Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this reason that bureaucrats with a vested interest, in welfare could scuttle Moynihan's program. Congressional committees must respond to both interested groups who can make their demands articulate and immediate, and to the bureaucracy which controls information necessary for the consideration of legislation. Further, the committees can enhance their own power by enhancing the power of the agencies and bureaus over which they have a degree of financial control. No group without influence upon this system can expect to be favored...
...adequacy of the welfare bureaucracy's efforts and even the integrity of its view of events," Moynihan says, had been "roundly condemned" by his report. The result was forseeable: the enervation of Moynihan's program...
...Moynihan charges that civil rights leaders lost the initiative for a program "going beyond the traditional and relatively easy issues of segregation and discrimination" -- and misses the point. Civil rights and the Federal government were natural allies; they were both ostensibly dedicated to the libertarian issues that were easy: the ones that could be passed upon by many members of Congress without offending their constituencies. The civil rights movement, like the Federal government, was simply incapable of addressing itself to the type of change necessary to ameliorate the conditions under which the black poor live...
...this sense that the Moynihan Report is a cop-out; not for the white conscience so much as for official policy-makers faced with the impossibility of reconstituting power relations via government policy. Moynihan says that "unless we can change the character of the Negro family all our efforts will come to naught." But to change the character of the Negro family via government policy is impossible not only because of psychological reality but because of political reality...
...Moynihan's basically liberal orientation -- one, that is, which looks to the Federal government for the implementation of social change -- leads him to feel that unless the Federal government can do somehing, all is lost. That is simply not true. The government can pass--and what is more important, enforce -- laws that prevent that harrassment of people exercising their right to assemble and form organizations for their own advancement. These organizations can then, by putting pressure on public and private agencies, facilitate change. That is the limit, not of the moral obligation, but of the political capacity of the government...