Cornbread and Roses
by BOB MOSER

[from the November 28, 2005 issue]

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

On a soft gray Monday in mid-October, the Interfaith Council shelter in downtown Chapel Hill has a brand-new volunteer, brimming with enthusiasm that's almost annoying at 10:15 in the morning. "How're you all doing back there?" John Edwards calls out to the kitchen crew as he beams into the dining room, trailed by a clutch of staffers, University of North Carolina antipoverty activists and TV cameras. While he chats up the shelter volunteers and residents, alternately squinting his perma-tanned face with concern and flashing the yard-wide smile that almost won Iowa, two white-haired women on the kitchen crew, both named Jane, are nudged toward him for a souvenir shot. "I want this picture for me," Edwards says with his best Sunday school charm, hugging the women under his arms. After a bit more chatting and hugging, there's a momentary lull. Hands on hips, with mock impatience, Edwards tilts toward the kitchen and hollers out, "So am I supposed to do something or what?"

"Well, we've got some unloading," offers Paul Eberhardt, the day shelter coordinator. Quick as a flash, last year's Democratic nominee for Vice President is back in the pantry, tearing cans of generic lima beans and tomatoes out of their plastic-wrapped cardboard while Eberhardt feeds him an earful of insights from the front lines of poverty-fighting. "Lately we're getting hospital workers, construction workers, here at lunchtime," Eberhardt says, talking fast. "It's low employment now, not just unemployment." Edwards purses his lips, furrows his brow, gives every sign of listening, even as he briskly moves on to filling up water pitchers, smiling on cue for the local affiliates until it's time to clap his hands and cry out to his staff, "What's next?"

Around this time last year, a lot of people were asking that very same question about Edwards. After his cometlike ascent from first-term senator to the national Democratic ticket, Edwards crashed to earth when he failed to persuade running mate John Kerry to contest George W. Bush's questionable victory in Ohio. Suddenly, Edwards's giddy three-year campaign to lift himself into the political stratosphere--and knit together the "two Americas" he dearly loved to preach about--was over. His wife, Elizabeth, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. His Senate seat, which Edwards had abandoned to focus on the national race, would return to Republican hands in January, leaving him without a built-in mechanism for staying in the national spotlight. For the first time in his adult life, this blue-skies optimist was staring straight into a blank horizon. Friends and admirers offered advice and speculated: Would he return to his law practice? Start a foreign-policy think tank to shore up his presidential résumé? Run for governor? Cash in on his connections with some Dan Quayle-style consultancies?

In February Edwards surprised them all, announcing a campaign to "eradicate poverty in America." With a $40,000 annual salary paid by private funds, Edwards became the first director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC, Chapel Hill's law school, largely a think tank designed to bring antipoverty scholars, activists, journalists and politicians together to cook up innovative ways to tackle economic and racial inequities.Edwards is also putting some of his ideas into action, including the College for Everyone program he promised in 2004. In low-income Greene County Edwards this summer announced a pilot program to pay for the first year of college for local high school graduates willing to work at least ten hours a week.

Since launching the center, Edwards has returned to perpetual motion, taking his antipoverty crusade to more than thirty states. Between visits to shelters and job-training centers and delivering his new stump speech, full of ringing challenges to view poverty as "the great moral cause of our time," Edwards has raised more than $4 million for Democratic legislative candidates in mostly red states, trying, as he says, "to build the party back from the ground up." He's teaming with unlikely partners on the left--including local AFL-CIO, ACORN and NAACP chapters--in campaigns to raise the minimum wage in Ohio, Arizona and Michigan. He's praising Big Labor's historic role in "lifting millions of Americans out of poverty." And he's floating serious--and surprisingly liberal--proposals to put his high-flown rhetoric into action. He's touting a controversial "cultural integration" plan to give low-income families housing vouchers to move into better neighborhoods. He's calling for expansions to Bill Clinton's earned-income tax credits, for concerted crackdowns on predatory lenders, and for "work bonds" to help low-income workers build savings and assets. He wants not only to repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent but also to raise capital-gains taxes for those on the top rungs. After Hurricane Katrina he spoke pointedly about how "the face of poverty in America is the face of color" and promoted an ambitious Gulf Coast recovery program modeled on FDR's Works Progress Administration--a touchstone for the kind of big-government liberalism that the old Edwards (like most Democratic leaders today) wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole.

All of which raises a question: Who is this guy--and what has he done with the centrist New Democrat who once had Karl Rove quaking in his boots? While he clearly hasn't lost his all-too-palpable lust for the White House, Edwards has largely left behind the Clintonian emphasis on "personal responsibility" and "fiscal restraint" that often struck a hollow note in his campaign speeches--particularly in contrast to his heartfelt cry of "two Americas." The metamorphosis began during the last campaign, when Edwards gradually found his voice as an economic populist. Less than a decade into his political career, he remains a work in progress.

"We might be seeing the kind of transformation Bobby Kennedy underwent," says Pete MacDowell, a veteran grassroots organizer and staunch Edwards critic ("a political Ken doll with a populist streak" is how MacDowell describes him) who runs the NC Progressive Democrats PAC. "After he initially supported Vietnam and went slow on civil rights, Kennedy developed a moral core and turned into the kind of Democrat we haven't seen since. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe that's what we're now seeing with Edwards. Maybe this is his core."

However implausible the RFK comparison might sound, it's hard to deny it on this mid-October Monday in Chapel Hill, when Edwards--fresh from the shelter--shimmers onto the stage of UNC's Great Hall at lunchtime, soaking up Beatles-esque roars of adulation from an overflow crowd of students. It's the first stop on a ten-campus national tour, Opportunity Rocks, where Edwards will urge thousands of students to fight poverty. Even with an unsexy message, the messenger will draw crowds that surprise even his organizers--1,500 at the University of California, Berkeley, more than 2,000 at the University of Michigan.

Edwards doesn't disappoint his young fans. Like his hero, Kennedy, he has a knack for talking about life-and-death struggles, laying bare the challenges of blue-collar folks struggling to make ends meet but leaving his audience more challenged and inspired than depressed. Reminding students of their forebears' campaigns against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, Edwards throws down the gauntlet: "These folks need a champion--and not just me. They need you. You can make ending poverty in America the cause of your generation. It's the right thing to do. This is not about charity--it's about justice!"

"I never thought I'd see this many kids coming to listen to a speech about poverty," UNC senior Josh Glasser gushed in the glowing wake left by Edwards as he jetted off to his next gig. Last year Glasser co-founded SPROUT, a campus group helping low-income locals apply for earned-income tax credits. Edwards's speech at UNC, where Glasser and co-founder James Jolley handed out SPROUT fliers, brought sixty-five new students to the group's listserv in just the first day. "We met with the senator and his staff and they really listened, really wanted to help," Glasser says. "It wasn't some top-down thing--they wanted to hear our ideas. I know some people are cynical about him using this to position himself for President. But come on: We all know poverty's not exactly a get-'em-to-the-polls kind of issue. He's convinced me, at least, that he means it." For Edwards, that's one down--and just a few dozen million more skeptics to go.

Johnny Reid Edwards shot onto the national political stage in 2001, at a moment when Democrats were still gagging on the bitter dregs of Al Gore's defeat--and dreaming fond dreams of the next Bill Clinton. And here, by God, he seemed to be: a jovial moderate, even handsomer than Clinton, saying smart, empathetic things about "regular people" in a soft Dixie drawl. Like Clinton, Edwards had risen to glory from practically nothing, the kind of rags-to-riches legend that has made voters swoon since the days of Andy Jackson. Best of all, he came without Clinton's personal baggage. Even the notorious smear campaigners at the North Carolina Republican Party could dredge up nothing damning on Edwards during his upset of Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth in 1998--nothing beyond the indisputable fact that he had, for twenty years, been successfully suing big corporations on behalf of those "regular people," piling up millions in the process as one of America's top trial attorneys.

In his three years as a senator, Edwards had hardly had time to knock anybody's socks off. He'd impressed hard-bitten Washingtonians when he deposed key witnesses in Clinton's impeachment trial and delivered a closing defense argument--and again when he led a winning fight, joining Senators McCain and Kennedy, for the Patients' Bill of Rights. But there were whispers of shallowness, callowness, naked opportunism. And almost as soon as he'd kindled the hopes of forlorn Democrats, more serious doubts began to surface.

Democrats had seen both Clinton and Jimmy Carter campaign as power-to-the-people populists and then govern more like Nixon than Roosevelt. Edwards's affiliation with the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in the mid-1980s to demolish the party's old "liberal fundamentalism," reinforced the suspicion that he was just another big talker from Dixie with a conservative core. It didn't help when Clinton, the old snake-oil master himself, admiringly commented that Edwards could "charm an owl out of a tree." Worse, throughout 2002 and 2003 Edwards gave policy speeches--crafted in part by DLC policy guru Bruce Reed--that made him sound exactly like what cynics had taken to calling him: Clinton Lite. "The American people don't want us to tear down America's corporations," he declared in a talk called "Putting Responsibility First." In one healthcare speech Edwards repeated the word "responsibility" twenty-eight times. Outlining his tax-policy proposals Edwards came off like a Clinton puppet, mouthing the mantra "opportunity, responsibility, hard work."

Out of the other side of his mouth, however, Edwards talked with candor and gut-level understanding about economic, racial and class inequities. "How long had it been since you heard a Democrat utter the word poverty?'' says Chris Kromm, executive director of the progressive Institute for Southern Studies. "And who would have thought they'd hear a Democrat from the South making workers' rights a central campaign theme?" Edwards's refusal to speak ill of his Democratic opponents also struck a fresh tone. Progressives remained skeptical, but they couldn't completely tune Edwards out--except for one not-so-little thing.

"I can give you the exact date," says Kromm. "September 19, 2002." In that day's Washington Post Edwards wrote an op-ed headlined "Congress Must Be Clear," staking himself out as the Democrat most gung-ho to sic the troops on Saddam Hussein. Swallowing the WMD story hook, line and sinker, Edwards commanded his fellow senators to "send a clear message to Iraq and the world: America is united in its determination to eliminate forever the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Though he made obligatory noises about "an effort to rally the international community" and "real steps to win the peace" before invading, Edwards threw himself fully behind the Congressional resolution to authorize Bush's go-it-alone invasion of Iraq.

"Either he was a hawk, or he didn't know what he was talking about, or he was guilty of the worst kind of political pandering," Kromm says. "I thought, 'You're trying to appeal to progressives, but you've already lost them.' I'm not sure he ever recovered from that."

In an interview after the UNC speech, Edwards finally utters the words he'd assiduously avoided during the last campaign: "I voted for the resolution," he says. "It was a mistake." So far, so good. But he goes on, "The hard question is, What do you do now? Looking back, it's easy to say that it was wrong and based on false information. Anybody who doesn't admit that isn't honest, and that's the truth." So what now? "I myself feel conflicted about it," Edwards replies. "But we have to find ways--and I don't mean just yanking all the troops tomorrow--but we have to find ways to start bringing our troops home. Our presence there is clearly contributing to the problem." So does he agree with Senator Russ Feingold that Washington should set a withdrawal deadline? "No. Even if we're going to say that internally, that we're gonna have our troops out by X date, there's no reason to announce that to the world. I think that's probably a mistake." He doesn't agree, either, with Senator Clinton's call for more US troops to finish the job? "No sir!" Edwards says, sitting straight up in his chair. "Did she really say that?"

Edwards steadfastly declines to revisit the last campaign. "If you don't mind," he says, "I'd rather talk about the future." But as he touts his antipoverty crusade and dissects the morass Democrats find themselves mired in, it is clear that Edwards has done some hard thinking about the lessons of 2004--and about the political opportunity that presented itself in the terrible wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Lesson One: Stop thinking small. "I think in our effort to be elected, we've become minimalists, tinkering around the edges--Our tax cut is better than yours, or, We'll give you smaller class sizes," he says. "That's not what the country wants. We've got to give the American people something big and important to be unified by. Republicans use big things to divide America. I think we can use big things to unite America."

Chief among those "big things," clearly, is an all-out effort to conquer poverty. "Both sides bear responsibility for what's happened," he says. "During the Great Depression with Franklin Roosevelt, during the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson's great War on Poverty and Bobby Kennedy going through Appalachia--we were the party that led the fight against poverty in this country. We've got to show some backbone and stand up for the folks who are struggling. We've done it in the past, but it's been a while."

Which brings us to Lesson Two: Democrats can't afford to keep ceding the "values vote." Here again, Edwards sees his antipoverty crusade as a step in the right direction. "In a country of our wealth, to have 37 million people living in poverty? It's a huge moral issue," he says. "There's a hunger in this country for a sense of national community, that we're not in this thing by ourselves. There's been a long period of selfish thinking. I think there's a great opportunity for us to be about a big, moral cause that's bigger than people's own self-interest."

But will that message fly among the evangelical voters who've twice put George W. Bush over the top? "Shoot," says Edwards. "I could go right now to just about any church in Alabama or Georgia and speak about poverty, and I know people will respond." Ferrel Guillory, a longtime political reporter who now runs the UNC Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life, says that might be--in typical Edwards fashion--a bit too optimistic. "Edwards is not going to appeal to the religious right," Guillory says. "But he could make a strong appeal to 'values voters' who are not hard-core conservatives."

Steve Jarding, the rural strategist who set fundraising records running Edwards's PAC in 2002 before leaving the campaign in frustration, thinks his moral spin on the "two Americas" message has real potential in Middle America. "Let's face it: There are millions of families sitting down at the table tonight, parents working two or three jobs and struggling to survive. Are they sitting there saying, Thank God two gay people aren't getting married? or, I'm so glad the girl down the street can't get an abortion? That's not what's tearing their families apart. If Edwards will stand up and tell them that, he could change the turf."

Lesson Three is also about changing the turf: Democrats, who've now lost every state in the nation's largest region in two straight elections, have to take their message south. "Look," Edwards says, "the fact is, if you lose the whole South, you've got almost no margin of error in the rest of the country. But it's more than that. We have to make it clear we've got a vision for the whole country, not just blue states."

Edwards won't criticize his 2004 running mate, Kerry, who declared even before the Democratic primaries that he believed a Democrat could win without going south--and then tried to make good on that belief, pulling Democratic national money, along with the Southerner he tapped for Vice President, out of every Southern state but Florida. Bush ended up winning every Southern state--except Edwards's North Carolina--by a larger margin than in 2000. "If you were in a state like Alabama last year," Edwards acknowledges, "you didn't hardly know we were running."

Conventional wisdom says that an antipoverty, pro-labor campaign would be approximately as popular in the South as William Tecumseh Sherman (or Senator Kerry). But the new-model John Edwards is all about flouting conventional Democratic thinking. And Guillory, for one, believes economic populism can work in Dixie as textile mills and furniture factories continue to close down. "There's a heightened awareness of economic peril and dislocation in the South, resulting from shifts in the job market," he says. "There's a greater awareness that the affluence and growth has not been evenly distributed, that it's been a kind of creative destruction--creating and destroying at the same time."

But Edwards has to broaden his focus beyond poverty to make his populist message a winner at the polls. "It's not just about the poor," says Pete MacDowell. "Where is he on healthcare, jobs policy, urban policy, immigration, creating jobs with alternative energy sources--all these issues where the Democrats have just been saying and doing zero?"

Edwards says his New America Initiative will address the middle-class squeeze as well as poverty. But he thinks the key to Southern votes involves something that transcends policy positions. "These are the kinds of people that respond to strength and leadership," he says. "They want leaders who have the backbone to stand up for something. We're not Republicans. When we try to be some lighter version of what we are, which is what happens over and over, it's devastating to Democrats. Why would they choose us?"

For Democrats looking to 2008, of course, the question is somewhat different: Why choose Edwards? For all the cogency of his diagnosis of what ails the Democrats, and all the undeniable passion of his antipoverty campaign, even Edwards's admirers wonder whether he's chosen the right pilot program for "thinking big again." And even as he drowns those "insincerity" and "shallowness" whispers in a sea of noble intentions and bright proposals, Edwards still manages to revive the old, stubborn doubts.

Just before the Opportunity Rocks tour took flight, BusinessWeek Online broke the news that Edwards, who had been vowing to "pour everything I've got into this cause," had been hired as a "global consultant" for Fortress Investment Group, a global asset-management firm. So while he set out to inspire college students, Edwards found himself answering a fresh batch of hard questions. "This is another thing that I'm doing that'll take a relatively small amount of time," he protested after the UNC speech. "It's an opportunity for me to explore sort of what's happening with the global economy." Asked another hard question--Is it realistic to talk about "eradicating" poverty?--Edwards resorts to pie-in-the-sky. "Of course it's realistic," he says, flashing an incredulous look. "It's completely realistic. I don't see the eradication of poverty here in this country as this huge, mammoth thing."

Edwards is far more persuasive when asked whether his antipoverty campaign is just a political tool. "Look, to be honest, it's all very personal for me. I've seen everything, been everything, from poor to lower middle class, then regular middle class and then just skyrocketing, you know, when I was a lawyer. What happened to me is that I started thinking as I got older about this. I saw some of the people I'd grown up with going the other way, getting in trouble, having a really terrible time getting by. These were my friends when I was growing up and here I was, doing great. It was no great policy revelation, just a sense that something was wrong, that, Why am I the one who's gotten the good luck and they didn't?"

While Edwards insists that his latest campaign "ought to be nonpartisan," its success in keeping him in the national limelight will determine whether he can make a viable charge at Hillary Clinton in 2008. In one recent poll Clinton led the likely pack of Democratic contenders with 42 percent; Edwards was a distant second at 14. "I wouldn't put much stock in that, though," says Ferrel Guillory. "For all you read about Hillary Clinton, she's not scaring away contenders. She's going to lead in the polls right up till the primaries start, because she's the celebrity. But the people making her out to be inevitable are Republicans. They'd love nothing better, especially in the South."

Edwards has a leg up in a survey that may mean more. According to a Pew Center poll released in late October, his favorability rating among Democrats not only bests Hillary's, 68 to 59 percent, but even that of the original Clinton, Bill, who stands at 64. And while John Kerry's unfavorable rating is a sad 48 percent among the Democrats who just last year nominated him for President, Edwards's "unfavorable" is easily the lowest, at 32--and the survey showed he's the best liked, and least loathed, among Republicans and independents, too.

Up against Clinton II's New Democratic moderation, Edwards might end up grappling with a once-unthinkable perception of him as--ye gods!--an old-style liberal, more worried about the plight of poor black folk than struggling white folk. "His message has to make sense to middle-class voters," says Guillory. "He has to have the 'moral values' component, but he also has to be hardheaded. To be effective in terms of politics and poverty, you have to come at it counterintuitively. Clinton did that."

The time could be ripe for an economic populism that goes beyond Clinton's piecemeal approach. "Circumstances beyond John's control may have elevated his central issue of poverty to where it can catapult him politically," says Steve Jarding. "Those images from New Orleans, not unlike when the planes hit the towers in New York--they'll be seared into people's minds for a while. America was embarrassed by it. We've been told for so long that the government is the enemy. Now people see that we need it; it's just not working."

Edwards's great challenge, finally, may be convincing the skeptical millions that he's the one who can make things work. "He's raised poverty to a presidential-level conversation for the first time in forty years," says Guillory. "You've got to give him credit for that. And given the shallowness of his experience in politics, the way he vaulted right over the lower rungs of the ladder--it's an amazing story. But now that he's there, he's got to do more than make us laugh and make us cry. He's got to paint a clearer picture of where he's going to take the country."
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051128&s=moser

It's what I said in a post on Barack Obama that hilights what is
highlighted above

In ten to twenty years many kids will grow up and wannabe the next
Barack Obama

Many people want to be the next Bobby Kennedy. But Bobby died in 1968. There is NObody that can replace him.

People who are special are one and only's ...not someone like them

It's like pizza...In 49 states one can get New York Style pizza

However, there is only one New York

Not that this time I wouldn't support him if he were the candidate, but
Barack Obama is the special one that Bobby Kennedy was

I want to clarify- I am not starting trouble here.(old trouble no longer exists in 08).

Just think it would be better if he doesn't compare himself to Bobby.
(or have newspaper people or talking heads do that.)Especially as Teddy is backing John Kerry already.

If it came to it, a John Edwards/Barack Obama ticket would be great,
or Barack Obama /John Edwards

I know you are not starting trouble. And by the way, Edwards didn't compare himself to Bobby Kennedy. A critic of Edwards used those words.

I thought this was a very interesting piece. I especially noted what critics were now saying. When people who were critical of someone start saying good things I take notice.

I don't know if you just skimmed the piece (I know that it is very long) or had the chance to read it all the way through. If you didn't get a chance to read it all the way through I would encourage you to do so at some point in the future. I think you will enjoy the fact that he is saying some of the things that you said. I hightlighted some of what I felt were interesting passages but there were many more that were also interesting that I didn't highlight.

This piece says both good things and bad things about Edwards. I thought it was a pretty balanced piece. And of course, as a liberal I was real pleased that some of the critics are noticing that he really has a lot of liberal positions. He is an interesting fellow.

because you requested, I went an read every single word.
It's interesting...

You know, it don't bother me that he is evolving. There are lots of things I don't like about the Al Gore of 20 years ago, that he is different now.Because he was really conservative when you think about it.

Wish he would take a bigger anti-war stance, with a date of withdrawal, using the money saved from the war effort to go toward the people who need it most

I can see more sense in 08 for Edwards than say Warner, Bayh, Feingold or another "unknown" nationwide, but you gotta admit, if Obama decides to go for it,
and after Katrina, Obama and Edwards, I think Obama comes across more authentic.

I really hadn't thought Obama was thinking of 08 for President, however, he has shown up in places where candidates show up, even coming to New Jersey to
campaign here. A non-candidate or one not testing the water wouldn't do it.


Just in general, nrns, it must be very weird being any of the 4 people(Gore/Lieberman/Kerry/Edwards.)All four won the election, and had I am sure plans in their head for their whole terms.Then to be told they didn't...
And Gore and Edwards Gore fought it til the end, Edwards wanted to fight it and far as he knew, it was going to be...what that must do to their minds, I can't imagine...

I'm glad that you read it.

Yeah, Gore was more conservative years ago. I am really looking forward to hearing from all of our candidates in 2008. I really hope that we pick a nominee that really can help us make dramatic gains in the South & West. We can not continue to just ignore parts of the country. Whether that candidate will be a southernor or a northernor I don't know but we need someone that can bridge the gap.

I like Obama too. I also like Clark. But of course, my favorite is Edwards. An Edwards/Obama ticket or an Edwards/Clark ticket would make me very happy. I don't think it will happen but I'd be very happy.

We don't get too many articles these days on poverty but I am being optimistic that it will change which is why I started this thread.



Monkey See, Monkey Do
By David K. Shipler

There is no more telling indictment of reporters and editors than the surprise felt by most Americans in seeing the raw poverty among New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina. In an open society, nobody who had been watching television or reading newspapers should have been surprised by what Katrina “revealed,” to use the word so widely uttered in the aftermath. The fissures of race and class should be “revealed” every day by America’s free press. Why aren’t they?

We used to cover poverty. Maybe my lenses are fogged with nostalgia, but I remember my years in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the metropolitan staff of The New York Times as an era of acute attention to the problems of the city’s poor. The civil rights movement and the urban riots had raised the country’s consciousness. Many beats — mine was housing — carried a hard-working staff into the bleakest neighborhoods where vocal community organizations and welfare-rights activists pressed their arguments.

As Great Society funds flowed from Washington, local government could hardly avoid the issues of poverty — and neither could we, because then as now, news organizations covered mostly government. From the mayor’s office to the city council, the planning commission, and other agencies, poverty and race were woven into the public agenda. Stories were easy to get.

It is an axiom of democracy that government should not escape scrutiny, and it’s a principle of journalism that what government does is news. Policies and programs generate stories about the problems designated for resolution, the gaps between promises and performance, the demands from below on those in power, the underlying politics and economics.

By contrast, what government fails to do is usually not defined as news. But it should be, for neglect is a form of policy, too. When government ignores a problem, the problem festers and usually fades into the shadows of coverage until a Hurricane Katrina ravages New Orleans or a riot tears through South-Central Los Angeles. If the White House pursues an issue, either at home or abroad, the bright searchlight of attention focuses for a while, and once the beam swings away, the subject disappears. When was the last time you saw a story about Nicaragua? Or Kosovo? Eventually, when American troops leave Iraq, most American correspondents will leave with them, just as most American reporters left the suffering ghettos of America’s inner cities as the War on Poverty subsided during the 1970s into a stalemate of deprivation.

News professionals bridle at the notion that government sets their priorities, but they’ve allowed that to happen indirectly. In newspapers and broadcasting, the only sustained coverage of poverty in the decade before Katrina, most notably by the Times reporter Jason DeParle, was stimulated by a government move: federal welfare reform in 1996. Otherwise, the press still finds it hard to cover poverty when the story is not about change or action but about enduring hardship and government inaction. The main exceptions have been the recent series on class and poverty, including those by the Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, North Carolina Public Radio, and the Washington, D.C., public radio station WAMU.

You might imagine that reporters and editors who spend months on a series would grow attuned to issues that would then seep into daily coverage. I haven’t done a content analysis, but I don’t think it happens. The big projects seem isolated from the flow of other reporting. In years of exploring race and poverty throughout the country, I’ve rarely felt a sensation of familiarity, as if I’ve read this somewhere or heard that before. The landscape I’ve found is mostly terra incognita to the major news organizations on which I rely.

That explains the nation’s shock after the hurricane.

The deep suspicions of authority among impoverished African Americans — the distrust of police, politicians, and even rescue workers — would not have puzzled anyone who has worked on racial issues, and it should not have amazed a literate public educated by solid reporting on racial tensions and injustices. Surely it was no revelation to those who work in nonprofit antipoverty agencies that many of the poor lived in neighborhoods most vulnerable to flooding but could not evacuate because they had no car, no place to go, no credit card for a motel, or — even if they owned vehicles — too little money for a tank of gas.

Unfortunately, people who staff antipoverty programs hardly ever get interviewed, although they’re primary sources of nonideological information about the grassroots problems of the poor. Many of these workers, once poor themselves, transcend the liberal-conservative political dispute about who’s at fault and see clearly the intersecting factors of personal failure and societal failure that create the ecology of poverty.

If reporters spent time at job-training centers, malnutrition clinics, legal-aid offices, housing agencies, and the like, they would get more powerful stories in a week than they could write in a month — not about the programs themselves, not the puff pieces that program directors who compete for funding would prefer, but rather about the problems the programs aim to solve. Good coverage would also connect the dots by demonstrating the influence of one problem on another and the links among problems and policies.

Such sophisticated, nuanced, and complex portrayals of poverty would enrich understanding beyond the conventional left-right debate that dominates political coverage whenever a bill is introduced or a grand plan is proposed. Much reporting on welfare reform was driven by the assumption that moving from welfare to work meant success; too little light was shed on the poverty wages that were being paid, which trapped former welfare recipients in the same zone of low living standards where they had resided before. Reporting on poverty, then, means diagnosing it, which will help this society be self-correcting. You can’t solve a problem unless it’s defined.

Without covering the subject well, news organizations risk becoming irrelevant to professionals who need information and now have the Internet. When President Bush’s current budget was proposed, I searched my favorite newspapers in vain for details on cuts in poverty programs. I finally obtained them from a nonprofit agency in Hartford, Connecticut, which relied on an Internet subculture of analysts and advocates to do what the press didn’t do.

Would thorough coverage make a difference? After the public editor of The New York Times, Byron Calame, examined a decade of the paper’s reporting on New Orleans and found nothing that “focused on the city’s poor and the racial dimension of poverty,” a former resident, Jose Heinert, offered a cynical reaction in a letter to the editor.

“Poverty there was almost totally ignored by those in the white community,” he wrote. “It was like two parallel worlds, not unlike what I have seen in undeveloped countries. The Times can write articles about it every day. But nothing will change, I’m sorry to say.”

Perhaps he’s right, and the open secret of poverty will not be acknowledged by the more affluent and powerful. We are in a new Gilded Age of huge disparities between rich and poor, a startling display of greed. But alongside the greed stands a towering generosity that is mobilized whenever a catastrophe occurs, be it a tsunami in Asia or a hurricane at home. In traveling the country, I have found powerful currents of concern among Americans of privilege, most of whom raise their hands when I ask who would be willing to pay higher taxes to fight poverty.

Katrina, then, has offered an opportunity for the press to rethink its inattention to a national disgrace. No problem gets cured unless it is first turned out into the sunlight.



David K. Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, worked for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988, reporting from New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington. His most recent books are The Working Poor: Invisible in America and A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/6/shipler.asp

In Fresno, Tackling Poverty Moves to the Top of the Agenda
Council Approves Task Force After Study Links Central Valley City With Densest Area of Poor

By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 21, 2005; A03



FRESNO, Calif. -- The old man with the bowed back begging for change from his wheelchair found few customers at the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Fresno.

Anyone could see he needed help. On a cool day, he was stationed outside one of the discount children's clothing stores, wearing torn sheets like a toga, his gray stick legs exposed, flies hovering around his lap. But there were so few passersby to solicit, so few shoppers this day as on any given day on one of the main thoroughfares in Fresno (population 456,000), that the old man would starve if he did not know to head to one of the soup kitchens several blocks from the mall.

At the soup kitchens, the curious emptiness of downtown Fresno is reversed. The lines for meals are packed with old people, young couples, extended families, blacks, whites, Latinos. Fresno, the largest city in California's expansive Central Valley, may have gleaming new office buildings and an award-winning baseball stadium, but it remains a poor city overwhelmed by need. A short hop from City Hall, people live in slum buildings where roaches crawl in tenants' ears, the black mold looks like wallpaper and families split the rent by sleeping in walk-in closets, laundry rooms and bathtubs.

This city at the heart of the richest farmland in the world has been poor for so long, no one can remember it otherwise. Last month, when the Brookings Institution issued a report that said a higher proportion of poor people in Fresno lived in areas of concentrated poverty than in any other major city in the country -- pre-Katrina New Orleans was number two -- no one here was surprised. "My goodness, that's why I ran," said Alan Autry, who became mayor in 2000. "I called it 'A Tale of Two Cities.' "

Nonetheless, the Brookings study has spurred a call to arms here. Using 2000 Census data, it found that 43.5 percent of Fresno's poor live in extremely poor neighborhoods (where more than 40 percent of the residents live below the federal poverty line -- $17,600 a year for a family of four).

While city and private organizations were already working on attracting more jobs and improving living conditions, poverty is now topic number one in and out of City Hall. On Oct. 25, the Fresno City Council unanimously approved the creation of a "poverty task force," its first, to tackle what the Brookings report said are the most pressing problems confronting high concentrations of poverty -- lack of quality education and health care, job training, substandard housing and crime.

"What we are going to do is involve all scales of government -- that's the only way this is going to work," said Cynthia Sterling, the council member who called for the task force and whose district includes the two poorest sections of the city, downtown and south Fresno.

Officials and community leaders say the city has made strides in the past five years. Unemployment is down from 15 percent to 7.3 percent, the lowest in 20 years. The crime rate has dropped, and $45 million is being invested in creating and repairing infrastructure in poor neighborhoods.

But fighting poverty in Fresno (which ranks 16th among the nation's largest cities in terms of its overall poverty rate) may prove more than daunting. Unlike the other cities the Brookings report found with the most concentrated poverty -- New Orleans, Louisville, Miami and Atlanta -- Fresno is still, in many ways, a farm town. The city's dominant industry, agriculture, depends on a cheap, seasonal work force that keeps renewing itself as successive new waves of immigrants arrive.

The city's high dropout rate leaves a workforce ill-prepared for higher-paying jobs that Fresno is trying to attract. Not least, a housing boom in the past few years has exacerbated the city's concentrated poverty. Real estate has skyrocketed, leaving south Fresno as the last refuge for poorer residents forced to move because of rising rents elsewhere.

With all the new housing, "no affordable units were built," said Chris Schneider, the executive director of Central California Legal Services, whose clients are the Central Valley's poorest residents.

A drive through south Fresno found streets with wilted, squat wooden and concrete houses, a handful of prostitutes standing dejectedly on corners, huddles of young men standing outside a weedy lot drinking beer and mothers with children, but few children playing on the streets. North Fresno appeared like a suburb, with gated communities, shopping centers and traffic heavy with late-model SUVs.

The mayor agreed that the lack of affordable housing and decent jobs are major issues confronting the city. But, he said, illegal immigration is perhaps the greatest challenge to Fresno. "We're going to have to secure the border, he said, "reform the illegal immigration system and create a plan that addresses the 4.5 million immigrants in California that doesn't involve amnesty or sending them back."

Autry said that although officials have no idea how many illegal immigrants live in Fresno (the city is about 45 percent Latino, mostly Mexican, with a rising number of Hmong refugees), 20 percent of the people in the county jails are illegal immigrants. About one quarter of emergency room visits are from illegal immigrants and the vast majority of the tenants in the worst housing in the worst neighborhoods are immigrants, presumably including illegal immigrants.

"If we don't have a policy that allows an immigrant to come across with their dignity and their respect as well as their work ethic, we're going to pay an awful price," Autry said. "We already are." He added that Fresno is organizing a summit, to be held next month, where mayors from cities with high populations of undocumented immigrants will devise a plan to tackle the problems they are facing.

But illegal immigration, the mayor acknowledged, cannot be blamed for all of Fresno's woes. As those fleeing the skyrocketing housing prices in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area have converged here in the past three years, land and housing prices have increased by nearly 60 percent, according to the city's housing department, making the dream of homeownership for the working class more distant. Meanwhile, rents have increased by nearly 15 percent.

Developers have swooped in, renovated some of Fresno's deteriorated apartment buildings and then raised the rents, making them unaffordable to low-income residents. The poorer tenants must find cheaper housing, most of it in south Fresno, further concentrating the poverty there. In south Fresno, old wooden buildings are packed with new and longtime immigrants afraid to complain about egregious conditions, including roaches, broken toilets and mold. The cheapest three-bedroom houses rent for $500 a month, but they are nearly uninhabitable.

"The people are afraid to speak up," said Christina Miranda, a tenant organizer who spends her days trying to help poor residents learn and exercise their rights. "Some of the farm workers are Mixtec, from Oaxaca -- they don't even speak Spanish. They speak a dialect. The Cambodians are very closed off as well. The situation is perfect for a slumlord."

Rising rents are sending full-time workers to soup kitchens. Poverello House estimates that 70 percent of the average of 1,200 meals it serves each day are to people with minimum-wage jobs who cannot get by without help.

The Fresno Rescue Mission, which operates the largest homeless shelter in the region, providing 300 beds a night, has found the lines longer at its soup kitchen and the demand for shelter greater than ever. About one quarter of the people who now come to the mission for meals work full time but cannot pay all their bills. "Apartments that were $400 two years ago are now $800 to $900 a month," said the Rev. Larry Arce, director of the mission.

Sterling, the council member starting the poverty task force, said that its first job will be a "thorough needs assessment" in Fresno, starting with her district, which has the highest rate of crime and gang activity and the lowest graduation rate. "This is just a blessed opportunity we have now," she said, referring to how the Brookings report put poverty on the political agenda.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2001018_pf.html

House Bill Raises Welfare Work Requirement

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 27, 2005; A10



The House has included a major restructuring of the nation's welfare system in its massive budget cutting bill, which would substantially increase the hours of work, training and community service the poor would have to perform to qualify for assistance.

President Bush has sought the changes for nearly four years but has been unable to get them through the Senate. Now Republicans have slipped them into a voluminous bill designed to save nearly $50 billion over five years by imposing new costs on Medicaid recipients, squeezing student lenders, cutting federal child support enforcement, narrowing eligibility for food stamps and trimming agriculture subsidies.

Those cuts have been the focal point of debate over the bill, while 71 pages of the 830-page measure that are devoted to changes in welfare have gone largely unnoticed. Administration and House Republican officials say such budget bills -- which are easier to pass because they cannot be filibustered in the Senate -- are designed to make necessary but difficult changes to entitlement programs such as welfare.

But Democratic lawmakers and governors from both parties say such broad changes should be debated and voted on separately.

"What you're seeing is a way for them to hide the issue," said Rep. Jim McDermott (Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means subcommittee that has jurisdiction over welfare. "It's a familiar technique for issues that can't be passed otherwise."

The changes would have a huge impact on the lives of the 2 million adult Americans who remain on welfare. For states to avoid federal sanctions, most recipients would have to spend 40 hours a week in activities out of the house, substantially more than they do now.

Democrats and liberal advocacy groups charge that the harsher work rules are not backed up by the funding to subsidize child care. Moreover, the larger budget bill's cuts to food stamps and Medicaid could add still more financial pressure as welfare recipients transition to the ranks of the working poor.

"There is no good argument for these increased work requirements," said Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who quit the Clinton administration in protest over the 1996 welfare restructuring. "People have demonstrated they wanted to get off welfare and go to work. They don't need an extra push with a stick."

The new changes are a follow-on to the 1996 bill, whose supporters argued it was needed to end the cycle of dependence on government.

Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, disputed critics who opposed the 1996 changes, which he said have been successful. The changes in the House bill reflect the reality that part-time, low-wage work cannot lift a family out of poverty, but even at modest wages, workers can pull themselves above the poverty line working full time and collecting the earned income tax credit, he said.

"We're not big, mean conservatives, trying to punish the poor," he said. "States have been focusing on part-time work because that's what we told them to do. The standard should be what most Americans think work is: full-time work."

Some welfare recipients such as Shontice Fields, 27, would face significant upheaval. Under District of Columbia rules, Fields's life is already complicated. She is up by 6:30 a.m. to get her sons, Teshon, 2, and Terrell, 6, ready for day care and school. By 7:30, Teshon has been delivered to his babysitter. By 8:45, Fields is back at her C Street NE home to walk Terrell to school.

Then she hops on a bus for the 20-minute ride to Catholic Community Services, where she spends 20 hours a week studying for her high school equivalency degree and meeting the activity requirement for her monthly $379 welfare check. She has just enough time to get back home to settle her sons in after school. Double the activity hours, as the House bill would do, and the Fieldses could be in trouble, she said.

"Right now, it's a struggle to make sure my kids get picked up on time, make sure they do their homework," she said. "They have to realize you still have to discipline your kids."

Another welfare recipient, Amy Lee Durkee, 33, has cobbled together enough pre-nursing school studies and advocacy work at the family resource center at San Francisco's City College to meet California's welfare work rules. On top of that are the visits to her case worker, her studies and caring for her 8- and 4-year-old kids.

"Most of us, we want to work hard, to go to school, to get good jobs, to get ourselves and our families out of poverty," she said. "Just telling us, work 40 hours a week somewhere, anywhere, that's not helping."

The changes in the House bill involve multiple layers to ensure that states stick to tougher work rules. Under the requirements imposed in 1996, states are supposed to have half their welfare recipients working to avoid sanctions that eat into their welfare block grants, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Welfare recipients have to work, do community service or take vocational education classes for 20 hours a week. They are also expected to be out of the house 10 more hours a week, in education, volunteer or community service programs.

A quirk in the 1996 law gave states an incentive to cut their welfare rolls, by giving them "credits" that lessen the work requirements in proportion to the amount states lower their welfare rolls. Since such rolls have plummeted, virtually all states have collected enough credits so that no state has to impose the 30-hour work requirement.

To avoid sanctions under the changes in the House bill, states now would have to have 70 percent of their welfare recipients working, not 50 percent. The credits from past welfare roll reductions used to offset that percentage would be wiped out. Future declines in welfare rolls could be used to lower the 70 percent threshold, but HHS's Horn said the administration wants a "hard floor" of 50 percent at work.

Those at work would have to work longer. The 20-hour work rule would be raised to 24 hours, while additional activities would jump from 10 hours a week to 16. That 40-hour total would apply to all adults, including mothers such as Shontice Fields, with children younger than 6, who now must work only half that time.

Horn emphasized that states would be given broad latitude to decide which activities count toward those 16 hours. They could include getting substance abuse treatment or attending a child's soccer game, he said, just as long as the activities get people out of the house.

Opponents say the complexity of all these changes will lead to havoc in state governments and hardships to parents.

"What kind of bureaucracy is going to be set up to make sure you're out of the house 40 hours a week, and who's going to pay for the child care?" asked Helen Blank, director of public policy at the National Women's Law Center. "It's punitive. It's crazy."

But supporters say the changes are vital if the government is serious about lifting able-bodied adults out of poverty and into work.

"The left likes to say we have all these working poor families, but the reality is, the typical poor family with children works only 800 hours a year," not the 2,080 hours a full-time job entails, said Robert E. Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "That's why they're poor."

For additional child-care needs, the bill provides $500 million in added funds over five years -- half the amount an earlier House welfare bill included and a fraction of the $8.3 billion the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said would be needed to help parents meet the additional work requirements.

But Republicans say the CBO estimate is inflated. In 1996, CBO estimated that the welfare reform law would shortchange the cost of work requirements by $13 billion through 2002. Instead, as welfare rolls shriveled and welfare payments dropped, the states found themselves with $6 billion in unspent welfare block grants. Some $2 billion in surplus funds still exist and could be spent on child care if states so choose, if the welfare changes pass, Horn said.

Besides, Horn said, a provision stipulates that individuals are not to be penalized for refusing work because they lack child care.

Critics of the changes are undeterred by the experience of the last welfare restructuring. From their 14.3 million peak in 1994, the welfare rosters have dropped to about 5 million -- with 3 million of those children, Georgetown's Edelman said. Those declines freed up big sums for child care, job training and other assistance, but the trend cannot continue at that pace.

Federal funding for child care had been effectively frozen since 1996, already forcing more than half the states to cut back on assistance, especially for families that have worked their way off welfare and are increasingly left on their own, Blank said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2601034_pf.html

This was written by XicanoPwr, a cgcs member, and I hope he doesn't mind my posting it here. The Jeff Seemann that Xicano refers to is running for Congress in Ohio. Jeff spent 72 hours living as a homeless person because he wanted to experience what life was like for American citizens who are the forgotten ones.

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/

THE HOMELESS ISSUE: A SOLUTION TO CURB IT
by XicanoPwr
Wed Nov 23, 2005 at 10:27:05 AM EST


This policy analysis was inspired by Jeff Seemann and ePluribus Media members.

The issue of ending homelessness is once again going under national microscope. In July 2000, the National Alliance to End Homelessness took on an ambitious goal to end homelessness by creating ten-year plan to end homelessness. After the 2000 election, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Mel Martinez told the Alliance it would adopt this goal. Then President Bush made "ending chronic homelessness in the next decade a top objective" in his FY 2003 Budget. Soon after everybody got on this bandwagon - the New York Times wrote two lead editorials arguing forcefully for this goal, and several cities and some states have committed themselves to developing a plan by 2004.

At the time the 10-year plan was create, the National Alliance to End Homelessness was based on the Clinton/Gore administration commitment to end homelessness. During their administration, homeless program funds were steadily increasing. Now with the Bush Administration, our nation faces a host of conflicting social, economic and security priorities. Jeff's experiences is evidence that front line agencies are struggling to meet increases in demand for shelter, housing and services. Jeff also provided evidence it is a very unfriendly world for the homeless, poor, and low-income people.

Just as the existence of homelessness demonstrates the failure of many community and economic supports, their are successful examples that demonstrate that rehousing and prevention can end the cycle of homelessness. The challenge is to bring together an effective systems, policies, and communities that touch the lives of the homeless in a partnership to end homelessness.

The current system that is in place can do little to prevent people from becoming homeless or change the overall availability of housing, income and services that will truly end homelessness. Although there are programs with the potential to prevent homelessness through such programs as welfare, health care, mental health care, substance abuse treatment, and veteran's assistance, current resources and policies of these programs do not match the need.

Homelessness and Housing

Homelessness is often linked to the lack of affordable housing in the nation, oftentimes, programs forget the fact that a person's earnings are insufficient to pay for the housing that does exist. People who become homeless are at the very bottom of the income spectrum; they are the people who struggle with paying their rent and with remaining adequately housed.

Those who are homeless and do have a job, many of them work in jobs that require less than 20 hours per week. Or if they do have a job that pays enough, their pay only covers the house payment, rent or mortgage.

As bad as it is for those who do have jobs and can't escape homelessness, climbing out of homelessness is virtually impossible for those without a job. For those with limited skills or experience, opportunities for jobs that pay a living wage are very limited. In such a competitive environment, the difficulties of job-seeking as a homeless person can be almost insurmountable barriers to employment. During the time I was in county, successful programs were those who integrated job training and employment assistance into their housing programs.

One of the hallmarks Republican did soon after they controlled Congress in 1994, they cut - approved by Clinton - the Job Training for the Homeless Demonstration Program (JTHDP) that was administered by the Department of Labor. The JTHDP program provided funds for basic skills and literacy instruction, job training, referral, and job search activities. Although funding for the JTHDP program was cut, Congress required the Department of Labor to enhance the capacity of national employment programs such as the JTPA to serve homeless individuals. The problem, no one is monitoring this request.

Just because a homeless persons obtain work by successfully completing an employment program, does not necessarily end his or her homelessness. He or she still needs a decent job and a place to live.

Ending homelessness will require closing the gap between income and housing costs, but not just any type of jobs, employers need to play their part by paying a living wage. The reforms of our workforce development system have not served the homeless well. Congressional and Presidential action is needed to provide incentives for state workforce systems to include homeless people in the Workforce Investment Act and in other legislative opportunities. Besides having the Federal Government setting policies, labor and the private sector must work together to ensure that has an opportunity to obtain a job which pays a living wage, and the necessary supports, such as child care and transportation, to keep it. Housing instability will continue until the supply of affordable housing is increased; incomes are adequate to pay for necessities such as food, shelter and health care; and disadvantaged people can receive the services they need. Attempts to change the homeless assistance system must take place in the context of larger efforts to help very poor people.

Other Considerations

Agencies must receive strong support from funding sources, both private and public, that control capital resources, not just those that do services. Local capital to develop affordable housing is essential for any plan to succeed.

Federal agencies should continue to prioritize community-wide planning and integrated approaches for reducing chronic homelessness in general, and street homelessness for people with severe mental illness, chronic substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, or any combination in particular.

Federal agencies should facilitate opportunities for practitioners and planners to observe new approaches in action, speak with consumers, see results, and consider how these practices could be applied in their own community.

The inactive Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) must step up in its charge with cross-agency authority. The ICH must make sure there is interagency cooperation is the plan is to end homelessness.

The current system of prevention needs to be consistent in its actions to prevent homelessness. Currently, many agencies are duplicating services which create gaps in services and central location within the cities to monitor these services. One consideration would be a neighborhood support center, however, it only works if they are adequately funded and if their strategies emphasize personal responsibility and if sufficient housing resources exist and if shelter becomes a relatively unattractive option and not a way to jump the queue to a housing subsidy or other benefits.

State and local agencies should establish procedures and resources to assure that people leaving psychiatric care, substance abuse treatment, correctional facilities, or foster care do not become homeless.

State and local agencies should facilitate capacity to serve chronically homeless clients by improving liaison and integrated service arrangements among mental health, substance abuse, medical care, and housing authorities.

Mainstream health, mental health, substance abuse, and welfare agencies should make their clients' housing stability a high priority and create positions of housing developers and coordinators.

Housing providers need to understand the benefits of supportive services to their whole tenant base and not just to those who were once homeless.

Strong, skilled leaders committed to an integrated community-wide approach need to come forward and have the backing and resources of local mainstream agencies and elected officials.

Finally, every component of the system should be monitored based on outcome-based results. Providers should be held accountable for their results (e.g., moved 4 families of difficulty-level 3 to housing per month), not for their efforts (e.g., held four counseling sessions with families) which seems to be the current monitoring system. Which is included as one of the steps to end homelessness mentioned by the Alliance's 10 year plan.

By collecting much better data, and creating a planning process focused on outcomes, some localities are able to provide a much more effective mix of assistance. These steps require bringing together homeless assistance providers and mainstream state and local agencies and organizations whose clients become homeless.

Edwards urges war on poverty

Web Posted: 11/30/2005 12:00 AM CST
Vincent T. Davis
Express-News Staff Writer

Americans need to tackle poverty and other issues challenging the country to survive here and abroad, 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards told a capacity crowd at Trinity University's Laurie Auditorium on Tuesday night.

Edwards was the inaugural speaker of the university's 2005-2006 Distinguished Lecture series.

Before beginning his speech, Edwards answered the question he said he's been asked the most during his travels: how his wife, Elizabeth, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last November, is doing. He told the crowd that his wife is well and cancer-free.

The topic of his speech, "America, the Land of Opportunity," is in line with stories of growing up in North Carolina working beside his father in a textile mill and being near his mother, who worked at the post office.

Edwards is the director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The center develops ideas to help people move from poverty to the middle class.

Poverty, Edwards said, is the greatest moral issue facing the country today.

Hurricane Katrina exposed to the world via television screens 37 million people living in poverty, with New Orleans as a microcosm of what's going on in the country, Edwards said.

"They live on the razor's edge," Edwards said. "Poverty has a face, and many times it's of color."

He outlined the disparity of net incomes among African Americans, Latinos and Anglos to illustrate his point.

Edwards said the poor violate every stereotype associated with poverty. He said the disenfranchised don't have a champion or a concept of having someone fight for them.

"Bad things happen to everybody," he said. "The difference is if happens to me, I'll be fine."

He talked about the importance of investing in education, especially math and science, just as China and India, two rising economic powers, have done. He asked how we can compete with China, which graduates 10 engineers for every one in this country.

Before ending his speech, he challenged American youth to embrace poverty as their cause just as past generations tackled controversial topics.

Earlier in the day, Edwards spoke to 150 students at a question-and-answer session, asking them not to vote selfishly, but for what's right for the nation.

John Boney, 22, president of the university's College Democrats, said he wanted to hear more about comments the former senator made in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece about how politicians need to take more responsibility for their actions.

Answering questions after the speech, Edwards delved more into his comments, saying his first sentence of the editorial was "I was wrong," a reference to his casting a vote to go to war with Iraq.

He said the administration should tell the truth about the past. He said he's not for immediate withdrawal, but the military needs to speed up training the Iraqis and exploring pullout of the troops.

An audience member asked Edwards if he would be on the 2008 presidential ticket.

"What I want you to do is help me fight the war on poverty," Edwards said. "This is my cause now."

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education...ds.ddd1ca9.html

Mushroom Cloud, thanks for posting the piece by XicanoPwr.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=2050

Posted on Sat, Dec. 10, 2005

Edwards: Poverty not `complicated'

Former senator calls for higher minimum wage, more help for families

RICHARD RUBIN
rrubin@charlotteobserver.com

Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards brought his anti-poverty campaign through Charlotte on Friday, calling it a great moral challenge in a nation hungry for leadership.

"I know some people see it as complicated, and it's not," Edwards told Democratic city leaders attending the National League of Cities conference. "It's wrong in a country of (such) wealth to have 37 million people in poverty."

Edwards, sounding very much like a presidential candidate, called for a higher minimum wage, help for families setting up bank accounts and policies to prevent poor people from clustering in neighborhoods.

He also stretched his theme beyond the country's borders. Where is the United States, he asked, on global poverty? On AIDS? On genocide in Sudan?

"The world is watching, and they are waiting for us," Edwards said. "And they are waiting to see what we're made of."

Edwards, who represented North Carolina in the Senate for one term, now directs a center on poverty at UNC Chapel Hill. His wife, Elizabeth, spoke about children and families at a closed event earlier in the day. She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and John Edwards said Friday she was doing well.

The Democrats packed a ballroom in the Westin for Edwards, lining the walls and sitting on the floor. They gave him a standing ovation after his talk, then headed for the tables of corporate-sponsored canapés.

Earlier Friday, Edwards met with several Charlotte residents at Crisis Assistance Ministry, who told him how they landed in poverty and how they are struggling to get out.

Edwards, who has been meeting with similar groups around the country since the 2004 election, seemed like a reporter at times, pushing the women for details on their work history, families, savings accounts and education.

Their stories provided the details that fit Edwards' narrative about how people in poverty constantly live on the edge of disaster: A leaky roof turns into a credit-card nightmare, a teenage pregnancy makes higher education difficult and adds extra expenses.

Nicora Cotton became pregnant at 18.

"It put a dent in a lot of things. It stopped me," said Cotton, 24, who lives with her mother, her sister and her two children in a two-bedroom apartment.

Edwards told the women that many Americans too often equate poverty with laziness.

"They don't know about all the people who are out there working, trying to work," he said.


http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news.../printstory.jsp

Posted on Thu, Dec. 08, 2005

John Edwards: Turning every question into an answer about poverty

MARTHA WAGGONER
Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. - Ask former Sen. John Edwards a question about foreign relations, and he's likely to respond with an answer about poverty.

Edwards, who leads the new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is building his foreign policy resume - perhaps in response to criticism during his 2004 presidential run that he lacked overseas experience and with an eye toward another possible campaign. But his work on poverty seems to touch everything he does.

When asked Thursday about his focus on Russia - a nation more associated with the Cold War than the war on terror - Edwards mentioned his recent op-ed article about Iraq that was published in the Washington Post.

Then he talked about the poverty he had seen during a recent visit to India and also the suffering of the poor in other countries.

"In addition to Iraq, Russia, I'm also very focused on the issue of world poverty, what's happening in the Sudan, and then Darfur with genocide," Edwards said Thursday. "All are issues I care deeply about and I think are important to America's ability to lead on the big moral issues that face the world."

Edwards went to Moscow as co-chair of a Council on Foreign Relations task force examining U.S. relations with Russia. He met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Britain's treasury chief, Gordon Brown, earlier this year, and visited India.

But on Thursday, he focused solidly on domestic issues while speaking with the students at Wake Tech Community College during a forum sponsored by Generation Engage, a nonpartisan group working to connect politicians with young people who don't attend four-year colleges.

Edwards' oldest daughter, Cate, is on the group's board.

Forty-nine percent of 18-to-24-year-olds have no experience at a four-year college, which is typically where politicians reach young people, said Generation Engage's executive director, Adrian Talbott. Generation Engage uses electronic technology to make politicians available to people in that age group at community colleges, bars and restaurants.

During the forum Thursday, Edwards stuck to the poverty issue whenever possible, warning students that the world is watching how the United States responds to the poverty left behind by Hurricane Katrina.

He mentioned a headline in an overseas newspaper: "The Shaming of America," it read, along with photographs of hurricane victims from New Orleans.

"Are we actually going to step to the plate and give these people a chance to help themselves?" he asked. "Or are we just going to continue doing what we've been doing? That question is with us."

Edwards, who has praised young people for leading the civil-rights movement and Vietnam protests in the United States and apartheid opposition in South Africa without waiting for their elders, encouraged his audience Thursday to do the same with poverty.

"If I could convince young people to make this the cause of your generation, I would feel like I've done something great with my life," he said. "If I did nothing else but that, I would be happy.

"Because these folks have never had - I can tell you from being in rooms with them for hour after hour after hour - they have never had a champion. They have no idea what it's like to have somebody stand up for them. They scrape and fight and hang on by their fingernails just to survive every single day. They're worried about their kids eating. It's not right. It's not right, and you can do something about it."

http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtl.../printstory.jsp

As Edwards has moved away from the DLC position and acknowledged that
his previous position on Iraq was a mistake, I'm becoming more inclined to
consider him for 2008. He still has a lot of growing to be ready for prime time
but it is possible that he could do it.

A Question of Doing What's Right

There is a scene in October Sky where Homer enters the mines to work for his first evening shift. He glances upward as the elevator goes down into the mine shaft for a last glimpse of sky, and sees Sputnik flash by before the doors of the mine clank shut and he is enveloped in darkness.

That scene always makes me cry, partly because it is the moment that Homer feels his dream of science and space being extinguished. But partly because people in my family have always worked the mines, and all sorts of other industrial jobs, aspiring to so much more, but never quite making it out of the economic circumstances to which they were born, and continuing to work at jobs to take care of their families but which never really fed their souls. It was back-breaking, exhausting work for most of the folks in my family, but their work ethic was always inspiring, along with the lesson that I learned to aspire to more before it was too late.

Which was why, from the time I was a very small child, my parents emphasized education as the way out for me. I was lucky. My parents both worked hard to give me every opportunity to stretch my wings, but most kids here in West Virginia simply aren't that lucky. And that is true for a whole lot of Appalachia, and other economically depressed areas around the country, rural and inner-city alike.

The recent mining tragedy in Upshur County here has brought home those family lessons for me all over again. My heart aches for everyone involved in this. I'm told by folks who were there the night the miners were found that family members, in that rush after the inaccurate information on them being found alive spread through the church, rushed out to get blankets and coats to wrap their loved ones in when they came out of the mines, waiting on the church steps for the first sight of their men.

That this was not to be is so painful, so unbelievably painful, that describing what happened after that is more than I can bear this morning. And, to be honest, we know folks on all sides of this (I feel ethically obligated to say that up front), so this isn't a post about specifics on this particular incident. But the closeness of where this tragedy has hit home for everyone around here compels me to say some things that I have been thinking about for quite a while now.

We have lost our way in this country in terms of values. I don't mean in the wingy sort of way in which values are usually discussed, where you say a bunch of superficial nonsense about gays getting married and the country going to hell as a result, either. That's just another one of those fear tactics stirred up by political types who want to play divide and conquer to win elections by working the ends against the middle.

No, what I'm talking about goes deeper into who we are, into issues of where we ought to be. And these are issues that Democrats used to be for, in the not so distant past, but they have all but disappeared from the discussion in the last few years. I'm going to talk about this more as time goes on toward the elections in the Fall, but this morning it is eating at me as I listen to local news updates from the mine and find out that the miners left notes for those they left behind -- those notes cry out to me to get off my butt and do something. So here goes.

You have to have a job to make any money to live. That's pretty much a given. You can start your own business, but that requires a helluva lot of work, too, so unless you are lucky enough to be born a trust fund kid (like the ones I met when I was away in college), life requires that you get off your butt and do something to earn a living.

To what end, though? As a worker these days, you have less earning potential in a whole lot of jobs that used to guarantee a decent day's pay. And at the end of the road, you have no guarantee that the pension into which you've been paying your whole damned life will even be there - I can't tell you how many people around here have lost everything because the business for which they worked went bankrupt and the pensions got voided in a reorganization under the corporate bankruptcy laws.

But as someone who has owned her own business, I can also tell you that the owner end of things isn't all roses and profits. After we got done paying out salaries, overhead costs, state and federal taxes, business taxes, social security and workers' comp, there was not a whole lot left for my partner and myself a lot of months. For small businesses, the margins are awfully small sometimes.

For a lot of corporations, especially those industries where money pressure has really put the squeeze on things in this economy, the margins are pretty tight, too. It's not enough to just say corporations suck -- that's too easy, and too intellectually sloppy. With the increases in fuel costs this year, I can't imagine trying to work a large budget for some of these places -- my little firm budget used to give me a migraine, and we only had a handful of employees and one office building.

None of this, though, excuses treating people like dirt. Nothing does. And that's where my gripe comes in today. CEOs for some of the major corporations in this country make obscene amounts of money, all the while, in a lot of cases, running the company into the ground and then taking off on their golden parachute ride -- leaving behind the folks who are living on the margins on their $7 an hour (and that's a great salary for a whole huge group of people in this country, let me tell you) to pick the pieces out of all those broken promises.

We need a voice for those people. John Edwards picked up this theme in the last election cycle during the primaries -- with his Two Americas -- and I would love to see that discussion continued into 2006. People who make $7 an hour (or less) can't afford to hire Jack Abramoff to represent their interests to the big shots in Washington. They generally aren't in any sort of union -- which would at least give them a possibility of an organized voice of some sort (although these days, that certainly isn't assured). They have no big money voice to back them up in Washington.

These are the folks that Democrats used to be able to depend on for a vote -- because the party spent time working on issues that lifted up the least of our nation, to give them a shot at the American dream, just like everyone else.

What I saw as an attorney -- both in private practice and as a prosecutor in cases with abused and neglected kids through to adult criminals -- is that there are a whole lot of folks in this country who have absolutely no faith in being treated like decent, equal human beings. People who are so used to being pushed to the margins that they see no way out. People who get into a cycle of being brought up in a family where abuse and neglect seems normal because it is the everyday norm, who then become juvenile offenders and then move up to the adult system and, when they have kids, the cycle starts all over again.

We've gutted funding for mental health. We pay social workers who intercede on the children's behalf less than they could make at McDonalds, but we expect them to do a job so difficult and so important to our communities. We spend huge sums of money on new prisons every year: imagine if we just dedicated a small portion of that amount to services on the front end of the problem -- when these kids were small or even when they were still in the womb (you would not believe the amount of damage to a child that can be done by a mother using crack while pregnant) -- how much better return would that be for our nation over the long run?

These are the things that kept me up at night as a prosecutor. The individual stories behind every single one of the defendants and families that I saw, and the question of how to fix the problems that I kept repeatedly seeing, and not just put a band-aid on the problem and hope it would go away on its own. The question of how economic hardship can push someone already on the brink of disaster to do something so stupid, and that can impact his family for generations. But the answers were elusive, and still are.

This is a problem that we need a national discussion about over an extended period. Not some nasty political infighting. Not throwing a bunch of sound bites at each other and looking smug, digging in our respective positions a lobbing bombs out from behind the ideological bunkers.

A real, honest discussion. Education is the way out -- but that only works if people in incredibly poor areas have access to decent education. How do we accomplish that?

Mental health and other safety net programs have been gutted over the last few years. Are we trying to create more criminals to lock up -- because that's been a big part of the result that I've seen in the real world trenches. But for a government running deficits as big as the federal government is, where is more funding coming from to increase these programs? And from states, who are having trouble meeting federal entitlements that keep pushing off costs onto the backs of governors whose budgets are already stretched thin? No easy answers here, that's for sure.

Fair wages for a fair day's work are essential. But how does that happen in an era when health insurance costs are through the roof -- for both the worker and the business employing them -- and energy costs are eating up the margins for a lot of other businesses who might have some slack? For that matter, exactly how does a CEO justify making 350 times or more than his lowest paid worker, all the while running a business into the ground with bad decisions?

The bottom line is this: there are some really tough choices facing this nation (and the discussion above is my no means a comprehensive list), and we need to approach them carefully because the results of our action or inaction have long-term ramifications for our children. Democrats used to own these issues because they listened to the voices of those people who needed help, who needed a hand up, and who were willing to do the work on their end to get the job done. And they spoke up for them, gave them a voice in the halls of power.

Ever since 9/11, Republicans have hijacked the message. It's been all security, all fear, all the time. It's been "we tell you what to think about morals" and never mind that what you are being taught is to hate your neighbor because he thinks differently than you do.

Well, I've had it with this divide and conquer strategy, and I'm standing up today to say that this nation deserves better. My child deserves better, and so does yours.

The ends do not justify the means. That only works if you are on the top end of the food chain and don't give a rat's ass about anyone underneath you.

Growing up, my folks taught me that I was no better than anyone else. Period. But they also taught me that no one else was better than me, either, and that sense of self has helped me to question things that I thought were wrong my whole life. It's one of the reasons that I started blogging.

But it isn't enough that I want more for myself and my family. Every person in this nation needs to wake up and realize that they deserve more as well. That's a message that Democrats could take to the bank, I'm sure of it. I know it is a message that would resonate here in West Virginia. People are hungry for hope, they are hungry for someone who will value them -- and not just use them as a pawn.

More than that, they deserve to be valued. It's a question of doing what is right, not just what is politically expedient in the moment to win the election or raise more money or whatever else seems to be driving political power these days. Let's give the little guy a voice again -- help him to stand on his own two feet and make something for his children, and you help the whole country. That goes for moms, too, I can tell you that.

Homer Hickam set his sights on the heavens in October Sky. Imagine where we could go as a nation if we all started looking up again, looking to our dreams for our own lives and for our children, instead of just looking down on each other.

(Photo credit to Richard Mills of The Times.)

posted by ReddHedd @ 7:15 AM

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/

A New Poor People's Campaign
Anthony Asadullah Samad
April 09, 2007

Anthony Asadullah Samad is a columnist for The Black Communicator, from which this column is excerpted. He is also managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of the upcoming book, Saving The Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is www.AnthonySamad.com.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized that we were “inextricably connected” to our brothers smothering in the airtight vault of poverty. King also recognized that there was no rational justification for such deep-seated poverty in America.

King criticized America as wanting to fund foreign wars more than it wanted to fund domestic dignity. He planned to have a “Poor People’s Campaign” to raise America’s conscience on the question of poverty. He went to Memphis to show solidarity for striking sanitation workers—more to put a face on poverty and to give dignity to the cause of impoverished workers. King lost his life in this campaign, and the Poor People’s Campaign failed in the face of both national recalcitrance and political indifferent.

Race, economics and circumstance were factors then, and they are factors now. King tried to make America face up to economic injustice then. We must make America face up to economic injustice now. We must re-engage a Poor People's Campaign in this country, to bring attention to the growing effects of poverty.

Poverty is something urban communities will not escape through passive engagement. “Tokenism” (passive investment in urban communities, small donations to community organizations, marginal social welfare policies) will not cure poverty. Detroit, Southside Chicago and South Los Angeles look the same as they did 40 years ago. In some cases, they look worse.

The alternative has been to try to attain “favorite Negro status” and escape the realities of impoverishment. “Escapism” has been the solution for many Blacks who simply try to earn enough money to separate themselves from the madness of crime—which is a residual effect of socio-economic disparities. What African Americans have realized in the 39 years since King’s murder is that they can’t escape poverty. Even the more affluent Blacks can’t escape the despair of poverty—not as long as you have one family member or friend impacted by the grips of poverty. How many people do you know that live in “the hills,” but have to go back to “the flats” to visit “their people"? How many people do we know that moved to the Westside, but have to “go home” to visit “Mama” on the eastside or southside—not because they don’t have the means to move her but because she doesn’t want to move?

For many of our seniors, it’s the only neighborhood they’ve ever known and they’re not leaving their homes, no matter how much the “hood” has changed. How many of us have passed through Skid Row and seen somebody you knew (well) and thought that was the last person you’d see down there because “back in the day" the person “had it goin’ on"? But circumstances change, and life changes—and what was once up is now down. It’s earthshaking and nerve-shattering to know that “if not for the Grace of God, that could be...”

Individuals can escape poverty. Communities hardly ever do, unless they’re gentrified—in which case, the impoverished are just moved somewhere else, while the rich take over strategic locales (which urban spaces are becoming increasingly more gentrified and valuable).

The last 40 years have proven that low income people just can’t work their way out of poverty. They have to hit the Lotto or find they have minerals in their backyards. Wages have been suppressed as high-wage manufacturing jobs were replaced by low-wage service jobs. The fastest growing segment of the poverty and welfare populations are people who get up and go to work everyday and still can’t make ends meet, the “working poor."

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Los Angles and SEIU Local 6434b launched a National Poor People’s Campaign that we hope will spread across the nation. It was announced on the same day a rally was being held in support of a security officers’ march for increased wages and improvement in work conditions so the officers can have jobs with dignity.

The modern-day example of why we need a Poor People’s Campaign is the plight of security officers in Los Angeles (really, security officers anywhere). Here are people, seeking dignity through work, hired at minimum (or just above minimum) wage, to protect assets in our communities—most times without a gun or sufficient back-up, representing the first point of contact in dangerous situations, but never earning the respect (numerous “toy cop” jokes) or the money they deserve to provide for and protect their families. In Los Angeles, Blacks are 9 percent of the population and over 70 percent of the security guard workers. Race, economics and circumstance are big factors here. It’s the Memphis Sanitation Workers' dilemma all over again. Black workers are good enough to protect business interests all over the city, but not good enough to earn livable wages and live with dignity.

This is just one industry where wage suppression impacts the quality of one’s life. None of us can escape the realities of the poor—no matter how much we try. And poverty will never just “go away” as long as much of society tries to ignore it. Black America can restore America’s social conscience by addressing poverty. Poverty is not just a “black problem." It is a class problem, a poor people’s problem that disproportionately affects Blacks. This is one problem we can address. Those who “invoke King” every 15 minutes ... those who want to fight a war… those who say Blacks need a focused cause to re-engage the civil rights movement, here it is.
Campaign in your area to eradicate poverty—King’s last fight.