1996-98: President Bill Clinton puts $5 billion towards jobs and $30 billion towards crime prevention. Seeing welfare as problem that needs to be fixed, Clinton ends welfare as it was known since the 1930s by approving the Republican led Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.  He promises to "weed out any inmate" receiving public aid.   

Actions for Self-Determination:

• 1966: National Welfare Rights Organization builds a national movement of primarily Black women to fight for the rights of welfare recipients.
  
• 1985: Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) forms on Skid Row as a performance group focusing on the issues and stories of the residents of the area, created and told by themselves.
• 1991: Cheri Honkala, a single homeless mother, joins with other single mothers in Philadelphia to form the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. The group was looking to solve child care shortages in order to allow the mothers to find work.  The effort has since grown under the name of Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, advocating for the rights of the poor and using vacant homes for housing the homeless.
  
• 1998: Susan Burton, formerly incarcerated, founds A New Way of Life ReEntry Program. The South Los Angeles organization provides services for women being let out of jail/prison as a way to lower recidivism and increase community safety.
• 1999: People in Seattle shut down World Trade Organization talks, a global meeting on advancing neoliberalism.

Discussion Questions:

• Compare welfare with corporate subsidies (auto bailout, industrial agriculture, military). What stories do you think about when you hear welfare? Auto industry? How do they affect how you view them?
• Clinton framed his welfare approach with the idea that welfare was a problem that needed to be solved. Why is welfare seen as such a "dirty" word in American politics? Why is welfare more accepted in places like Finland?
• Is racism or poverty seen as a bigger issue in the United States?
• Do you, or someone you know, work a minimum wage job full-time? Are you/they able to "get by"? What kind of sacrifices do you/they make?
• Can debt be a form of confinement? Why or why not? What types of economic confinement do you experience?

Additional Resources:

• Incarceration, Reentry and Social Capital: Social Networks in the Balance [PDF Article]
• Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh [PDF article]
• "The Debt Trap"—New York Times [Interactive Article]

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