Three Worlds of Relief

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cybelle Fox
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Assistance Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare System ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
The New Deal

This book examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, the book finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. The book reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, the book paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. It debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. The book challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state.

Welfare Reforms in Post-Crisis Korea: Dilemmas and Choices

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hye Kyung Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
First Century ◽  
Policy Choice ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare System ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ultimate Question ◽  
Welfare Reforms

This paper explicates the welfare reforms executed in Korea after the abrupt financial meltdown in November 1997, and asks whether the same line of reforms will continue further into the twenty-first century Korea. The DJ government's post-crisis policy choice was to persue an expansion and consolidation of the social welfare system based upon the principle of solidarity. Consequently, the size of social welfare expenditure grew fast between 1996 and 1999. Korean experience of post-crisis years demonstrates the case in which the global integration of economy brought about the fast expansion of social welfare programs. The ultimate question is will this growth continue in the sea of neo-liberal challenges, with the new government's ‘Participatory Welfare’ whose complete design is not made public yet.

scholarly journals The Overdiagnosis of Bipolar Disorder Within Marginalized Communities: A Call to Action

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-99
Author(s):  
Paul Doyen
Keyword(s):  
Bipolar Disorder ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Drug Effects ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Psychosocial Models

This paper argues that the overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder (BD) is an urgent and underrecognized problem within the U.S., threatening to expose vulnerable Americans to heightened stigma and harmful drug effects while disguising the environmental and traumagenic roots of their distress. The paper traces BD overdiagnosis to biomedical assumptions about mental illness and to the decline of social welfare policies over the past twenty-five years. It calls on policymakers to address BD overdiagnosis by revising criteria in the DSM 5, developing psychosocial models of mental illness, and reintroducing protective social welfare programs. Finally, the paper urges social workers to educate themselves about the harms of BD overdiagnosis as well as to recognize their own role in medicalizing their clients’ distress.

The Churches Do Their Part

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-86
Author(s):  
John W. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
Wagner Act ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter shows how mainline Protestant religious leaders, often working in conjunction with Jewish and Catholic groups, were instrumental in building popular support for New Deal programs including unemployment insurance, the National Recovery Administration, and the Wagner Act. It shows that Protestant elites offered the Roosevelt administration a variety of tangible forms of assistance—from local educational sessions to letter-writing campaigns to “NRA Sundays”—that went well beyond their public expressions of support. Arguably the churches’ greatest contribution to the construction of the New Deal-era welfare state, however, was to serve as a bulwark against attacks from a growing cadre of proto-libertarian entities on the far right. So long as most Protestants attended mainline churches, and so long as mainline leaders were monolithic in their support of social welfare programs, claims that there was something un-American about redirecting resources to aid the downtrodden remained an exceedingly tough sell.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Remittances and the Politics of Austerity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Germano
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Welfare Function ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
International Migrants

Remittances sent by international migrants have become an increasingly important source of social welfare in the developing world. This chapter explores what remittances are, why migrants send them, and how poor families use them. I argue in this chapter that remittances are more than just gifts from one relative to another. They play a larger social welfare role that complements funds that governments spend on social welfare programs. This social welfare function has become particularly important in recent decades as developing countries have prioritized austerity and integrated into volatile global markets. I argue that by filling a welfare gap in an age of austerity, remittances help to reduce the suffering and anger that so often trigger political and social instability during times of economic crisis.

Trust in a Polarized Age

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Political Trust ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Downward Spiral

Americans today don’t trust each other and their institutions as much as they used to. The collapse of social and political trust arguably has fueled our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. But is the decline in trust inevitable? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in war-like politics, institutional decay, and possibly even civil war? This book argues that American political and economic institutions are capable of creating and maintaining trust, even through polarized times. Combining philosophical arguments and empirical data, the author shows that liberal democracy, markets, and social welfare programs all play a vital role in producing social and political trust. Even more, these institutions can promote trust justly, by recognizing and respecting our basic human rights.

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Ryan LaRochelle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Block Grant ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

The Impact of Social Welfare Programs

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Work Incentives ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Training

This article briefly reviews the conservative, liberal and radical approaches to social welfare programs, and compares these with empirical evidence from the USA. Conservatives stress that welfare programs reduce work incentives and undermine individual initiatives. Liberals suggest that cuts in welfare have created increased hardship without changing significantly the incentives to work. The Massachusetts Employment and Training Program is analyzed from both perspectives. The Program does not reduce benefits but instead increases work incentives. The results of this Program are skeptically reviewed by radicals as well as some liberals.

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