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Fifty years since Johnson’s declaration of the “War on Poverty” - World Socialist Web Site

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/08/pers-j08.html

In his first State of the Union Address, delivered to Congress on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson called for ending poverty, joblessness, and hunger in the US. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” Johnson said in the speech, delivered not quite seven weeks after the assassination of his predecessor, John Kennedy.

Within two years, Congress put in place a series of laws and programs that together became known as “The Great Society.” These included: the Social Security Act of 1965 creating Medicare and Medicaid, which respectively provided health insurance to the elderly and introduced federal health care coverage for the disabled and poor; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the first significant legislation addressing institutional racism since the era of Reconstruction nearly a century earlier; and a number of job training, urban development, educational, and nutritional government agencies and initiatives, including the pre-kindergarten educational program Head Start and the Food Stamp program.

#états-unis #pauvreté

Wall Street swindles, not pensions, behind financial crisis in Detroit and other US cities - World Socialist Web Site

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/08/swap-j08.html

The political establishment and the media have relentlessly promoted the myth that the crisis in Detroit and in cities across the US is a product of overgenerous spending on social services and benefits, with public employee pension liabilities cited as the main culprit.

In reality, the driving force behind the Detroit bankruptcy has been a predatory interest rate swap foisted on the city by Wall Street bankers, which was signed by former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in 2005. Scores of states, municipalities, school districts and various other public entities entered into similar swap contracts over the past decade. These deals have enabled the world’s most powerful banking houses to systematically plunder public budgets across the nation, creating the conditions for the rising wave of municipal bankruptcies.

#détroit #étatsunis #crise_financière #wall_street