jobs ladder that you had to forfeit without any compensation.

And that’s not even counting how much money in terms of real costs that unpaid caregivers are sparing the rest of society from having to bear through local/state taxation by taking care of elderly and disabled family members who really can’t live on their own.

If my husband dies before me, I will be eligible for a paltry widows’ benefit equal to 55% of my husband’s benefit calculation, which is FAR below our antiquated federal poverty level calculation. But I’ll only be able to get that survivor’s benefit after he dies and after I reach age 67 — if I live that long as a 52 year old woman with diabetes and Crohn’s disease who suffered a lifetime of abject poverty due largely to classism and systemic discrimination.

Meanwhile, we are BOTH suffering in deep poverty because I’ve been unable to get any income. I don’t have money to pay for training to build updated skills (and keep the utilities on while doing so). I lack an impressive portfolio and a work history with professional references that might help me to get hired at gigs on freelance platforms so I can work from home while caring for my ailing elderly husband. And my husband’s social security benefit is NOT enough for one person to live on, let alone two people. Yet, his $1037/mo social security pegs our household of two as “too rich” for me to qualify for a $700/mo SSI benefit.

SSI is a means-tested welfare program for poor disabled people who never got the chance to earn enough credits to qualify for social security disability (SSDI) — SSI is not a social security program like SSDI. In order to get SSI, I’d have to have less than $2,000 in total assets, divorce my husband and move out of, and relinquish ownership rights to, our very humble (and run-down) marital home and live separately and alone. And I’d have to stay far below poverty in order to maintain ongoing SSI eligibility. I’d even be restricted from doing “too much” volunteer work because that makes me “employable” at a paid job in the eyes of the SSI program’s criteria.

This is the “safety net” that staunch anti-UBI critics who’ve never been truly poor accuse Andrew Yang of seeking to eliminate and replace with his $1,000/mo unconditional basic income (UBI), even though the majority of disabled Americans get denied help under the current system. And those who finally manage to get SSI after a lengthy appeals process where their lawyer gets about a third of their backdue SSI award, don’t even get enough of a monthly amount to live on with a quality of life and any real dignity.

Being a Crohn’s disease sufferer and a diabetic, in addition to being older with very little technical skills aptitude, there’s NO guarantee that Bernie’s FJG plan can or will accommodate people like me who really aren’t physically able to work outside the home — no matter how badly we may want to — due to lack of a car, and disabilities/health issues on top of familial caregiving responsibilities. We’re pointedly excluded in Bernie’s “working people” rhetoric, and we’re just an afterthought in Bernie’s FJG plan. There’s tens of millions of us, but we’re being neglected. The only candidate running for president in 2020 who gets this and has an actual plan to ensure everyone is included and economically taken care of is Andrew Yang.

Society pays for what it values, but only to whom it deems human enough to matter. Bernie’s FJG as the only allowable solution to poverty leaves it up to local community organizations’ leaders to decide what counts as “important work” and what does not. So, poor older and chronically ill women who are/were caregivers and homemakers (for lack of feasible options when we were young) will be left out in the cold again — because society does not value women. Even the self-styled “socialists” backing the FJG over UBI dismiss caregiving and homemaking as “doing nothing”, unless we’re doing it for other people’s families. Only then does it count as “socially useful work” deserving of any income.

If society valued women, older women who are now unemployable due to health problems and disabilities after society benefited from a lifetime of our unpaid labor, women like me wouldn’t be forced to fight for (non-forthcoming) help from means-tested programs like SSI, and we wouldn’t be left having to beg for support through personal fundraisers, throwing ourselves at the mercy of strangers and hoping we get helped just so we can keep ourselves alive.

If society valued women who’ve been caregivers and homemakers who are now battling health issues and disabilities in our older years, then society would put its money where its mouth is: We would be getting economically supported with dignity and a quality of life. But we’re not. That’s proof of what society values, and what it does not.

This shows us what we can expect our local communities to value as “work”, and what won’t count as a “job.” Bernie’s FJG plan merely reinforces the status quo of capitalism’s gender division of labor, and perpetuates the devaluation of women and what has always been traditionally “women’s work.”

The devaluation of women and the view of homemaking and caregiving as “doing nothing” was the whole premise for “eliminating welfare as we know it”. The entire Welfare Reform debate, which resulted in the collapsing of the floor from underneath the poorest of the poor, was based on the idea that raising children, being a homemaker, a full-time caregiver for disabled or elderly family members, is “doing nothing” — as long as it’s poor women who are doing it.

When upper-middle class and rich women opt to leave prestigious careers to be full-time homemakers and caregivers, they’re praised for choosing to make a sacrifice to do the “important work” of motherhood and taking care of the home and family. But society hypocritically pathologizes poor women for making that same sacrifice out of necessity and lack of choice.

Digging into the background of professor Stephanie Kelton, Bernie’s economics guru, some disturbing facts came to light. Kelton and fellow FJG promoter and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) pioneer, L. Randall Wray, are acolytes of Hyman Minsky — an anti-welfare reactionary who is rabidly opposed to giving poor people money.

They even wrote academic papers justifying their position with a disturbing lie: Kelton and Wray both claimed in their paper that Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs didn’t reduce poverty. Wray has repeated this on Internet forums.

As flawed as LBJ’s Great Society welfare programs were, they most certainly did reduce poverty in America. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s before LBJ launched the War on Poverty, there were approximately 200 deaths per year due to starvation just in the state of West Virginia alone. Deaths from sickness, cold, and starvation throughout Appalachia were directly due to poverty caused by deliberate disinvestment and an artificial manipulation of the labor market by timber and coal barons who suppressed industry and opportunities for other jobs for the people by keeping other businesses out.

By the time LBJ left office, welfare reduced poverty from 30% in 1959 to a historic low of 11% by the time his term ended. His Great Society programs reduced poverty by close to 40% and eliminated Third World level poverty in the US altogether.

Lack of jobs doesn’t oppress poor people. What oppresses poor people is being starved into submission — poverty is economic terrorism.There’s nothing wrong with a jobs guarantee program. But we need to be honest when we talk about what constitutes “work.”

So why lie about what the FJG program really is if it’s really such a good deal for America’s poor? Why lie about LBJ’s welfare programs in order to promote the FJG if it’s truly justice-centered? There’s only one reason for lying in an economics paper published in the name of “scholarship” to justify a FJG program as a viable macroeconomic plan aimed at eliminating poverty and that is because the program is not designed in the best interests of the poor.

L. Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton, and Fadhel Kaboub are no friends to poor people. They do not seek a jobs program that will actually lift the poor up into middle class careers and set us on the path to full social inclusion and prosperity. Just in the way they and most other FJG promoters speak about the poor oozes with disdain for anything that would truly liberate poor people, including entrepreneurship for those who just need a financial boost to succeed at self-employment. They can’t bear the thought of giving money unconditionally to the “idle poor”, but they’re not bothered about the idle rich getting money that’s not earned from a job.

It seems they want to use their FJG brainchild to keep the poor down and in “our place”, forced (by the withholding of other options) into minimum-wage menial jobs assigned by local elites who will be in charge of the agencies administering these FJG jobs. Jobs that we must accept if we don’t want to starve to death and be homeless. Jobs at which we’ll never be allowed to advance and earn more than the minimum wage and get promotions (or even any respect) — while using FJG participants to discipline higher-paid middle class workers with the constant threat that they can be replaced by minimum-wage FJG workers who want better jobs if they don’t “behave.” Their own words in their published work and slide shows stand as proof.

At an open lecture held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 7th 2019, fellow MMT and pro-FJG economist Fadhel Kaboub, who hails from the same Levy Institute as Stephanie Kelton and Randall Wray, described his macroeconomic vision for the FJG. The FJG as Kaboub imagines it should set off alarms for every Left-leaning person with rudimentary grasp of how bloody the US labor movement was, and the oppression that working class people died in fighting against.

Kaboub stated he’d like to implement “local currencies” as FJG wages — i.e., money issued by a local organization that is NOT exchangeable into USD. You can listen to what he said starting at 47:44 in this video clip of the event: https://youtu.be/kL5d_4lFWsk?t=2864

Many workers were paid in “local currencies” during the bad old days that organized labor fought against for over a century. Coal miners and labor employed by timber barons throughout Appalachia were paid in ‘scrip money’ which they could not exchange for USD. They could only spend their ‘scrip money’ wages at the local company-owned store in the company-owned towns where they lived, worked, and died for generations. Everything from the workers’ houses down to the church pews where the workers and their families sat for Sunday sermons, were owned by the coal companies. The workers had their over-inflated housing rent deducted from their wages and their remaining pay was paid to them in scrip. The miners and their families were captives — they weren’t paid in normal money so they couldn’t just pack up and leave if they didn’t like it.

Being paid wages in a “local currency” redeemable only at the company store, for working at the only jobs allowed to them by ruthless coal barons like Stone Mountain Coal Company, who hired private mercenary police forces like the Baldwin-Felts Agency to suppress workers’ rights by murdering union organizers and workers who attempted to flee penniless and on foot into the mountains, was not progressive. It was the spark that lit the tinderbox in what was working class America’s bloodiest battle in US labor history — “Bloody Mingo”/the Massacre at Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain — ending on September 3rd 1921 after President Warren G. Harding declared martial law, sent in troops and ordered the Air Corps to bomb the residents of Blair and Sharples in southern West Virginia. It was the largest armed insurrection on American soil since the Civil War. Bomb fragments and undetonated bombs are still being found in that region today, 98 years later.

If you’re a progressive who thinks Kaboub’s idea about “local currencies” as a paycheck earned from coerced participation in a low-paying, unsatisfying jobs program is the best thing since toast, you need a refresher course in US labor history.

These MMT/FJG economists aren’t the good guys they’ve fooled many “progressives” into believing they are. Otherwise they wouldn’t have lied about LBJ’s Great Society programs not reducing poverty, and they wouldn’t seek to resurrect a bygone era where workers were trapped in local feudal-like fiefdoms and forced to work for ‘scrip money’ not redeemable anywhere except the ‘company store.’

A truly progressive plan would be an economic floor through which no American can fall, even if they’re “not a good culture fit” for employers and even if their work is the thankless, unpaid job of caregiving and homemaking. A truly progressive platform would not define homemaking/caregiving as “doing nothing” while hypocritially stating that childcare and eldercare workers doing that same work for employers deserve a $15/hour minimum wage. If it’s “work” when women do it for other people’s families, then it should count as “work” when doing it for our own. That would be in the spirit of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without violating poor people’s right to the same freedom to make choices like everyone else, an idea best summed up as “no one deserves to be too poor to be able to live” — the view held by many UBI supporters like the #BrokeFolkVote and scholars like Karl Widerquist.

Under the pretty gift wrapping, Bernie’s FJG plan looks more like a glorified version of re-authorized Welfare Reform with a slightly less stingy Workfare component. Poor people who cannot or will not fit into the FJG mold will be left to starve and be homeless, without a safety net. This is humane?

FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights lists the right to a job with a living wage as well as a livable guaranteed income in the event of sickness, disability and old age. There’s a huge difference between the guaranteed right TO a job and the guaranteed “right” to starvation and homelessness if you can’t do the only job your local community offers you through Bernie’s FJG.

Bernie’s FJG plan as designed by Stephanie Kelton (and her Levy Institute colleagues) is not reflective of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights. It’s based on the same classist, mean-spirited ideology rooted in the Calvinist predestination/Just World Fallacy deficit theory view of the poor that launched the War on the Poor and brought the Welfare Reform Act to fruition in the first place. America’s poorest and most marginalized need and deserve real economic justice — not velvet-gloved coercion and paternalism deceptively labeled as a social right.

It is possible to create a great FJG plan — one that would be the envy of every social democracy in the world. But that would entail having a sizable representation of chronically poor marginalized and hard-to-employ people at the policymaking table. “Nothing about us without us.”

Implement a good UBI alongside an optimal FJG to ensure that the FJG plan is truly in the spirit of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights — not reminiscent of more carrot-and-stick measures that are pointedly biased against the poor, amounting to a lot more sticks than carrots.

FDR clearly grasped the difference between a “right” and a punitive action — unlike today’s progressives who devalue caregiving and homemaking as “doing nothing”, who back-bench the disabled poor and harm us with means testing, who ignore those for whom no viable jobs can be easily and quickly created, and who heap scorn and contempt upon poor people who want a real opportunity requiring the freedom that only an unconditional basic income can deliver in order to chart their own paths to prosperity through entrepreneurship and self-employment.

I’ve been a Bernie supporter since 2016. I’d love to support him now. But my husband and I have difficulty doing so with his alienation of homemakers/caregivers and many other categories of poor people who will be no better off than they are now as punishment for the “crime” of not being easy to shoehorn into a plan that they just can’t fit into. We’re more interested in a human rights-centered solution to poverty that includes a good UBI plan. We believe that is the best way to move forward in helping all Americans — including the disabled, homemakers and caregivers, the homeless, human trafficking survivors, struggling entrepreneurs, tempermental writers, and many other square pegs who can’t fit into a round hole. I really hope Bernie comes around to seeing things this way. Until he does, we won’t be supporting him. Instead, we are supporting Andrew Yang.

If you care about real economic justice, consider very carefully the plans proposed by the candidate you intend to vote for and vote for those who actually support and empower everyone with a social floor that comes with real options — including the income-backed freedom to say “NO” to compulsory participation in a Stalinesque minimum-wage menial jobs gulag masquerading as an “economic right.”

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