I’d like to think that I’ve been pretty consistent in my claims that the poor and disadvantaged are under attack.  I’d argue the case of the Black poor, in particular, where others might isolate class instead of race, as the determinate factor.  Herein, I will not only offer the empirical evidence of my claims, but expound upon the rhyme and reasons leading to eradication: the endgame.

With the roaring waters calmed after averting a government shutdown, House Republicans are celebrating recent budget cuts to discretionary spending.  Of course, those House Republicans, pushed by their Tea Party faction, took aim at the monstrous federal deficit.  The Democrats, on the other hand, proposed a spending freeze.  Neither option would have added to the federal deficit. What’s unfortunate is that the final solution hasn’t chipped anything significant off the block of granite, which is the federal deficit.

What is even more unfortunate is that the current compromise that President Obama has reached with House Republicans under the plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), crushes the fingers of the poor who are barely hanging onto the ledge of the economy—the very constituency that believed in Obama’s message of hope and change.

In this budget compromise, social safety net programs were not spared. WIC, a program that uses federal money to subsidize the food and nutrition needs of children from low-income families, is cut by more than $500 million. The GOP proposal of $61 billion in cuts—on top of the $40 billion in cuts offered by Obama—focused only on non-security discretionary spending (just 12% of the budget) and called for across-the-board cuts that will curtail several programs for the poor and adversely affect most government agencies and services offered to the public.  Almost $1 billion is cut from a community development fund run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Cuts of Pell grants for low-income students who need assistance to get through college, served as meat for the butcher.  But, what was spared were tax cuts for the rich.

While preservation of the Bush-era tax cuts remains, cuts to nutrition programs mean the malnourishment of a certain class of people—children.  For the thousands of children, this budget dims their prospects of becoming serious US competitors—in and for this country. Not to feed them is to eliminate their potential for competition. One’s inability to fairly compete rings a death knell in this society.

Cuts to housing lead to stunted, interrupted or non-existent environmental growth, placing those without [housing] at yet another extreme disadvantage.  No one thrives when there’s no safe, stable and secure place to call home.  Alas, It’s much easier to compete against an insecure, unstable and forlorn constituency.

Cuts to education funding for the most vulnerable have always been a reliable determinant for eradicating one’s competition.  When it comes to skill, experience employability and employment, education is the key component for success.  House Republicans have placed one more nail in the coffin of educational opportunities with this budget compromise.  This act to cut education funding was surely executed upon the backs of the poor.

What’s sad is that President Obama played a major role in shoring up the Conservative Right‘s agenda to “take their [our] country back.”  By compromising on a budget that did not spread the pain, poor and disadvantaged sectors of this society will continue to suffer immensely.  Though one may possess hope for the future, the interim is filled with scratching from two rungs lower on the ladder (than one may have been 10 years ago).  For this budget agenda is “taking the country back”…back to the past.  As the budget process moves into the policy modifications phase, it hearkens to the days of the Nixon administration.  Let us recall the exasperation with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. As part of the Great Society, Johnson's belief in expanding the government's role in social welfare programs from education to health care was a continuation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, which ran from 1933 to 1935. The popularity of a war on poverty waned after the 1960s, in particular, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. President Nixon’s policies opened the door for deregulation, growing criticism of the welfare state, and an ideological shift that began to whittle down federal aid to impoverished residents in the 1980s and 1990s.  In 1996, that shift culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996—the Act that President Bill Clinton proclaimed would "end welfare as we know it."

One of the central fiscal promises Obama made as a Presidential candidate was to reverse most of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, while protecting cuts for the poor and middle-class.  Responsible deficit cutting measures must correspond with revenue generating policies.  The battle rests on a single principle: either the poor live or they die.  The budget cuts, as defined by the Ryan plan, eradicate the poor and disadvantaged in America…and Republican ideologues know it.

So what we have here is a repeat of history, though the majority of Americans who should remember invoke selective amnesia.  Cutting aid to the poorest of our citizenry means that those funds shall be channeled elsewhere.  And, they won’t be channeled to cut the deficit. It appears that if tax cuts for the wealthy put more money in the pockets of those already well-off, and poor and working-class Americans get poorer, then opportunities for the “have-nots”  (the latter group) to compete become even slimmer than an already pittance of a fair shake. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re witnessing an endgame—to eradicate the competition.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Perry Redd, is the former Executive Director of the workers rights advocacy, Sincere Seven, and author of the on-line commentary, “The Other Side of the Tracks.” He is the host of the internet-based talk radio show, Socially Speaking in Washington, DC. Click here to contact Mr. Redd.