Customer Reviews

Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America

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Theresa Funiciello has experienced the welfare system from virtually every possible angle and has a perspective that no other "expert" can possibly match. Whether you consider yourself left-wing or right-wing politically, you need to read this book before expressing an opinion on welfare issues.

Funiciello has spent time on both sides of the welfare system and within which found an undeniable constant...the desparate need for change. In her informative masterpiece, she creates three short books. A personal account as a welfare receipient, the reality of non-profit organizations, and a look at possibilities in welfare reform. Each section is written with remarkable insight and is teeming with pertinent information. The most inspiring trait to this piece is that Funiciello, even at the darkest of moments, remains a glimmer of hope for the men, women and children struggling to survive in the most powerful country in the world.

Shortly...I enjoyed this book enormously. Ms. Funiciello is a concise and clear writer. She writes about welfare from the recipient's point of view, revealing the absurdities and cruelties without getting sesationalist. A very good read.

This book offers a rare first hand glimpse into the welfare experience, and in doing so exposes many hypocrisies and problems within it. MUCH has been written about welfare, but rarely has anything been written regarding how welfare recipients see themselves and the system. Therefore, this book is a must for anyone who thinks they know everything about how the welfare system operates, or how it should be run.

The book starts off with Funiciello's experiences as a welfare recipient, including her decision to go on welfare, and her attempts to find a job which should have been able to break her out of it. She then talks about her experiences with a welfare rights organization in New York. She tells stories of women who were trying to navigate their way through the welfare bureaucracy with varying amounts of success. She then goes on to give her opinions about what is wrong, and why we have yet to come up with a satisfying solution.

This book was a breath of fresh air for me, and forced me to reconsider much of what I thought about welfare, it's role in society, and the treatment of its recipients.

While I agree that the author raises valid points about dealing with the welfare bureaucracy and the need for streamlining the process to make it more responsive to the needs of applicants, I found her shrill sense of entitlement to be very off-putting. If at any point in the book she expressed appreciation, gratitude, or even minor thanks for what is presently being done -- without which many families would have absolutely nothing at all -- I missed it. Because the available help and resources do not meet her seemingly quite high standards does not mean that they are not worthy of appreciation. Her points about the need for change are well taken, but she says little about personal initiative, and a great deal about nothing being good enough. I have read a good deal on this topic and I am very sympathetic to the plight of people trapped in the welfare system, but I must admit that this writer's "gimmie and make it good, and then add more on top of that" attitude was a turn-off. Try "The Myth Of The Welfare Queen" for a read that will make you want to volunteer to get involved and help these people immediately.

I read this book in the early 90s when I was working for an organization that served food to people with late-stage HIV disease. As I write today to an old friend about the path my life has taken, this book (and Sandra Lipsitz Bem's Lenses of Gender) comes to mind as being absolutely critical to a shift in my political perspective and life choices. Specifically, I moved from social service to social advocacy work because this book made clear the role of welfare institutions in the maintenance of social, political and economic inequality. Frankly, reading the book while working in such a context made me absolutely sick to my stomach (in the way that awakening to your sucker-hood usually does). I recommend the title enthusiastically. (And note that so much still needs to be done.)

Theresa Funiciello used her own (and her friends) experiences on welfare to show readers what being on welfare is really like. No cash cows existed for these women, they were at the bottom rungs of an 'affluent' society.

She argues that big corporations receive their own welfare in the form of tax subsidies. However because they are rich in a capitalist society championing the accumulation of wealth as success, we are not supposed to view this arrangement as being 'lazy' or 'lacking a work ethic'. Attacking low-income women who cannot write a multimillion dollar check is considered politically safer.

Funiciello is also wary of liberals who claim to support welfare mothers, but are too busy talking about themselves to hear the women themselves(pp. 212-255). She takes the Catholic Church to task for claiming to organize against poverty, while it is simultaneously one of the country's largest land holders (p. 226-227) and now appears more interested in self-preservation than alleviating human suffering. She also dislikes non-profits which don't eliminate poverty, but somehow are eager to have that one additional charity ball where they can don diamonds and eat caviar.

Funiciello believes that it is the American system itself which puts American women and children in poverty. She is savvy enough to recognize that some so-called 'do-gooders' whose own income depends on working in anti-poverty programs are not eager for a real socioeconomic revolution to occur. Then these 'colleagues' would have to see Funiciello and her sisters as activist equals instead of victims or cases. Even some social workers who started out with good intentions became burnt out from their own time spent trying to decipher the mysteries of American social services.

Contrasting, Funiciello's social justice calls for a universal guaranteed income which would prevent people from becoming poor. Funiciello says the success of this program would ultimately rest on initial and subsequent program appropriations, but provides European evidence to document these programs do work and people do not stop working with a guaranteed adequate income (pp. 300-302).

Instead, it can actually open up paid job hours for more people in a society (pp. 304-305) and eliminate the corrupted social service professionals from the field by virtue of a greatly reduced clientele base.

Funiciello also provides a concise synopsis of inner-city and older suburban neighborhood deterioration. Neighborhoods do not simply deteriorate on their own, the best and brightest in a community move away from an area which they sense is becoming neglected and those who cannot move away are left to attempt muddling through as best they can. The closure of stores and banks inadvertently prompts some of those remaining people to legitimize the underground economy as being their only means for survival.

Funiciello writes on a very timely topic with focused indignation. Her personal convictions are based upon experience, but she recognizes the dangers of drowning arguments in emotion. Because this book lacks an index, the prospective reader must commit to reading the entirety of this title and will find it very difficult to 'jump' around in the text.