We must never forget our part in this. I thank Peter Edelman and his wife Marian Wright Edelman for being morally consistent about the problem, regardless of which administration is in charge.
Here are some quotes I had on my computer from an old research paper. My paper focused on children but it's all the same war.
In America's 1990s, to be poor is not so a much socioeconomic status as it is a serious character flaw, a defect of the spirit. Federal statistics tell a tale of loss and want so dreadful that Dickens, of A Tale of Two Cities fame, would cringe.
Consider: seven million people homeless, with less than two hundred dollars in monthly income. Thirty seven million people, 14.5 percent of the nation's population, living below poverty levels. Of that number 29 percent are African Americans, meaning that over 10.6 million blacks live in poverty.
Both wings of the ruling "Republicrat" Party try to outdo themselves in announcing new, ever more draconian measures to restrict, repress, restrain, and eliminate the poor. One is reminded of the wry observation of French writer Anatole France: "The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread."
Already U.S. manufacturers have fled to NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]-friendly Mexico, and only the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas has slowed an emerging flood of Western capital. Outgunned in the industrial wars by Japan and Germany, the United States has embarked on a low-technology, low-skill, high-employment scheme that exploits the poor, the stupid, and the slow via a boom in prison construction, America's sole growth industry.
Increasingly, more and more Americans are guarding more and more American prisoners for more and more years. And this amid the lowest crime rate in decades. No major political party has an answer to this social dilemma, short of cages and graves for the poor.
The time is ripe for a new, brighter, life-affirming vision that liberates, not represses, the poor, who after all are the vast majority of this Earth's people. Neither serpentine politics, nor sterile economic theory that treats them-people -as mere economic units offers much hope. For the very politicians they vote for spit in their faces, while economists write them off as "nonpersons."
It must come from the poor, a rebellion of the spirit that reaffirms their intrinsic human worth, based upon who they are rather than what they possess.
- Excerpt from Howard Zinn's book "Voices of People's History of the United States", pg 566, WAR ON THE POOR
The book is online here
http://www6.svsu.edu/~jalewis2/HIST1700/PDF/HIST%201700%20Zinn%20Voices%20of%20Peoples%20History%20Reader.pdf Mr. President, the cosmetic improvements made in this bad bill cannot possibly justify its passage. It is no answer to say that this bill is less extreme than previous bills. Less extreme is still too extreme.
This bill condemns millions of innocent children to poverty in the name of welfare reform. But no welfare bill worthy of the name reform would lead to such an unconscionable result. This bill is not a welfare reform bill--it is a ``Let them eat cake'' bill.
In fact, welfare reform would have nothing to do with the tens of billions of dollars in this bill in harsh cuts that hurt children. Cuts of that obscene magnitude are totally unjustified. They are being inflicted for one reason only--to pay for the massive tax breaks for the wealthy that Bob Dole and the Republican majority in Congress still hope to pass. Today the Republican majority has succeeded in pushing extremism and calling it virtue. It is nothing of the sort. This bill will condemn millions of American children to poverty in order to provide huge tax breaks for the rich.
...
The United States already has more children living in poverty--the United States already spend less of its wealth on its children--than 16 out of the 18 major industrial nations in the world. The United States has a larger gap between rich and poor children than any other industrial nation. Children in the United States are twice as likely to be poor than British children, and three times as likely to be poor than French or German children. And we call ourselves the leader of the free world? Shame on us. Shame on the Senate. Surely we can do better-- and there is still time to do it.
-Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) “Statement By Senator Kennedy On The Passage Of The Welfare Bill,” July 23, 1996,
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1996-07-23/html/CREC-1996-07-23-pt1-PgS8501.htm
“Mr. President, several weeks ago, during the consideration of the welfare reform bill, I came to the floor and expressed my views on that legislation. At the time, I characterized the bill as an unconscionable retreat from our Nation’s more than 60-year commitment to America’s poorest children. Unfortunately, I still believe that to be the case today.”
In the past 60 years, while we have disagreed and quarreled in this country on some issues, all Americans, regardless of party or ideology, understood that it was in our national interest to protect the most innocent and defenseless of our people--the 9 million children who collect Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
With the passage of the welfare reform bill, I believe we have abandoned that 60-year-old commitment.
- Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) “Statement By Senator Dodd On The Passage Of The Welfare Bill,”,
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1996-09-30/html/CREC-1996-09-30-pt1-PgS11867.htmUpon resigning his position as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services
"There will be suffering. Some of the damage will be obvious -- more homelessness, for example, with more demand on already strapped shelters and soup kitchens. The ensuing problems will also appear as increases in the incidence of other problems, directly but perhaps not provably owing to the impact of the welfare bill. There will be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality, and increased drug and alcohol abuse. There will be increased family violence and abuse against children and women, and a consequent significant spillover of the problem into the already overloaded child-welfare system and battered-women's shelters."
- Peter Edelman,
'Atlantic Monthly', The Worst Thing Bill Clinton has Ever Done, March 1997
and last but not least, this stirring letter from his wife Marian
"...Protect Children from Unjust Policies"
An open letter to President Clinton
from Marian Wright Edelman, President and Founder of the Children's Defense Fund
I am calling for your unwavering moral leadership for children and opposition to Senate and House welfare and Medicaid block grants, which will make more children poor and sick.
As president, you have the opportunity and personal responsibility to protect children from unjust policies. It would be a great moral and practical wrong for you to sign any welfare "reform" bill that will push millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty, as both the Senate and House welfare bills will do. It would be wrong to destroy the 60-year-old guaranteed safety net for children, women, and poor families, as both the Senate and House welfare bills will do.
It would be wrong to leave millions of voteless, voiceless children to the vagaries of 50 state bureaucracies and politics, as both the Senate and House bills will do. It would be wrong to strip children of or weaken current ensured help for their daily survival and during economic recessions and natural disasters, as both the Senate and House bills will do. It would be wrong to exacerbate rather than alleviate the current shameful and epidemic child poverty that no decent, rich nation should tolerate for even one child.
Both the Senate and House welfare bills are morally and practically indefensible. Rather than solve widespread child deprivation, they simply shift the burden onto states and localities with far fewer federal resources, weakened state maintenance of effort, and little or no state accountability. As you well know, these block grants are not designed primarily to help children or to make families more self-sufficient. They are Trojan horses for massive budget cuts and for imposing an ideological agenda that says that government assistance for the poor and children should be dismantled and cut while government assistance for wealthy individuals and corporations should be maintained and even increased. Do you think the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Micah, and Amos--or Jesus Christ--would support such policies?
Neither the Senate nor House welfare bill is an example of the good competing with the perfect. Both are fatally flawed, callous, anti-child assaults. Both bills eviscerate the moral compact between the nation and its children and its poor.
If child investments are unfairly and indiscriminately cut by many billions of dollars, there is perhaps some prospect of recouping the money over time when new child suffering becomes apparent, as it did after the Reagan cuts and as it will this time as pending cuts are many times worse. But longer-term and perhaps irreparable damage will be inflicted on children if you permit to be destroyed the fundamental moral principle that an American child, regardless of the state or parents the child chanced to draw, is entitled to protection of last resort by his or her national government. If any piece of the framework or cornerstone of the laws--AFDC, Medicaid, family and child nutrition--is dismantled, we may not get them back in our lifetime or our children's.
What a tragic step backward for America when so many children already are left behind. Both you and I know that there are lessons from American history, including the end of Reconstruction, when the immoral abandonment of structures of law and equity led to decades of setbacks for powerless Americans and battles we still are fighting today. What a tragic irony it would be for this regressive attack on children and the poor to occur on your watch. For me, this is a defining moral litmus test for your presidency.
We cannot heal our racial divisions or prepare our nation for the future unless we give poor Black, Brown, and White children a healthy and fair start in life. These pending block grants will make that task so much harder. Together with the proposed tax policies, they widen the income gulf between America's haves and have-nots. You have spoken too eloquently and worked too long for children to wipe it out with your signature now.
It is nonsense for congressional leaders to argue that they are protecting children from a future debt children did not create by destroying the vital laws and investments children need to live, learn, and grow today. That is the domestic equivalent of bombing Vietnamese villages in order to save them. It is moral hypocrisy for our nation to slash income, health, and nutrition assistance for poor children while leaving untouched hundreds of billions in corporate welfare, giving the Pentagon almost $7 billion it did not request.
The Children's Defense Fund wants welfare reform. But we want fair reform that does not pick on and hurt children and that provides parents jobs and safe child care. We want reform that prepares our children for the new millennium-not reform that pushes them back to past inequities within and among states.
We want to "end welfare as we know it." But we do not want to replace it with welfare as we do not want to know it. We do not want to codify a policy of national child abandonment.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt correctly said: "Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Every president since FDR--Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush--preserved the minimal national guarantee of income assistance for poor children. It is a precedent I hope and trust you will uphold. What was right and compassionate in FDR's day is right today and will be right tomorrow.
There is an even higher precedent that we profess to follow in our Judeo-Christian nation. The Old Testament prophets and the New Testament Messiah made plain God's mandate to protect the poor and the weak and the young. The Senate and House welfare bills do not meet this test.
(Published Nov. 3, 1995 in The Washington Post)
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/edelman_open_letter.html
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