LIVES  THAT  END  AT  BIRTH

By Valdas Anelauskas


Societies may be judged by how they treat their children
As I see it, in a profound sense, the ultimate test of 
a moral society is the kind of a life it gives to its 
youngest members.  After spending seven years in the 
United States I have a pretty good idea now of how 
children are treated here, by this society.
 
Many Americans, I know, still think of America as 
a child-centered nation. They like to boast that 
all children here are equally cherished, protected, 
nurtured, and offered a field of opportunity 
unmatched in the world...  But the truth is that 
millions of poor kids are not doing well in this 
country today. A child in America is now at much 
greater risk than a child elsewhere in the advanced 
industrial world. Compared with other advanced 
countries, children in the United States are much 
more likely to die before their first birthday, to 
live in abject poverty, to be homeless and hungry, 
to be abandoned by their parents, and even to be 
killed at a very young age...
 
As the prominent American thinker Noam Chomsky
points out, the United States of America is basically 
waging a perpetually escalating war against its children 
and their families; which means that the purposeful, 
conscious social policy of this extreme capitalist system 
has been to attack and destroy basic social values. As 
a result there are extremely high rates of child poverty, 
child homelessness and child hunger in America today.  
In the United States poor kids now deal with risk and 
neglect on a scale unimagined in previous generations. 
Neglect of children has become so endemic to American 
society that childhood is now miserable for millions of 
children in this country.  According to a UNICEF study 
conducted in 1993 by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 
"Never before has one generation of American children 
been less healthy, less cared for, or less prepared for 
life than their parents at the same age".

America's social well-being in general has fallen 
dramatically to its lowest point over the last few decades, 
and poor children of this country are suffering the most, 
according to an Index of Social Health developed 
recently by researchers at Fordham University. This 
report looks at federal government statistics of 16 
different social problems, comparing each annual 
measure with the year in which it was at its best level.
In 1973 the Index stood at 77 points; by 1994 (the most 
recent year covered) it plummeted  down to 37, its 
lowest level ever.  "The decline in the social health of 
children and youth tells us something about the future 
shape of our society", warns Marc Miringoff, 
the director of the  Fordham's Institute for Innovation 
in Social Policy, which prepares the index.
 
And the most amazing thing about this society, as Noam 
Chomsky notes,  is that the people who are carrying out 
this barbaric war against families and children in this 
country are able to say that they are... "defending family 
values", and nobody here cracks up in ridicule. This is 
a really unique element of American totalitarian ulture...  
"That takes a real totalitarian intellectual climate", 
Chomsky says... 
 
When a three-year-old boy fell into the gorilla 
enclosure last year at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, 
a female gorilla gently picked up the injured child 
and carried him to safety. Isn't it ironic that this 
animal instinctively recognized her responsibility 
to children while those who rule and make social 
policies in American society with all its so-called 
"conservative family values" don't?  Well, there is 
a  joke that a true American conservative is someone 
who believes life begins at conception and ends at 
birth.  "Being poor doesn't hurt a child," said one 
of them, Robert Rector,  a social policy analyst at 
the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative 
think-tank in Washington,D.C. 
 
I don't want to appear too personal in my writings, but 
this is a very special subject to me.  Since our daughter 
Gabriella was born here in America, the war against 
children has really been in our face.  Straight away we 
encountered it:  When we took our baby-girl to 
St.Vincent Hospital in Manhattan for her first medical 
checkup two weeks after she was born, the doctor there 
refused to see her just because it turned out that 
mother's health insurance didn't cover a newborn baby...  
A two-week-old child was simply denied basic medical 
help because of financial reasons!  It was really 
something that we, when living in the former Soviet 
Union, couldn't even imagine.  Indeed, it was our first 
serious encounter with the capitalist interpretation of 
family values, and with their attitude towards 
children.  That incident was probably the turning-point 
where I personally came to hate this barbaric system... 
 
You won't find any more accounts about our family's 
own experiences in this article.  It isn't our family's 
story after all.  This is about American families, about 
American children.  We are not Americans.  We can 
leave this country and go back home.  But those millions 
of desperately poor children that happened to be born in 
this so-called "land of opportunity", have nowhere to go.  
They must face their present and future misery here.  
And this article is dedicated to them.


		       *   *   *


The percentage of children living in poverty is perhaps the 
most global and widely used indicator of child well-being in 
any nation.  And child poverty is not an act of God.  It is 
only a  reflection of society's political, economical and value 
choices.  What can be said of a nation that does not assume 
responsibility to take care of the most vulnerable among its 
young citizens?  America is such nation.
 
The poverty rate among children in America today is enormous. 
Malnutrition is unbelievably high and just getting worse and worse. 
The same is true with infant mortality.  It's unique in the 
civilized world.  According to the latest statistics on poverty 
in the United States, released in 1996 by the U.S. Census Bureau, 
14.3 million children in America are living in abject poverty.  
Most of them do not have a future, and they know they do not 
have a future...
 
And it is the direct consequence of the official U.S. social 
policies.  The steadily rising trend of child poverty in this 
country first of all is the fruit of a capitalist economic system 
itself, but also it is the result of society's inadequate spending 
on children. Less than 5 percent of the U.S. federal budget is 
devoted to programs that in some way benefit children, 
whereas all other rich countries give children a much higher 
priority. For example, overall spending on child well-being is 
about $230 billion a year in France, compared with only $146 
billion in the United States.  In fact, most Western European 
nations spend two or even three times as much as the U.S. on 
families with children, which explains why so many more 
American than European children live in poverty.  
"Industrialized countries vary in their level of generosity 
toward families with children, but the U.S. is the least generous 
of all," points out Elizabeth Duskin, chief social policy 
economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and 
Development, a Paris-based economic research center. 
 
This lack of generosity is why poverty, hunger, homelessness 
and ill-health are the lot of millions of youngsters in  today's 
America.  Compared to other industrial nations, the United 
States has by far the highest percentage of children living 
in poverty: 20.8 percent in 1995. In most other rich countries, 
child poverty rates are only a small fraction of the U.S. rate. 
In Western Europe those rates typically hover between the 2 to 7 
percent level.  So, the United States today has a child poverty 
rate that is four times the average of Western European 
countries. America's extraordinary high child poverty rate is 
not some unavoidable attribute of a modern industrial society 
that cannot be escaped.  This is highly unusual and represents 
unconscionable choices that this society has made and 
misguided priorities Americans have set.  Other advanced 
nations with fewer resources and often similar economic and 
social problems have placed a much higher priority on 
protecting and investing in their children.  
 
Therefore,  by comparison with all other rich nations, the 
United States lifts a far smaller proportion of low-income 
families with children out of poverty.  Actually, the U.S., 
France and Britain would have almost a similar percentage of 
children who are considered poor if based on parents' income 
- somewhere between 24 percent and 29 percent. But after 
receiving tax breaks and all the social benefits, only 5.7 percent 
of French children and 7.3 percent of British children are still 
considered poor, while nearly 21 percent of U.S. children still 
suffer in severe poverty.  American children are twice as likely 
to be poor as Canadian children, three times as likely to be poor 
as British children, four times as likely to be poor as French  
children, and 7 to 13 times more likely to be poorer than 
German, Dutch, and Swedish children. Thus, compared to 
children of all other advanced rich countries, American 
children are doing, I would say, extremely badly today.  
 
More than that, child poverty rates in the United States rose 
rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s, while they sharply 
declined elsewhere in the industrialized world.  The reality is 
that the United States of America is the only rich industrial 
country where the number of poor children has increased 
significantly in recent years.  During the last few decades 
child poverty became entrenched here on a scale unprecedented 
in the postwar period and unmatched in the advanced world.  
The 20-year growth of the number of American children actually 
living in deep poverty is amazing.  It climbed from 15.4 
percent in 1974 to 20.8 percent in 1995.  More than 14 million 
American children - the equivalent of a medium-sized country - 
are now despairingly poor.  They live in families that lack the 
money to pay the rent for decent housing and put food on the 
table.  Hundreds of thousands of American children are 
homeless today, and many more than that are hungry.  This 
gives us an idea how "well" American society is treating its 
youngest members.  The very fact that in one of the world's 
richest countries 14.3 million of children live in abject 
misery says how "advanced" this society is... 
 
As a matter of fact, one out of every five  children in the U.S. 
lives in destitution today. For children under six, the group 
most vulnerable to all the negative impacts of poverty, the rate 
is even higher: one in four. A study released recently by the 
National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia 
University’s School of Public Health reports that 6.1 million 
American children under the age of six - almost the population 
of Chicago and Los Angeles combined - lived in severe 
poverty in 1994.  It has almost doubled since 1979 when the 
number of children under age six living in poverty in the 
United States was 3.5 million.  The poverty rate for children 
under age six in this country is now higher than for any other 
age group of the U.S. population.  It was well over double the 
rate for adults or the elderly in 1994. Actually, nearly half of 
all children under age six (a shocking 45 percent) lived in poor 
or nearly poor families in 1994, according to this report.  
In addition to those 6.1 million who lived in actual poverty, 
another 4.8 million children under six lived in near poverty, 
which means the family's income is at or below 185 percent of 
the official federal poverty line. Furthermore, according to the 
Children's Defense Fund, more than half of all poor children in 
America now live in extreme poverty, in families with incomes 
below 50% of the official poverty line.  This proportion has 
also risen steadily and doubled - from 6 percent in 1975 (the 
first year for which data on extreme poverty in the U.S. is 
available), to its present record-high level of 12 percent in 
1994.
 
Further, many American cities now have child poverty rates 
of over 35 percent, or even over 50 percent for black children. 
Nearly 600,000 people or one family out of five, for example, 
are living far below the official poverty line in Chicago.  The 
child poverty rate stands there at 33.3 percent, one child out 
of three. But in the Oakland area of Chicago 84 percent of all 
children live in poverty. In New York City - the richest city 
in the world, there is inequality greater than in Guatemala, and 
40% of the children in NYC are now living below the poverty 
line. 
 
Many Americans still believe that poor people don't work or 
that those people who work are not poor, and that people who 
are poor just need to work...  But the truth is that more than 
a third of poor children in America today live in working 
families where at least one parent works year-round, says 
the 1996 Kids Count Data Book, a compilation of statistics 
on the well-being of children released annually by the Annie 
E. Casey Foundation. In 1994, the United States had 5.6 million 
poor children living  in families with incomes way below the 
official poverty line despite parents working full time 50 or 
more weeks that year.  This is up from 3.4 million two decades 
ago.  The Baltimore-based foundation points out that children 
of the working poor is the fastest-growing segment of the 
nation's children who live in severe poverty. Besides, 
a majority of all poor children under the age of six - 62 percent - 
lived in working families, contrary to the commonly-held belief 
that a parent's job will keep children out of poverty.  In the 
years since 1989, the number of youngest children living in 
these so-called working-poor families has jumped 30 percent.  
And we continue to see expanding millions of desperate 
American families who are unable to protect their kids from 
poverty.  More and more children in the United States are 
growing up despairingly poor regardless of  their parents' work 
efforts.
 
It must be said that the reality of young child poverty in this 
country extends far beyond the stereotypical image of the poor 
minority child in an urban setting.  The fact that nearly half 
of all America's children under age six live in poverty or near 
poverty manifestly demonstrates that young child poverty here 
is a mainstream occurrence affecting children from all racial 
and ethnic backgrounds, from all types of residential areas, 
and from all regions of the United States.  As a matter of fact, 
during the last few decades the young child poverty rate in 
the U.S. has grown at a much faster pace in the suburbs than 
in cities and twice as fast among whites as among blacks.  
Contrary to stereotypes, more poor children in America today 
live outside cities - in suburbs and small towns or rural areas - 
than in cities.

I have cited here all the current demographics to illustrate 
the magnitude of poverty among children in America at the 
end of the millennium. It is not difficult to imagine how 
this poverty affects young children. Poverty leaves its marks 
in every part of a child's life.  The experience of misery 
and hunger has particularly damaging effects in early childhood. 
First of all, children need adequate nutrition to grow up 
healthy and without developmental problems.  The authors of 
the Scientific American (Feb'96) article, J. Larry Brown and 
Ernesto Pollitt, revealed through a lengthy study that malnutrition 
in preschool children not only promotes illness, retards 
intellectual and physical development, but also initiates 
interactive social processes that further diminish children's 
developmental capabilities.  Even short periods of malnutrition 
can affect a child's behavior, cognitive development and future 
productivity.  Hunger is devastating to children, and haunts them 
all through their lives. 
 
The hard fact is that about 5.5 million of American children 
suffer from hunger and an additional 9.6 million are at constant 
risk of going hungry. Once poor families pay rent and bills, 
little or nothing is left for food. According to a recent study, 
29 percent of all children here in Oregon are going hungry or are 
at risk. "There really are times when we are really hungry, and 
there is nothing to eat. Mostly I worry about my little sister 
getting enough food because she is going through a growth spurt", 
said Amy Rose, a 9-year-old girl from Milwaukee, OR, in an article 
published recently by The Oregonian (Oct.16,1996). According 
to the Rockefeller Foundation, the depth and breadth of poverty 
is such in the United States that there are more children suffering 
from hunger here  than there are children in such countries as Angola, 
Somalia, Haiti, Zimbabwe, El Salvador, or Cambodia. Over the past 
decade, clinics around the U.S. have reported an alarming increase 
in the incidence of severe forms of malnutrition in some 
poverty-stricken areas where hunger is a harsh reality faced by 
millions of American families struggling to make ends meet, without 
success.  By definition, families below the poverty line cannot 
feed their children and pay the rent. Food is what poor families
scrimp and save on. You pay rent because you'll be evicted;
you pay for your heat because it can be shut off; you pay for
medical care or you might not get any and die; what is left is 
what you try to buy food with.
 
Who would argue that a child simply cannot start out right in 
life without protection against the risk of being born into the 
abject poverty of a family with grossly inadequate income. It's 
society's duty and responsibility to protect its children from 
suffering or death because of poverty.  According to the Children's 
Defense Fund, every day an average of 2,660 children are born into 
poverty in America, and it is a hard fact that every 53 minutes an 
American child dies because of  the effects of poverty.  Indeed, 
more American children die each year from poverty than from traffic 
fatalities, and twice as many children die in this country from 
poverty than from cancer and heart disease combined.  More than 
any other factor, poverty limits the capability of families, and 
begins harming the young children before they are even born...  
And poverty, of course, has especially serious consequences for 
infants and toddlers.  Children born into poor families are more 
likely to be premature, to have low birth weight, to die within 
the first year of life, and, of course, to experience much more 
illnesses and all kinds of health-related problems.  Poor children 
are more likely to die at every age and from every cause.
 
The United States of America is unique in its lack of provision 
for childbirth. In all other rich nations, pregnant women and 
newborn babies are treated with much more generosity and humanity.  
It is a large part of the reason why infant mortality rates are so 
much lower in France, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and in all 
other civilized countries than they are here in the United States.  
Today, in the modern world a nation's rate of infant mortality is 
like a barometer of its success and advancement in combating poverty, 
ignorance and disease.  It is one of the clearest indications of the
overall health and well-being. As a World Health Organization's report 
states, "Infant mortality is not a health problem. Infant mortality 
is a social  problem with health consequences"...  The infant mortality
rate in the United States places it 25th in the world, behind all other 
developed countries. It may be added that in 1960 the U.S. ranked 
9th in the world.  Entire regions of this country and most large 
cities now have infant mortality rates unknown in civilized societies. 
An American baby born into poverty in the U.S. capital Washington, 
D.C., in the shadow of the White House, today is much more likely 
to die in the first year of life than even a baby born in North Korea... 
 
The fact is that each day in the United States, an average of 96 
newborn babies die.  The National Commission on Children reported, 
for example, in 1993 that over the course of a single year almost 
40,000 American babies died before their first birthday. Half of 
those deaths could have been avoided because they were the direct 
result of mothers receiving too little or no prenatal care at all. 
The health condition of mothers during pregnancy has a most serious 
consequences for children.  Infant mortality in this country is also 
closely linked to the inadequacy of nutrition among many pregnant 
women. A study released in 1995 by the Center for Disease Control 
and Prevention states that a survey of 21,583 mothers revealed that 
poverty is still a leading cause of infant mortality in the United 
States. Soaring infant mortality rates in poverty-stricken areas 
of this country show how deadly poverty can be. 
 
It goes beyond my understanding but, as statistics show, more than 
one-third of pregnant women ( about 1.3 million each year) in the 
United States receive absolutely insufficient prenatal care, mainly 
due to financial barriers. Poor women do not receive the care they 
need because the U.S. health care system, unlike that of every other 
major industrial nation, does not provide universal basic coverage 
for all mothers and children. According to research carried out at 
New York's Alan Guttmacher Institute, 36 percent of pregnant women 
in the United States have no medical insurance coverage at the start 
of pregnancy and 15 percent are still not covered even at the time 
of delivery. Those women who receive only late or no prenatal care 
at all are twice as likely to give birth to premature, low-birth-weight 
babies, and these newborns are forty times more likely to die 
in the first month of life than normal-weight infants.  As a case in 
point, over seven percent (7.3%) of all babies born in the U.S. in 
1992 had a low birth weight, which is the single greatest cause of 
infant death and of major childhood disabilities. The number of low 
birth-weight babies in America increased by 6 percent nationwide 
between 1985 and 1992.  Furthermore, each year an average of 
400,000 babies in the United States are born too soon; 74% of infants 
deaths are due to premature births.
 
It is a well-documented fact that American children living 
below or just above the poverty line have much higher relative 
frequencies of health problems of all sorts. It goes without 
saying that access to health care is one of the key issues of 
child overall well-being.  Basic medical care is absolutely 
necessary for survival and child development.  Therefore, 
virtually all other industrialized countries see health care as 
a universal right for children. Not so in America. Poverty in this 
country influences child health directly by making it harder 
for families to afford health services. At any given moment in 
the United States around 12 million  children are uninsured 
and have little or no access to adequate and appropriate health 
care.  For instance, in 1992, a shocking 12.7 percent of 
America's children (8.4 million) had no health insurance 
coverage for the entire year.  
 
The point is that during the 1980s and 1990s growing 
numbers of families with children in this country simply fell 
through the medical safety net. One in three children in 
America has never seen a dentist! Very often poverty causes 
many parents to delay seeking medical care until a child is 
gravely ill...  Poor American families are constantly forced to 
make impossible budget choices about which pressing needs 
to address and which to risk ignoring.  Should they pay the 
rent if it means running out of food for their growing children 
before the end of the month?  Should they buy winter clothes 
for the children if it means falling behind on the rent?  Is it 
"worth" to having a child's medical checkup or immunization 
if it means missing another utility bill and having the heat or 
electricity cut off?  The longer a family is forced to take these 
kinds of chances, the greater the likelihood the children's 
health will deteriorate to the point of irreversible damage...
 
The Medicaid system for poor Americans finances health care 
for only 40 percent of those below the official poverty line. 
It must be said that kids in working-poor families are without 
health insurance at a much higher rate than any other group 
of American children.  More than a quarter of the children in 
these families live without any health insurance most of the 
time.  That is about twice the rate for all Americans, and in 
most cases it is because the parents' employers do not provide 
health benefits.  At the same time, these families are ineligible 
for Medicaid because they are not welfare assistance 
recipients.  Besides, one major barrier to health care for poor 
families, even with Medicaid insurance, is the difficulty of 
finding a doctor who would accept Medicaid.  Many doctors 
here simply refuse to accept it, in part because of very low 
Medicaid reimbursement rates from the government.  As an 
example, in 1989 one in four pediatricians surveyed said that 
they would not accept Medicaid.  In a survey by the U.S. 
General Accounting Office, 15 percent of uninsured and 
Medicaid-insured women who had received inadequate 
prenatal care or no care at all during their pregnancy said 
they could not find a doctor who would see them...
 
Thus, increasingly large numbers of poor children are simply 
left out of the American medical system, with predictable 
results. Many diseases of childhood are preventable with 
routine immunization, yet immunization rates for American 
children are very low.  Only 67 percent of children under 
2 years of age here get the full series of all necessary 
immunizations, as compared to a 90 percent rate announced 
by UNICEF in 1993 for twelve developing countries.  
The United States now ranks 70th worldwide in preschool 
immunization rates.  Because of poverty, millions of 
American children are failing to receive vital immunizations 
that could protect them against such diseases as polio, 
measles, and mumps.  The number of children immunized 
against polio declined sharply in the 1980s, and half of all 
small children in the U.S. are not now protected against this 
crippling disease. And measles is back, too. The last 
comprehensive immunization survey in the United States 
showed that 21 percent of one-to-four-year-olds were not 
immunized against measles.  Consequently, 17,850 cases of 
measles with 41 deaths were reported in 1989, up from 1,500 
cases in 1983.  Further, in 1990 there were 27,672 reported 
cases of measles in the United States.  The truth is that in 
the last decade of the XX century America is doing a poorer 
job of looking after the health needs of its children than 
Cuba does...
 
Can one imagine a satisfactory life for child if the family has 
no place to live?  Well, thousands of children across America 
have no place to call home. Entire families are living on 
America's streets, homeless and begging for food. At the 
harshest extreme of poverty, an estimated 100,000 American 
children are homeless each day, according to the National 
Academy's of Science figures.  Millions of other poor 
children live in fear of homelessness or do not have safe, 
healthy and decent homes. Official neglect of families with 
children in America especially deepened during the 1980s 
when Reagan's administration systematically cut the amount 
of public money going to social programs. Those major cuts 
in federal support for affordable housing now virtually 
guarantee that hundreds of thousands of American children 
grow up not knowing the security of a home. In the United 
States, federal support for low-income people's housing 
dropped from $32 billion in 1978 to only $9 billion in 1988, 
a  decline of more than 80 percent after adjusting for 
inflation. 

This cutback, no doubt, is the main cause of an acute 
affordable housing shortage that now stretches across 
America.  Homelessness among families today is a direct 
result of the dramatic drop here in the availability of low-cost 
housing that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.  Over the past 
few decades there has been a dramatic decline in the supply of 
housing affordable to people with low income.  This absence 
of affordable housing is, no doubt, the fundamental cause of 
homelessness in America today.  Poverty, a family's inability 
to pay the rent demanded by the capitalist market, is the 
primary reason that so many American children face 
homelessness at the end of the millennium.
 
Entrenched poverty, in tandem with the tight housing supply 
for the poor, inevitably leads to homelessness.  A typical poor 
family with children is paying at least 70 percent of its income 
for rent and utilities in America today. These families are 
clearly on the brink of homelessness. A small rent increase, 
the loss of job, or a medical emergency can easily push them 
over the edge at any time. And the situation is just getting 
worse and worse.  According to the Federal Department of 
Housing and Urban Development, the number of people in the 
United States facing a severe housing crisis has grown to more 
than 5.3 million, the highest figure in more than 20 years.  
Most analysts see the gap between the demand for and the 
supply of affordable housing getting much wider in the near 
future.  A recent study by the National Low Income Housing 
Coalition found that one in three of the 18.8 million low-
income worker households nationwide simply can't afford the 
so-called "fair market" rent for a two-bedroom apartment of 
$543 a month.  The study further found that a minimum wage 
household would have to make 2.5 times the current minimum 
wage just to stay even with rents.  That being so, by the end 
of the decade, more than 5 million Americans will likely be 
homeless.  By the year 2010, a study published by the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology warns, over 18 million 
Americans can be unable to secure housing...
 
Estimates vary, but in the first half of the 1990s, somewhere 
between two and three million people in America already 
were homeless and more than a third of them were families 
with little children. The fact is that children in this country 
now account for about 35 percent of the homeless. That means 
that one of every three persons who lack a roof over their 
heads is a child.  The average age of a homeless person in 
America is... nine!  Families with children not only comprise 
close to half of the homeless population of America today, but 
also make up what is currently the fastest-growing segment.  
This is a chilling fact from any point of view. A recent survey 
of 29 cities conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors 
estimates that in 1995 families with children constituted 
36.5% of all homeless population across the country, up from 
27% in the last decade.  This study also notes that the requests 
for emergency shelter by homeless families with children 
increased by 15% between 1994 and 1995. 
 
While for most Europeans, the word "homeless" evokes a snapshot 
of a transient individual, the picture of homelessness 
in America today is a family portrait. There are about 6,000 
families with little children, for example, living in the New 
York City homeless shelter system on any single day. Ten 
times that number of New Yorkers are only one step away 
from homelessness.  In just one decade, the 1980s, New York 
City witnessed as astounding 500 percent increase in its 
homeless family population.  Every day about 30 children 
become newly homeless in New York City and the new 
welfare repeal law, no doubt,  will now push many more poor 
children into the streets.  Increase in child homelessness left 
nearly one in ten of New York City's poor children under the 
age of six living in shelters or on the streets at some point 
in 1995.  Homelessness among children is also on the rise in 
other American cities as well.  For example, Philadelphia 
experienced a more than 50% increase in families with 
children living on the streets or homeless shelters since 1992.  
The bare fact is that more than five million Americans are 
living near the edge of homelessness today in this so-called 
"land of opportunity"...
 
As far as I know, for many chronically homeless families with 
children the major roadblock in getting out of homelessness is 
a virtual impossibility to find an affordable housing with 
enough bedrooms as required by law.  For example, if you 
have a girl and a boy and they're over 6-years-old, the law 
requires that you can only rent a minimum of a three-bedroom 
apartment or house. The median so-called "fair market rent"
in the United States in 1996 was $543 for a two-bedroom 
apartment. In many states and especially in a larger cities it 
is much higher. As an example, in California for a two-bedroom 
apartment this "fair market" rent in 1996 was as high as $777.  
And I don't even know how much it is for three bedrooms... 
But I know that at the same time a family of three, forced by 
current economy of impoverishment, to survive on welfare 
assistance in California were receiving only $594 a month, 
which is $183 less than "fair market" rent on a two-bedroom 
apartment. It isn't enough for even a one-bedroom and, of 
course, there can't be any illusions about finding those three 
bedrooms in California that are required by law for less than 
$600 a month for the poor family with two different-sex 
kids...  It is incredible that there is such a law in America 
which requires that different-sex little brothers and sisters 
sleep in separate rooms, but at the very same time there is no 
law that protects those same kids from sleeping on the street...  
This is the nasty face of American hypocrisy...  
 
Furthermore, many poor families with little children face 
obvious discrimination here in America when they are 
desperately trying to find affordable housing.  Very often, 
families are told outright by landlords or property managers 
that they'd rather rent their property to people with pets than 
rent to someone with kids...  Therefore, millions of children 
across the country are forced to live in decrepit slum-like 
housing, often lacking the basic elements of civilized life such 
as heat, hot water and electricity. Poor children are more 
likely to live without heat in winter, either because of missing 
or broken heating equipment that the family cannot afford to 
fix or because of utility shut-offs.  Often it can be deadly.  
A study in Kansas, for example, found that children from 
low-income families are four times more likely than other 
children to die from fires. In the winter in cold climates, 
daily newspaper readers find it hard to miss the stories about 
fire deaths resulting from makeshift heating and lighting 
arrangements. 
 
As an example, The Washington Post told of a February 1994 
fire in Baltimore that killed nine people, including seven 
children ages eight months to 11 years old. The cause of the 
fire was due to overturned candles because the electricity had 
been shut off.  The same newspaper also reported in 
December 1993 that neighbors listened in horror as five- and 
six-year-old sisters trapped in their burning Washington, D.C., 
home screamed for help...  Again, candles were being used 
because electricity had been shut off.  Four little children 
died December 26, 1995 in Ukiah, California, in a house fire 
caused by the shut off of electricity to their home.  The 
municipal-owned electric company cut off power over a back 
bill of $250, forcing Christy and Emmit Kuns and their six 
children to use candles to light and heat their home.  The 
Kuns' family was living in poverty, with the father's wages 
too low to support his wife and six children.  The electricity 
was shut off after the family had fallen three months behind 
in paying its bill.  It was the fourth time since 1993 that 
electricity was shut off for nonpayment.  This time it was 
fatal...
 
High housing costs not only mean that poor families have less 
money to purchase food and other necessities, but often it also 
simply compels them to accept substandard and inadequate 
housing. As a result, millions of children in this country are 
poorly, inadequately or even dangerously housed, whether in 
rural slums or urban ghettos. Such housing problems, of 
course,  can trigger or exacerbate a child's lasting educational 
and health problems. Over a half of all homeless children 
never have lived in anything other than some kind of 
temporary housing. It goes without saying, homelessness is 
a very devastating experience for a child, because a home is 
much more than only four walls and a roof. A home provides 
warmth, security and continuity. It does not take very long for 
homelessness to destroy the inner beauty of a child. In the 
words of  Robert M. Hayes, advocate for the homeless,  
"There is no surer way to destroy the beauty of childhood than 
by rendering a child homeless. It strips a child of the values 
that create humane adults.  It erodes a child's sensitivity, 
ethics, and ability to love.  And it destroys children by a slow 
death".  The life of a homeless child is dangerous, fragmented, 
and without any sense of security. Homeless children very 
quickly lose their emotional anchor - and eventually their 
chance at an education. Statistics show that more than half of 
all homeless children fail to attend school on a regular basis. 
As I see it, all the misery of a child's poverty cannot compare 
to the wretchedness of life for a homeless child.  As basic as 
food, shelter, and clothing are for human beings, children who 
do not know the security of permanence are irrevocably 
harmed.
 
Millions of American children experience a childhood lacking 
in the essential requirements for good health, physical safety 
and proper mental and social development.  These poor 
children are much more likely to have higher rates of 
developmental and learning disabilities. In general, poverty is 
a key roadblock to a child's education.  As already mentioned 
earlier, the inadequate prenatal care poor mothers receive 
significantly increases their babies' risk of being born too 
early and underweight, conditions that can lead to 
developmental and learning disabilities as they grow up.  
 
Children who begin life in poverty are at a huge disadvantage 
when they enter kindergarten, and a shortage of resources 
dogs them relentlessly through every stage of the educational 
process. By the time they reach kindergarten age, they are 
already falling behind through no fault of their own. The 
Carnegie Foundation recently reported that 35 percent of 
American kindergarten age children arrive at school 
absolutely unprepared to learn.  There's a wider gap in the 
skills of children entering school now than there was 20 years 
ago, education researchers say. Many more American children 
today have a very low level of skills - they can barely hold 
a pencil, aren't used to routine and don't even know how to turn 
to adults for help. "There are more children at the lower end, 
and there are children who are extending the lower end even 
lower," ascertains Robert C. Pianta, an associate professor 
at University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. He has 
looked at school readiness of about 1,000 American kindergartners. 
A major reason for this lag is poverty, prof.Pianta says. 
 
Millions of kids in America these days have been exposed to 
family and neighborhood chaos. Poverty restricts the range of 
neighborhoods in which their families can afford to live. As 
a result poor children living in those chaotic environments have 
had no predictable routines in their lives, and they have had no 
close relationships with adults. These kids are more likely to 
have few social skills and little ability to tolerate frustration. 
That being so, they simply don't even know how to adapt to 
basic routines in school or use books.
 
Poverty limits children's resources for learning both at home 
and in school.  When poor children in America reach school 
age, they must often attend inferior schools.  Because of 
where they are compelled to live, students from low-income 
families usually receive their education in the poorest schools, 
according to the National Academy of Sciences.  Children 
living in high-poverty areas frequently attend schools that are 
under-funded and ill-equipped to meet their educational and 
social needs.  As for example, one elementary school in 
Brooklyn, N.Y., was so overcrowded that school officials 
converted an abandoned bathroom into a classroom.  Children 
at this school were forced to sit at school tables that were 
placed in front of open urinals...  And head lice is a perennial 
scourge of elementary schools across America...
 
The United States spends only 0.3% of the federal budget on 
elementary and secondary education.  Lack of money means 
lack of resources. Schoolchildren in America have to go and 
sell candy door-to-door or wash cars to keep the school library 
open, while there is plenty of money in this country for such 
military projects as "star wars"... In California, for example, 
the prison budget increased by 500% in the past 15 years, while 
funding to education was cut by $70 billion. Besides, the 
teacher-to-student ratio and the average class size in the 
United States also lags behind 18 countries, including Libya 
and Lebanon.
 
Therefore, no wonder that underachievement and failure in 
the education of Americans are now widespread. Across the 
United States, combined average Scholastic Aptitude Test 
(SAT) scores have fallen 70 points since 1963.  Today U.S. 
children perform very poorly on all standardized tests, in 
comparison to children in other countries.   Americans are at 
or near the bottom in most international surveys measuring 
educational achievement: 7th out of ten countries in physics;  
9th out of ten countries in chemistry; and 10th - dead last - in 
average mathematics proficiency. International Assessment of 
Math and Science looked at students in the United States and 
eleven other advanced industrial countries. The American 
students came out last in mathematics and next to last in 
science.
 
According to Richard Jaeger, a professor of educational 
research at the University of North Carolina, America's 
schools are not the first to blame for such a poor performance 
of U.S. students on international achievement tests.  Jaeger, 
who analyzed the results of those tests administered in 14 
nations in 1991, notes that societal factors are essential to 
school success.  He says that America's rising childhood 
poverty rate, breakdown of families and all other social 
problems account for all of the disparity between American 
and foreign students' achievement.  
 
It's not just math or science skills that leave American students 
behind the rest of the world. They also seem to know very 
little about the world they live in. In a poll  that ABC News 
conducted for one of its programs in 1988, fewer than half the 
students knew what apartheid in South Africa was, and nearly 
70 percent hadn't even heard of Chernobyl, the worst nuclear 
accident in the world that happened in 1986. Actually, 
American students absorb very little factual knowledge during 
their years in school. Geography is a particularly weak area 
for most of them. A 1987 study of 5,000 high school seniors 
in eight major American cities found that 25 percent of the 
students tested could not identify the country that borders 
the U.S. on the south. According to a series of New York Times 
surveys, forty years ago 84 percent of American college 
students knew that Manila was the capital of the Philippines; 
and today only 27 percent know the correct answer to that 
same question.  They don't even know their own history of 
the United States.  In a 1990 study by the National Endowment 
for the Humanities, more than 40 percent of college seniors 
did not know when the Civil War in the U.S. was fought. 
 A shocking 20 percent of American sixth-graders cannot locate 
their country on a world map.  Well, 40 percent of today's 
fourth-graders in America actually believe the world is flat...
 
There was an interesting report from a Temple University 
psychologist, whose 10-year study found that a large 
percentage of American teenagers act dumb to avoid being 
ridiculed by friends.  Only one in ten said they wanted to be 
known for their intelligence.  I think, after a while, stupidity 
stops being an act and becomes the real thing...  Moreover, 
I would say, the American educational system is purposefully 
designed to make people, to borrow Adam Smith's phrase, 
"as stupid and ignorant as it's possible for a human being to be".  
There are huge efforts in this country toward preventing 
people from independent thinking.  Americans go through 
their entire life with this mutilating educational process plus 
the poison of corporate propaganda and, as a result, submit 
themselves to this evil system.
 
A dramatic measure of the U.S. educational system is its 
record of illiteracy. Over the last thirty years the United States 
has dropped from 18th to 49th place among nations in terms 
of the proportion of the population that is literate.  According 
to the U.S. Department of Education, today approximately 27 
million people or one out of every five American 
(non-immigrant) adults, has not attained even "basic literacy" 
(a fourth-grade reading level), which means that they cannot 
read the simplest texts such as street signs.  It is known as 
functional illiteracy. Another 45 million people in America are 
only marginally literate. They cannot read a newspaper or 
write at the eighth-grade level, which is thought to be the 
minimal educational requirement for a normal person.  Every 
week, 44,000 people are added to the adult illiterate 
population of the United States.  This adds up to 2.2 million 
people per year. According to Jonathan Kozol, the author of 
book Illiterate America, for example, in Boston, 40 
percent of the adult population are illiterate. 
 
In fact, standards in many high schools in this country today 
are so low that hundreds of thousands of functionally illiterate 
young people graduate every year. At least 700,000 American 
high school graduates get diplomas each year and cannot read 
them.  More than that, a 1993 survey by the National Center 
for Education Statistics showed that half of 5,000 college 
graduates surveyed could not read or interpret a simple bus 
schedule...  I think, if an illiterate person can graduate from 
a university here, something is uniquely wrong  with the 
American education system.
 
In most of the other countries, the number of well-educated 
people rose rapidly during the last few decades.  Only here, in 
the United States, the proportion of youngsters finishing high 
school actually dropped from the late 1960s to the 1980s.  
The national high school dropout rate in the U.S. is now 
approaching 30 percent. It goes without saying that graduating 
from high school is critical for obtaining post-secondary 
education and getting a good job in any society.  Teens who 
drop out of high school  face enormous odds for achieving 
economic success in life. Ninety percent of Japanese teenagers 
successfully complete high school, compared with only 73 
percent in America.  We already can see very clear results... 
 
Not only do more Japanese students graduate high school, but 
also those graduates know much more than their American 
counterparts. Japanese children spend 240 days in school in 
contrast to the 180 days American children spend. Experts 
believe that an average high school education in Japan can be 
equated with an average college education in the United 
States. The majority of Americans graduate from high school 
(if they  graduate at all) with less knowledge and fewer skills 
than students in any other developed nation.  Especially kids 
from poor families, and minority students here are 
disproportionately unlikely to achieve even the minimal 
standards of education necessary today. Fourteen percent of 
all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered 
functionally illiterate, and rates among  minorities are well 
above that level. As I have already said, such illiteracy means 
that those individuals cannot read and understand material of 
practical significance in everyday life.
 
I think, everybody will agree that the only real way out of 
poverty these days is through education. It's true anywhere 
in the world. Unfortunately, when poor American children 
manage to finish high school, they are more likely to stop 
there rather than continue on to higher education. The costs of 
getting a college degree in the United States have been rising 
astronomically in recent years. In this country college 
education now is simply beyond the reach of millions of kids.  
Even when those students from poor families graduate from 
high school and are academically prepared to attend college, 
poverty creates insuperable barriers to their postsecondary 
education.  The most important obstacle, of course, is the cost 
of higher education in America.  A family with a 9-year-old 
child today should start salting away as much as $456 every 
month right now if they want to send the little one to the 
average state college in the year 2005...  If you're thinking 
about, say, Stanford or Harvard, raise that figure to $1,290 
a month... Who can afford that?  
 
That is why borrowing money to pay for college has soared in 
America in recent years.  In 1984 students and their parents 
borrowed $7.9 billion for higher education.  By the end of 
1994, that figure had grown to $23.1 billion, according to U.S. 
Department of Education.  Loans are now the principal source 
of money American students use for paying college tuition - 
not because they want to, but because there is no other way.  
Student loans have gone from being the exception to the 
norm: More than 50 percent of the students from four-year 
colleges graduate with a debt burden of at least $10,000.  
The number of students who borrowed money for paying tuition 
surged 62 percent from 620,000 in 1993 to more than 
1 million in 1995, according to the report released by the 
Education Resources Institute in Boston.  Low-income and 
minority students are borrowing at the highest rate.  The 
report says that 77 percent of students with a family income 
below $10,000 take out loans today to pay for education.
 
These educational underachievements and failures already 
reach deep into whole American society today. According to 
one survey, fewer than half of all American youngsters can 
determine the correct change after purchasing a hamburger 
and a soda at McDonald's... If such a large proportion of 
American youth lack such basic skills, they are clearly 
deficient in those math and other abilities demanded by an 
increasingly competitive labor market today and especially 
in the near future.  Such an impressive level of educational 
failure among young Americans already has serious 
repercussions in the labor market here. Good example: A New 
York Telephone company had to test 57,000 people before it 
could find 2,100 who were educated well enough for simple 
entry-level jobs as operators or repair technicians.  So, 
what can they expect in a few decades from now? 
 

Given the dramatic changes in the American labor market 
today, and the persistently high national rates of educational 
failure and non-completion of high school, it comes as no 
surprise that the ranks of people living in misery in the United 
States are swelling.  But all these problems are rooted first of 
all in the economic injustice of extreme American capitalism. 
Many poor families  in America today manage to survive only 
by cutting back on food, health care, housing, transportation, 
and education. Parents who experience severe poverty or 
economic insecurity, who cannot satisfy their own basic 
needs, are likely to have difficulty in responding to their 
children's needs too.  Poor children are not only at higher 
risks of dying, being disabled, being hungry, being sick or 
being homeless, but also they risk falling behind or dropping 
out of school, having lower than average skills, being 
illiterate - problems that will follow them throughout their 
adult lives. 
 
Moreover, millions of American children today are simply 
ignored or even abandoned by their parents. Millions of 
children are also being left alone during the day while parents 
work at their low-paying jobs, because decent child care or 
supervised activities for older kids are either unavailable 
or unaffordable.  With so many single parents and so many 
families where both parents are working these days to extreme 
just to make ends meet, there is no one around to make sure 
their kids are doing something positive. The National 
Commission on Children estimated in 1991 that in the U.S. 
1.3 million children aged five to fourteen are on their own 
after school all the time.  It may be added that in the average 
American household the TV set is on for six to seven hours 
a day. Preschool children watch TV more than four hours a day, 
and grade-school children spend more time watching television 
than attending classes.  Many children here spend the bulk of 
their waking hours in front of a television screen.  The average 
American teenager now spends four times as many hours watching 
TV as doing homework.  And children from poor families watch 
even more television than those from more affluent homes.  
 
Drug use among American teenagers nationwide has increased 
dramatically since 1992, according to a recent federal study.  
The results of the National Household Survey On Drug Abuse 
found that drug use among surveyed 12- to 17-year-olds more 
than doubled from 1992 to 1995.  The increase was from 5.3 
percent in 1992 to 10.9 percent in 1995.  These figures only 
confirm all other recent studies that drug use among American 
children has increased most sharply during the past four or 
five years.  As a matter of fact, the United States now has 
the highest teen alcohol- and drug-abuse rate of any industrial 
nation.  Drug use here crosses all racial, social, and economic 
boundaries, but in some of America's largest cities drugs have 
already taken over poor minorities. Crack, a particularly 
addictive and potent form of cocaine, which was introduced in 
America in early 1980s with direct involvement of the CIA, is 
now cheap and readily accessible, and is destroying today 
millions of lives in poor urban neighborhoods.  In many major 
cities, 10% of babies are born already exposed to drugs.  
The annual U.S. rate of drug-affected newborns more than 
quadrupled between 1979 and 1995.
 
Suicide among children in America has also quadrupled over 
the last 25 years and now is the second leading cause of death 
among teenagers in this country:  The first is homicide.  Many 
American kids decide to take their lives simply because they 
just "can't take it anymore"...  In 1986, for example, 10 
percent of teenage boys and 18 percent of teenage girls 
attempted suicide.  According to a survey done in 1995 by the 
Children Now organization, 43% of 15-17-year-old teenagers 
considered suicide.
 
It is important to stress that growing economic pressure on 
families with children in this country, particularly on young 
families and single parents, is at the heart of all kinds of 
social problems.  Over the last three decades there has been 
a sharp decline in the United States in the amount of time 
parents can spend caring for their children. According to 
Stanford economist Victor Fuchs, American children have lost 
ten to twelve hours of parental time per week since 1960. This 
time has been squeezed by the rapid shift of mothers into the 
labor force and most of all by an increase in the number of 
hours required on the job. Because of rigid economic pressures, 
American parents are now devoting much more time to earning 
a living and much less time to their children than they 
did a generation ago. Americans are working harder today 
than ever. According to a recent survey, the average work 
week jumped from 41 hours in 1973 to 47 hours in 1995.  So, 
today the average American worker puts in six more hours per 
week than two decades ago. This amounts to almost 300 
additional work-hours  per year.  
 
Such drastic reduction in parents' free time has had, of course, 
an extremely negative impact on children.   Family time is 
diminishing steadily as people are forced to work harder and 
many more hours just to keep up with rising costs.  Millions of 
American families are surviving these days, just barely, by 
holding down three, four or more jobs and working increasing 
amounts of overtime.  Those families struggle to make ends 
meet, knowing that they are but a couple of paychecks away 
from disaster.  Parents, working more and earning less, have 
also less and less time left to devote to their children. The 
consequences are already more than evident:  a study by the 
Annie E. Casey Foundation in 1992 found that by nine measures 
of family well-being, conditions for 82% of all the American 
families  worsened during the 1980s.  "These trends constitute 
a pattern of national child and family neglect", the study 
points out.
 
Much of this is provoked not only by rapidly falling wages but 
also by escalating living costs.  Many American families these 
days are squeezed on two fronts, dealing with falling wages, 
while at the same time facing sharply higher living costs. In 
the United States, housing payments now eat up at least 30 
percent of median family income, up from 17 percent in 1970. 
Another major reason for the rise in child poverty in recent 
years is the failure of hourly wages to keep pace with inflation.  
In the United States the average wage for a male fell 
19 percent between 1973 and 1987. That being so, wives and 
mothers flooded into the labor market in an attempt to shore 
up family income. But most American families ultimately 
found themselves working much harder for the same or even 
less income. People now are working harder and longer just 
to offset stagnant wages.  Many families in America today feel 
like the hamster in the wheel, they run and run and run, but 
they're still at the bottom...
 
With the decline in real wages, the poverty rate of full-time 
year-round workers is increasing dramatically.  Eight out of 
ten working families in this country have seen the purchasing 
power of their paychecks decline over the past 20 years, and 
one in four Americans with a full-time job today does not earn 
enough to stay above the official poverty line. Working 
families with two minimum wage earners cannot even afford 
decent housing.  A single mother who earns only minimum 
wage must work 55 hours a week to stay just above the 
official poverty level.  Over 2.5 million people in the U.S. 
who worked full-time and year-round in 1994 were below 
this level, which is the threshold that supposedly marks 
subsistence.
 
In accordance with the official poverty line measure, more 
than 39 million Americans live in poverty today. In reality, 
as John Schwartz and Thomas Volgy show in their book about 
the working-poor, the official poverty line in America is set 
way too low to cover basic human needs, such as food and 
housing.  This official poverty line is ludicrously inaccurate 
and simply does not reflect today's actual cost of living.  
A family of four needs an income of about 155 percent of the 
official poverty line, which is now $15,600 (for family of four), 
just to buy minimally sufficient food, housing, health care, 
transportation, education, clothing, and other absolutely 
necessary things, plus pay taxes.  The reality is that the official 
poverty line in America is set far below actual sufficiency for 
basic necessities,  while full-time jobs are becoming scarcer, 
and the pay ridiculous.  
  
The official poverty line is set so low that many American 
people living in poverty are not even included in the statistics.  
In reality, the situation with poverty in the U.S. is much worse 
than official figures show.  When the U.S. government 
adopted the poverty line measure in the mid-1960s, it defined 
poverty as the smallest amount of income required to afford 
basic necessities at the lowest level of living for an average 
family, purchased at the lowest realistic cost. As Schwartz and 
Volgy points out in Forgotten Americans, their book about 
working poor, "Divorced from any real definition of poverty 
the official measure has fallen far below economic reality, 
masking particularly the number of working poor.  The 
number of year-round, full-time American workers who live 
in poverty is actually three times what official census figures 
would have us believe".
 
More than 13 million Americans lost their jobs between 1980 
and 1993.  Fortune 500 companies alone slashed 4.4 million 
jobs.  Two thirds of the people laid off eventually found new 
jobs, but almost half of those jobs paid less than the old ones.  
The threat of unemployment, and the knowledge that any new 
job is likely to involve a wage cut, has led many employees 
to work longer hours just to show how indispensable they are.  
In the words of economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, "As American 
companies get leaner and meaner, a smaller number of people 
are expected to do the same amount of work. Tasks don't just 
go away when jobs are cut; the remaining workers just put in 
longer hours, something they are willing to do because they 
are afraid of being laid off themselves".  And this means, 
of course, less time available to be spent with family, with 
children.
 
In contrast, most Western European countries experienced 
a steady increase in wage rates and workers' free time in the 
last few decades. For example, in Germany, real hourly earnings 
increased by 1.3 percent a year during the 1980s and in France 
wages increased by 0.9 percent a year. Moreover, relaxed 
European attitudes toward the work week have been greatly 
facilitated by a powerful trade union movements that always 
have kept the issue of shorter work-hours at the top of the 
agenda. And vacation time also continues to rise everywhere 
throughout Europe with annual paid leave at five to six weeks 
in France or six weeks in Germany. Contrast this to America, 
where in 1995, workers had an average of 14 days off, down 
from 20 days in 1981.  In the United States now there are only 
one to two weeks of vacation time for most people and four 
weeks for the privileged.   Vacation time, sick leave, time to 
care for an ill child at home, and time for parenting a newborn 
are basic social policies that are taken for granted throughout 
Europe, but not in the United States.
 
No stage of life is more important for shaping an individual's 
future development and life course than the first three years 
of childhood.  Children under the age of three are more 
vulnerable to physical damage and social and emotional 
deprivation than they are at any other time of childhood: 
Children need the special attention of their parents most of 
that time.  But there is no such right in America as the right 
to paid family leave, enabling working parents to take time off 
for the birth of children or illness.  That is a basic human right 
in most other countries, but not in this one... Just the contrary, 
here, in America more and more women are expected to give 
birth one day, leave the hospital the next, leave their babies 
wherever they can, and return to work immediately...
 
The United States has no statutory parenting leave and very 
little public support for day care or preschools. Therefore, 
it comes as no surprise that most working mothers here are 
heavily overburdened by family responsibilities. Child care is 
the most important issue for working mothers in any country.  
Child care is essential if women are to work to support their 
families.  But in the United States many more very young 
infants under three months of age are now in poor quality 
out-of-home child care arrangements than in any of the other 
major industrial countries.  The price of day care in this 
country is the biggest worry for most average working 
parents, who cannot easily afford the $4,800 average yearly 
bill for just basic group care and certainly not the $8,800 
price of higher quality care.  According to the most recently 
published U.S. Census Bureau figures, the average working-poor 
family spends more than a fifth (21 percent) of its limited 
monthly income on trying to meet child care need.  This 
compares to a figure of 7 percent for well-to-do families.  
Even with such sacrifices, studies show that the child care 
received by most poor children is usually of much lower 
quality and benefits them less.  
 
Moreover, each year thousands of working women in America 
are harassed, demoted, transferred, or fired when they 
announce that they are pregnant, even though such actions are 
ostensibly illegal. In thousands of other cases, women work 
through their pregnancies only to lose their job while on short 
unpaid leave with a newborn baby.  Yes, the United States is 
the only advanced industrial country that has no statutory 
paid maternity leave. One hundred and seventeen countries 
(including every industrial nation and many developing 
nations) guarantee a woman's right to leave employment for 
childbirth, her job protected while she is on leave, and the 
provision of a cash benefit to replace all or most of her 
earnings. In addition, all Western European countries provide 
a generous package of rights and benefits to working parents 
when a child is born.  
 
In the United States, historically, the most common maternity 
policy was for employers simply to discharge their pregnant 
female employees.  Because women here are not entitled to 
job protection, when they give birth to a child, they are now 
often redefined as "new hires" when they return to work after 
childbirth, automatically losing seniority. This is a large part 
of the reason why working mothers lose about 13 percent of 
their earnings in the aftermath of a first child.  As economist 
Sylvia Ann Hewlett points out, "It's striking that the only legal 
provision Americans have for childbirth - the most miraculous 
event in a human life - is some weak language that defines 
pregnancy as just another disability in the eyes of the law". 
By law, employers are not supposed to fire a woman solely 
because she is pregnant; instead, they have to provide her with 
the same fringe benefits as workers with other disabilities.  
But the truth is that in at least 60 percent of all cases these 
benefits amount to nothing. 
 
In most other countries (all rich nations and many poor 
nations) childbirth receives prominent treatment under the 
law, and is the subject of elaborate legislative support.  For 
example, when Brazil rewrote its constitution in 1988, one of 
the provisions was the right of all Brazilian women to paid 
maternity leave when they give birth to a child. The notion of 
paid parenting leave becoming a constitutional right is beyond 
the reach of the American's imagination. Here, they cannot 
even afford to take unpaid leave. 
 
While there are powerful groups in this country pushing for 
a constitutional amendment to protect the American flag, no one 
has even suggested that the constitution concern itself with 
protecting pregnant women and newborn babies.  And by the 
way, in Cuba - U.S. "Enemy Number One" - maternity leave, 
equal to 100 percent of wages, is payable for 18 weeks.  In the 
former Soviet Union, besides maternity leave of full pay, 
the duration of which was 112 days, laws also provided an 
allowance for child delivery, leave for bringing up a child, 
as well as paid leave in the case of a child's sickness.
 
As for America, a new study published recently in the journal 
of the American Academy of Pediatrics reveals that one in 
four working parents of school-age children lacks sick leave 
of any kind - for themselves or for their children. Poor 
families and those whose children have chronic illnesses are in 
the worst situations.  Nearly three in five low-income working 
parents had no sick leave at all from 1985 through 1990.  This 
is an American reality...
 
One of President Clinton's favorite examples of his "family 
values" credentials is the passage in 1993 of the so-called 
Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows workers to take 
up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off work to care for a newborn 
or for medical emergencies - something most workers cannot 
afford to do anyway. And this law applies only to companies 
with 50 or more employees.
 
There was a story in the local newspaper here two years ago 
(The Oregonian, Apr. 1995) about one young Oregonian family 
whose 12-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor. 
The Gibbs family did the only thing they could think of. 
They closed ranks, staying at the girl's bedside during surgery 
at Children's Hospital in Seattle, chemotherapy, and two 
bone-marrow transplant procedures. In order to be with sick 
daughter the father first used his two weeks of annual vacation 
time, but it wasn't enough. A stroll through the tough Seattle 
neighborhood around the hospital and apartment complex where 
his wife was staying with their 9-year-old son reinforced his 
decision to be with his family full time.  There were drive-by 
shootings in front of the building, where they were staying. 
Various hoodlums were running around that area, so it definitely 
wasn't a place where you could drop your wife and child and say, 
"See you later, I'm off to work". The father had no more vacation 
days remaining, so he arranged to take an unpaid leave of absence 
from work. At the time his employer seemed quite supportive 
and had no objections. Mr.Gibbs had worked at an auto 
dealership for almost five years, driving 120 miles round trip 
daily to and from work. But after a few months he had been 
fired for being away too much time from his job. The father's 
job loss rocked the already struggling family, whose medical 
insurance was expected to cover only about 10 percent of the 
girl's $1 million to $1.5 million hospital bills... I think, 
this is a very good example of the American reality...
 
In American society, all the stress and strain on family life 
triggered by shrinking wages, unemployment or  necessary 
overworking of both parents, and marital breakdown have not 
been counterbalanced by any social help or services. On the 
contrary, in the 1980s and 1990s the proportion of public 
money spent on families and children was sharply reduced, 
and even more responsibility was returned to the family 
despite the manifest erosion of the family's ability to shoulder 
these responsibilities.  In the United States, where the poverty 
rate in the 1980s and 1990s was three and more times higher 
than that of any advanced nation in Europe, the social 
protection system - and public support for it - has eroded 
alarmingly.  
 
American families are in deep trouble today because of 
poverty, forced unemployment, or because both parents are 
so busy working just to keep the family out of poverty.  
Americans can't give their children the attention they need for 
proper emotional development.  When children are neglected 
by parents they're more likely to get involved  with drugs and 
crime.
 
Of course, a very important trend that contributes to child 
poverty in this country is an accelerating rate of family 
breakdown.  But on the other hand, poverty also significantly 
increases the chance that two-parent families will break up. 
So, poverty destroys families, and in a vicious circle, the 
dissolution of families makes poverty greater. The increasing 
economic stress on American families causes them to become 
dysfunctional and break up at an alarming rate. Over the past
three decades, the divorce rate in the United States has soared
and is by far the highest in the world. Actually, the rate of
divorce in the U.S. tripled between 1960 and 1990. Nearly one 
out of every two marriages here now ends in divorce.  
 
The other face of family breakdown is the growing number of 
out-of-wedlock births.  Currently, one in three families with 
children in the United States is headed by a single parent. 
An unprecedented 40% of all children in America (25 million) 
are growing up without their fathers. The absence of fathers 
is twice as common as it was a generation ago. If in 1960, 
only 11 percent of American children lived with their mother 
alone; by 1989, the figure increased almost four times.
 
Child poverty in America is also growing because teen-age 
girls are having children here at a rate of half a million 
a year, and most of these young mothers are single, thus adding 
another turn to the cycle of poverty.  According to data from 
the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the United States leads all 
developed nations of the world in teen-age pregnancy, abortion, 
and child-bearing.  America today has the highest rate of 
teen-age pregnancy in the industrial world.  About one 
million American teen-age girls become pregnant every year 
and there are now close to half a million live births a year to 
unwed teenagers in this country. One out of every five babies 
born in the United States is born to a teen-age mother. The 
proportion of out-of-wedlock births to teenagers has soared 
during the last decade:  It climbed 23 percent nationwide 
between 1983 and 1993. Some 3.3 million children are now 
living with their teen-age mothers in America.  These children 
are especially vulnerable to all sorts of problems.  
 
A recent study titled "Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and 
Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy" released in 1996 by
the Robin Hood Foundation shows that children born to teenagers 
age 17 or younger are twice as likely to be abused or neglected, 
and 50% more likely to fail in education.  Girls born to 
adolescent mothers are 83% more likely to become teen-age moms 
themselves, thus reproducing the cycle of poverty and disadvantage 
for yet another generation. Boys born to teen mothers are almost 
three times more likely to become criminals at a very young age 
and land in prison, or even be killed.  As Marian Wright Edelman 
from Children's Defense Fund points out, "After years of epidemic 
poverty, joblessness, racial intolerance, family disintegration, 
domestic violence, and drug and alcohol abuse, this crisis of 
children having children has been eclipsed by the greater problem 
of children killing children"...
 
Yes, it is very important to stress the impact of poverty on the 
epidemic of violence in the United States.  For children living 
in poverty increases the likelihood of experiencing child abuse 
in the family and of experiencing violence in the community.  
Anyone in this country who watches television, listens to the 
radio, or reads newspapers knows that America is becoming 
a more violent and a more dangerous place every year ... every 
day.  The crisis of violence in the United States has left few 
families untouched.  Violence has affected the lives of 
families and children across the United States in rural areas, 
in suburbs, and in inner cities.  Of particular concern is the 
alarming increase in crime and violence amongst and against 
children.  The rates of youth-initiated violent crimes are rising 
dramatically, as are numbers of young victims.  Every two 
hours in America today a child dies of a gunshot wound...
 
A typical American urban nightmare: a dozen teen-age gang 
members surrounded a car full of little children that took 
a wrong turn onto a graffiti-marred dead-end-street in Los 
Angeles. They blocked the vehicle as the driver tried 
frantically to escape, then opened fire on the passengers.  
A 3-year-old girl was killed,  her 2-year-old brother sitting 
in his infant car seat and the car's driver were both seriously 
wounded in the ambush in the gang-ridden L.A. neighborhood 
they accidentally drove into as they returned from a barbecue 
party.  They were driving home and taking a shortcut. The 
driver wasn't familiar with the area and at a fork in the road, 
he turned onto a dark, narrow dead-end alley where as many 
as a hundred Latino gang members often hang out. The road 
bears two signs: an official yellow traffic sign saying 
"Not a through street", and a graffiti warning in misspelled 
Spanish, "Avenida...assecinos" - street of killers...  This is 
America of the 1990s.
 
Increasingly, being poor in America means living in 
a devastated, crime-ridden neighborhood.  Poverty forces many 
families to live in these dangerous neighborhoods, exposing 
children to daily violence.  For example, in a recent study of 
life for preschoolers in one public housing  project, all the 
mothers cited shooting as their greatest fear for their children.  
In this inner-city area, every child has had a firsthand 
encounter with gunfire, ranging from being in the arms of 
someone when that person was shot to having bullets come 
through apartment windows near where the child was playing, 
tells James Garbarino, a noted psychologist in child 
development and recognized expert in child violence,  in his 
article published by American Behavioral Scientist in 1992. 
A study of fifth-graders in New Orleans showed that over half 
had been victims of violence; over 90% had witnessed 
violence; 40% had seen dead bodies; and 70% had seen 
weapons being used. 
 
I think everybody agrees that all the world's children deserve 
to grow up in a safe environment where they could walk the 
streets of their neighborhood free from harm.  Not so in the 
United States. Kids don't have such safety in this country...  
A child is probably much safer in Bosnia or Lebanon than in 
today's America... An American child is 5 to 13 times more 
likely to be murdered than a child in any other country.  
A study issued February 7, 1997 by U.S. Center for Disease 
Control concludes that children in the United States under 
the age of 15 suffer from the highest rates of homicide,
suicide and firearm related deaths of any major industrialized
country. The report surveyed data from 26 developed nations.
It found that the homicide rate for U.S. children was five
times higher than the combined average for the other 25
countries. American children lost their lives at a rate twice
that of children in other industrially advanced countries of
the world. Eighty-six percent of all firearm related deaths
of children reported in the survey occured in the United
States. Violent deaths among children in the U.S. were more
than ten times the rate of most European countries including
Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain and Spain.
 
In fact, the death of children has become so prevalent in big 
American cities that there is mounting pressure in many poor 
communities to have schools take out burial insurance on their 
young students... Between 1979 and 1991, nearly 50,000 
children in this country were killed by firearms - the same 
number of Americans that were killed in battle in the Vietnam 
war.  Juvenile homicide almost tripled during this period: 
from 4 to 11 murders per 100,000 kids.  Each day in the 
United States an average of 15 youngsters are shot dead. 
American teens today are killing each other with guns at the 
highest rate since the government began recording the deaths 
30 years ago. Three decades ago, feuding teen-age boys might 
get in to a fistfight; today, those same teenagers here would 
be more likely to die from gunshot wounds than from all natural 
causes combined. By the time they have reached adolescence, 
many, especially urban children, have experienced a level of 
violence once unknown except to soldiers in combat.  
 
According to the U.S. Justice Department, young kids between 
12 and 15 are now more often the victims of all types of 
crime than any other age group.  Homicide is the leading 
cause of death for American children today.  Preschoolers are 
especially at increasing risk of being killed in America where 
the murder rate of children under six hovers at record levels, 
in accordance with a recent study by the Population Reference 
Bureau.  This study, "Homicide in the United States: Who's At 
Risk", combed a half-century of data collected by the National 
Center for Health Statistics and the FBI.  Among the findings 
is that murder rates were up significantly for preschool-age 
children.  For example, for children age 4 and under, the 1990 
murder rate were 8 homicides per 100,000 kids. It has been 
climbing steadily since 1950 when the number was 2. Guns 
were used to kill 222 American children under the age of ten 
in 1990. Pediatric neurosurgeon John Ragheb with 10 years of
experience as a surgeon who operates on children with gunshot
wounds says, "We are in an epidemic of children dying by
guns. I hate to use the word epidemic, but that's what it is".
 
In truth, for many of America's children, stepping outside of 
their own front doors is a life-threatening act.  Millions of 
the youngest Americans risk extreme violence in their 
neighborhoods. Millions are not safe even in their own 
bedrooms. For example, in Detroit, New York or Los Angeles 
street crime and shootings have become so pervasive that 
children frequently sleep in bathtubs as protection from stray 
bullets. I remember when we lived in New York City, during 
the summer of 1990, in less than two weeks four little
children were killed by bullets meant for someone else. One
child was asleep on her mother's lap when she was hit by
stray bullet. Another child, a 9-month-old Bronx boy, was
playing in a walker in his grandmother's apartment when 
a hail of bullets crashed through the door. Random shootings 
occur constantly in many places. It is not safe for children 
to play outside after school. Even at home, family members - 
adults and children alike - live in an atmosphere of permanent 
fear, rather than safety, with children frequently awakening 
in terror to the sound of gunshots.  When the nation's youngest 
citizens are left without basic safety or confidence in the 
ability of adults to protect them, they are unable to grow, 
to learn,  or simply even to imagine a bright future.  
American kids today grow up in an environment devoid of 
opportunity and full of danger. In high-crime areas of 
Washington, D.C., newspapers report that elementary and high 
school students talk frequently about death - planning what 
they will wear to their own funerals and which friends should 
be invited - apparently in place of thinking about their 
future lives or careers.
 
American children may be direct victims of violence or 
helpless bystanders of violence. In either case there is 
lasting psychological damage. This exposure to violence has 
an extremely deleterious effect on the developing child.  Some 
inner-city children are exposed to violence so routinely that 
they exhibit post-traumatic stress symptoms similar to those 
that plague many Vietnam combat veterans, as points out 
Marian Wright Edelman from Children's Defense Fund.  In 
a 1991 survey by the U.S. Department of Justice, 20% of the 
students surveyed said they feared being attacked at school 
and one-third of American children fear an attack on the way 
to school.  School violence has increased significantly over 
the past five years in all large American cities and even in 
smaller towns.  Approximately 50 killings occur each year at 
or near U.S. schools, according to the first systematic study 
of violent school-related deaths by the Center for Disease 
Control and Prevention. A study of New York City teen-age 
gunshot victims found that 40 percent were shot during school 
hours.  
 
The number of children and teenagers carrying deadly 
weapons into schools has become epidemic. It is illegal in 
America for juveniles to purchase firearms.  However, many 
children have easy access to them, and they carry and use 
these weapons regularly.  According to investigation made by 
researchers from the John Hopkins University, between  1989 
and 1993 the number of lethal weapons carried by boys 
doubled, while it increased fivefold for girls. Of the 1,500 
students surveyed in 1989, when the average age was 9 years, 
11.7 percent of the boys and 3.3 percent of the girls carried 
either guns or knives to school. By 1993 the proportion had 
increased to 22.2 percent for boys and 15.3 percent for girls.  
One in five American high school students carried a weapon 
to school by 1993 and, according to the National School 
Safety Center, 46 students were killed on school grounds 
in 1993.  Almost a third of the deaths are gang-related.  
 
According to the FBI, the fastest growing cause of murder 
in America these days is juvenile gang killings.  The United 
States has some 1,436 youth gangs with 120,636 gang 
members, according to U.S. Justice Department estimates.  
Gangs exist everywhere: in large, mid-sized and small cities, 
and in suburban areas.  As Ed Edelman, a Los Angeles 
supervisor, acknowledged, "Gangs are very mobile today.  
They don't just stay in one area.  They are not just limited 
to poor areas of the country.  They are all over the place"... 
These Justice Department figures are disputed by the National 
School Safety Center, which in 1993 estimated that the Los 
Angeles area alone has at least 959 gangs with approximately 
125,000 gang members.  From 1981 to 1995, there has been 
a  280% increase in gang membership in California.  By the 
year 2000 it is estimated that there will be about 250,000 
gang members in Los Angeles alone.
 
Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, 
says that poor American youngsters turn to gangs and violence 
as a remedy for powerlessness.  Criminal activity most often 
flourishes in environments that offer few resources 
or alternative activities for impoverished youth. These 
children are the recruits for an ever-growing army of 
predatory criminals.  Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.  
When no decent job opportunities or positive role models 
exist, criminal activities provide excitement, status and even 
financial gain for these hopeless kids of America.
 
While some media pundits and politicians in this country will 
admit that the growing violence and increasing frequency of 
deadly behavior among American children can be traced to 
social and economic conditions, to increased pressures on the 
young, and to the breakdown of the families, they rarely have 
anything to say about the source of these problems. 
 
It is despair and hopelessness.  It is impoverishment of young 
bodies, the neglect of young minds and the abuse of young 
spirits that has given rise to the unprecedented levels of 
violence in the United States.  The crime we are witnessing all 
across America today is a direct result of poverty plus despair.  
Just take a quarter of the child population, raise them in 
desperate poverty, and subject them to TV commercials, night 
and day advising them that life without one-hundred-dollar 
Nike footwear is not worth living. As an added measure, make 
sure none of the available jobs pay more than about five 
dollars an hour... So, what else can you expect?
 
A 1993 report by the Washington State Department of 
Community Development states, "Our state and nation are 
awash in a tidal wave of violence that has reached epidemic 
proportions especially among our youngest generation".  As 
we can see, all these statistics show very clearly that serious 
crimes committed by kids have soared enormously in America 
in recent years.  And those who study the statistics warn that 
this portends a future crime wave of extraordinary 
proportions, since the juvenile portion of the U.S. population 
will increase substantially in the near future.  
 
Many experts believe that within the next decade America will 
experience an unprecedented surge in youth crime.  There are 
some clear-cut social and demographic trends that make it 
very evident that today's shocking reality of youth violence 
will explode over the next decade.  John DiIulio, a leading 
crime researcher at Princeton University, warns that the new 
baby boom of the late 1980s has unleashed a cohort of 
fatherless, unschooled, hopelessly impoverished and 
desperately angry youngsters onto the streets of America's 
cities and towns.  
 
As a consequence of this "baby boomerang" (the offspring of 
the baby boomers) there are almost 40 million children in the 
United States under the age of ten now.  Millions of them live 
in abject poverty.  Most do not have proper parental 
supervision at home, guiding their development and 
supervising their behavior. By the year 2005, the number of 
teens, ages 14-17 will increase in America by 20%, with 
a larger (26%) increase among blacks in this age group. There 
will be about 270,000 more delinquent juveniles on the streets 
than there were in 1990.  So, these children are like walking 
time bombs.  When the current bumper crop of elementary 
school age children become adolescents, the violent crime rate 
in the U.S. is likely to explode.  And if history is any 
predictor, those adolescents will be even more violent than the 
current delinquents. According to the U.S. Department of 
Justice, today's youth are already extremely violent and 
firearms are now used by three-fourths of all juvenile 
homicide offenders.  Therefore, some experts estimate that 
violent crime, like murder, can very soon increase in U.S. to 
as much as 40,000 killings per year - that is up 60 percent 
from the current toll.  This ticking youth-crime time bomb is 
already evident everywhere and, no doubt, it will blow up 
America some day...
 
American children spend an average of 25 hours per week 
viewing TV - more than any other activity except sleeping. 
As we all know, American television and movies are the most 
violent in the world. In 1991, researchers tabulated violence 
on TV during a typical 18-hour broadcast period in 
Washington, D.C.  They studied network, cable, and public 
broadcast television stations.  Their analysis showed that 
the majority of violent acts occurred in children's television 
programming. Cartoons show an average of 32 violent scenes 
per hour. The American Psychological Association estimates 
that the average American child views 10,000 murders, rapes 
and other brutal assaults per year on TV.  By age 18, the 
average child watches 100,000 acts of television violence, 
according to Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles based child 
psychologist.  Before the end of elementary school, the 
average child witnesses 8,000 television murders.  This much 
violence, of course, has an undeniable effect.  Many studies 
have demonstrated the direct link between violence on 
television and aggressive behavior in children.  Kids simply 
imitate what they see on television...
 
Apart from glamorizing violence, American television also 
produces a barrage of commercials. By the time the average 
American youngster finishes high school (if at all), he or 
she has been the target of more than 1,500 hours of TV ads. 
In other words, the average young American has spent the 
equivalent of a work-year listening to commercial messages. 
This heavy-duty advertising creates powerful desires that 
cannot be satisfied by minimum-wage jobs...  That being so, 
the contradiction is often resolved through crime.
 
But despite frightening crime rates and increasing juvenile 
violence, the home remains the most dangerous place for an 
American child.  A study issued in the fall of 1996 by the U.S. 
Department of Health and Human Services says that the rate 
of serious child abuse and neglect by parents has been 
dramatically rising in America since 1986. The estimated 
number of abused children rose to 2.81 million in 1993 - up 
98 percent from 1.42 million in 1986 when the last report was 
published.  The number of seriously injured or impaired 
children nearly quadrupled from 141,700 in 1986 to 565,000 
in 1993, the report says.  In 1994, a total of 1,271 children 
died of abuse and neglect, most often from an injury inflicted 
by a parent or caregiver: 88% of the children were under five 
years old.  From 1985 to 1994, the rate of child fatalities 
increased 48%. Every day at least three children die as a result 
of abuse or neglect.  The study says that those statistics appear 
to "herald a true rise in the scope and severity of child abuse 
and neglect in the United States".  
 
Daily, there can be found dozens and dozens of horror stories 
about the child abuse in newspapers all across America, 
stories like these:  A father killed his 10-month-old daughter 
by shaking her to death in a fit of rage; then took her body 
to Arizona desert, where it was set on fire and abandoned in 
a desolate ravine...  A young woman that was taking care of her 
boyfriend's 2-year-old daughter became angry with the child 
for crying, so she threw the child onto the floor, banging the 
child's head and causing a brain injury...  Another woman, 
desperate to fed her cocaine habit, during a two year period, 
pushed her three daughters, all younger than 16, into 
prostitution, forcing them to have sex with her drug dealer...  
A mother who forgot that she left her 3-month-old daughter 
strapped in a car seat in the 105-degree heat when she went 
to work, finding the baby dead after returning from lunch...
This is how Americans "love" their children...
 
One-third of all victims of child abuse are younger than one 
year of age, and more than half (53%) of all deaths from child 
abuse are also babies of the same age group.  This study also 
found that children of single parents had an 80 percent greater 
risk of being harmed by physical abuse or neglect, and of 
suffering serious injury or harm from it than those living with 
both parents.  
 
Although family poverty is not necessarily a cause of child 
abuse or neglect, the high stress and lack of resources that 
result from poverty very often lead to it.  In the United States, 
the connection between the high poverty rates and the high 
rates of child abuse and neglect is particularly strong. Children  
from families living in poverty are 22 times more likely to 
suffer maltreatment or be seriously injured by parents than 
children of more well-to-do families. And the most important 
thing is that children who grow up in violent homes come 
to believe that violence is a normal and acceptable way to 
control others.  Studies show that most of violent adults who 
are now in prisons learned violence at home.
 
Today the United States with new social legislation, its 
so-called "welfare reform" has entered a real nightmare period 
in which the overwhelming might of the government is being 
used to deliberately inflict harm on the least powerful people 
in the country, its children.  In August 1996, President Clinton 
signed the so-called "Personal Responsibility and Work 
Opportunity Act" passed by the U.S. Congress.  This marks 
the beginning of a new era in American social policy. The 
federal and state governments are now putting into effect 
the cuts in children support programs decreed by this welfare 
"reform" bill. 
 
The "reform" will cut social welfare funding in the United 
States by a total of $56 billion over the next six years. These 
cuts in the welfare programs are likely to lead to a sharp and 
unprecedented increase in poverty.  As the federal and state 
governments continue to implement this legislation, the most 
vulnerable section of U.S. population  - poor children - are 
now being thrown into starvation.  According to a report by 
the Urban Institute, an additional 2.6 million people in the 
United States  will fall below the poverty line as a result of 
these social spending cuts. The Urban Institute has estimated 
that the welfare "reform" will increase the number of children 
living in poverty by 1.1 million (12 percent) and millions 
more of already desperately poor American children will be 
pushed into even deeper poverty.  
 
More than a fifth of American families with children will be 
affected by this draconian legislation.  It takes place under 
conditions of already deep social misery and it will, no doubt, 
destine millions more infants and toddlers to the damaging 
effect of childhood malnutrition.  These most drastic cuts 
in social spending come at a time when The Hunger Project 
estimates that about 5 million of American children under 
six years of age already go to bed hungry every night...  
The "welfare reform" bill makes hungry kids even hungrier 
by slashing $28 billion over six years from the food stamps 
program that helped feed 14 million of poor children.
 
For the first time, an entitlement financial assistance program 
AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), one of 
a handful of key social programs in the United States that 
provided guaranteed assistance in need for all those eligible, 
is being abolished. The federal government will no longer have 
the obligation, legally enforceable for the past 60 years, to 
provide a minimum of financial and food aid to impoverished 
families who have nowhere else to turn.  AFDC was the 
program of last resort for millions of American families with 
children in poverty.  It was a frayed lifeline, however, barely 
providing for necessities, and serving only less than half the 
families in poverty.   
 
It must be said that welfare assistance in the United States 
was always on an extremely low level.  Although AFDC offered 
some economic support, it did so at a very inadequate level.  
For example, in Louisiana, a mother with 2 children received 
only $190 per month; in Mississippi only $120/month... How 
can one survive on such money?  Annual AFDC spending since 
1964 has amounted to less than 1.5 percent of federal outlays.  
In 1994, it was about one percent.  Now, it will be nothing, 
zero percent!  
 
The fact that two-thirds of AFDC recipients were children, 
about 9 million, is simply ignored.  What happens to them 
now and to those who will need assistance in the future will 
depend on how quickly and how brutally the state 
governments move against them.  During this time, as states 
continue to devise their own welfare programs, setting new 
eligibility criteria and benefit levels, millions of American 
children will be thrown into completely desperate straits.
 
Today, the U.S. rulers are trying to cover over their all-out 
assault against the people by blaming the victims themselves 
for the poverty and oppression imposed on them. Moreover, 
this brutal system even punishes the poor for being poor. 
But the fundamental cause of this permanent servitude and 
deprivation is that the U.S. capitalist system is completely 
failing to provide a decent livelihood for tens of millions 
of Americans, and is imposing extreme poverty and degradation 
on the people. 
 
The United States of America is the country with the most 
barbaric social system, and that barbarism has reached 
the point that even disabled children are being deprived 
of the most minimal governmental support. The Supplemental 
Security Income (SSI) program for children will be cut, 
denying benefits to an estimated 315,000 disabled children 
over the next six years.  In passing the new law, the U.S. 
Congress declared that the benefits (which average 
$424/month) were "too generous" and that many of the 
children's disabilities are "not severe enough"...  Welfare 
"reform" cuts will also affect poor and disabled children's 
eligibility for Medicaid, adding as many as 4.5 million 
children to the rolls of the medically uninsured.
 
This destruction of all social welfare programs in 
America has two purposes: to free billions in federal 
money which can be funneled to the rich in the form of tax 
cuts, and to shred the safety net so that millions of poor 
people become a ready source of cheap slave labor.
 
President Clinton, as a cynical big business politician, has 
concluded that he can best secure his own future, as well as 
serve the corporate interests who control the Democratic and 
Republican parties, by placing himself at the head of the lynch 
mob attacking the poorest families in America.  It was Clinton 
who said that "we shouldn't pay people for doing nothing" - 
as if raising children is doing nothing...  And his wife Hillary 
shamelessly pretends to be a child advocate. What hypocrisy! 
The White House has even forbidden the Department of 
Health and Human Services to make any detailed estimate of 
how many children would be plunged into destitution as 
a result of this "welfare reform" legislation.  
 
"Soaring welfare costs" is a cover-up, a face mask to the 
political guardians of American plutocracy today. Thus, this 
U.S. plutocratic system is robbing impoverished children to 
pay for more tax cuts for the rich as well as finance the 
monster of American militarism.  The $24 billion a year spent 
on the principal welfare program, AFDC, is what the Pentagon 
spews in four weeks.  The U.S. currently spends about $767 
million a day, or around $281 billion every year on its 
military.  America ranks 16th in the world in the living 
standards of its children, but first in military spending.  
 
It's nothing other then an obscene orgy of social cannibalism.  
The outcome of this brutal attack on social programs in the 
U.S. will, no doubt,  be social-Darwinism hell for millions of 
people.  First of all for the children.  The passing of this 
"welfare reform" bill is equal to the signing of the death 
warrant for the millions of impoverished children in America.  
Two-thirds of the school children in Detroit, for example, are 
on AFDC program. To me this is like a massacre of the innocents. 
They really make war on children in America these days.  
 
The American extreme capitalist system has since the beginning 
been the most ruthless and destructive enemy of the family. 
Like everything else under U.S. capitalism, the family is valued 
in this society only to the extent that it supports and 
reinforces the profit system.  Capitalism itself is the primary 
cause of family breakdown and the destruction of positive 
social values in America.  What else could be the result of 
a belief system that teaches the supremacy of greed and divinity 
of cash?  This system simply has a fundamentally anti-social, 
anti-community, and anti-family character.
 
So far, the situation in Europe, as we all know, is still quite 
different from that in the United States. In Western European 
countries, comprehensive and aggressive social policies have 
compensated for family disintegration and created conditions 
that allow children to flourish. What most European nations 
share is a wider and deeper vision of collective responsibility 
for children. "In countries as diverse as France, the Netherlands 
and Sweden, governments intervene on behalf of families, reversing 
the tide of cumulative causation so that it spirals up instead 
of down, supporting rather than weakening fragile families, 
transforming the destinies of vulnerable children", says 
economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett. 
 
A wealth of evidence clearly show that state efforts to provide 
resources and time for parenting can markedly improve the 
life prospects of children growing up at risk.  In France, for 
instance, in recent years, tax policy and income transfers have 
reduced poverty among the children significantly, falling from 
21 to 5 percent. Similarly, in the Netherlands, family support 
policies have lowered the child poverty rate from 14 to 4 
percent. Housing and health care are two important social 
policy areas where the allocation of generous amounts of 
public money can make a great deal of difference to the 
well-being of families with children. Unlike most European 
countries, the United States does not fund these social 
services at levels that guarantee universal access.
 
In France all families with children receive an allowance to 
help pay for better housing and all workers have guaranteed 
four-week vacation in summer, as well as an annual vacation 
bonus, free preschools and medical care.  Children in France 
are valued as the nation's future.  Charles de Gaulle, the 
late President of France, once said that motherhood should be 
regarded as "a social function similar to military service for 
men, that has to be financially supported by whole community".  
For me this statement dramatizes the European view of children 
as precious national resources deserving the aid and attention 
of the community at large. 
 
Most civilized nations have a profound appreciation of today's 
little child as the worker and the citizen of the future. Today's
infants are literally the nation's future.  Thus, the health, 
wealth and security of the nation depend on ensuring that each 
baby gets a good start in life and that societal conditions 
permit children to flourish. This sense of collective 
responsibility for children is the source of the elaborate social 
supports that are still so common in European countries.  But 
not so here in America...
 
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 
was adopted in 1989 and ultimately ratified by 187 countries 
as of early 1997.  It has broken all records as the most 
rapidly and widely ratified human rights treaty in history. 
This Convention is an important international agreement that 
defines and sets minimum legal and moral standards for the 
protection of children. Its uniqueness steams from the fact that 
it is the first legally binding international instrument to 
incorporate the full range of human rights - children's civil 
and political rights as well as their economic, social and 
cultural rights - thus giving all rights equal emphasis. As 
straightforward as the concept of children's rights might 
appear, the fact remains that the United States (along with 
such countries as Somalia, Cook Islands and Oman) is among 
the few nations that have not yet ratified the Convention.  
It stands as a reflection of this nation's attitude towards its 
children.  Moreover, I think, it tells us something about the 
country that pretends to be the leader of the world...
 
American government treats parenthood as some kind of 
expensive and expendable private hobby. Under the American 
extreme capitalist system, children are regarded merely as 
forms of private property, with each child's access or right 
to things such as health care or education depending solely on 
parents' ability to provide these essentials.  Moreover, the 
American society itself is increasingly hostile to families 
with children.  Many Americans would rather judge or punish 
poor parents than protect children.  Many here applauded the 
passage of President Clinton's "welfare reform" bill...  
Millions of children here are "alienated from a society that 
turns a deaf ear to the basic human needs and longings of 
every child", points out  Marian Wright Edelman of Children's 
Defense Fund.
 
Therefore, poor children in the U.S. are much poorer and their 
living conditions are far worse than those of needy children in 
other Western industrial nations, according to a recent survey 
of eighteen developed countries conducted by the Luxembourg 
Income Study, a nonprofit group based in Luxembourg.  Millions 
of American children are falling deeper and deeper into poverty.  
There really is no sense of security, no sense of safety or 
opportunity for these children today, and they do not believe 
they can have a better future...  For most of them there is no 
way out of the nightmare that is the day-to-day existence of 
poverty...
 
Behind all the statistics, all the observations, and all the 
examples given in this article, a clear and simple message 
screams out: All this amounts to nothing less than a massive 
criminal assault on the most innocent and defenseless members 
of American society - its little children.  Shameful and 
epidemic child poverty in America is something that no decent, 
moral nation should tolerate for even one child... In his 
famous book on free enterprise, The Wealth of Nations, even 
the prophet of capitalism Adam Smith acknowledged, "No society 
can surely be flourishing and happy when part of the members 
are poor and miserable"...
 
In my view, one of the first priorities of any civilized society 
is to take care of its children, to prevent their needless 
suffering. In the words of famous American writer Pearl S. Buck, 
"The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for 
its helpless members". No moral society will allow children to 
be born in abject poverty.  Every civilized nation should work 
to refine models of social policy that nurture its children, 
should protect and subsidize families with children simply 
because those children are its future; if they are neglected, 
stagnation and decline of a nation become inevitable.  Any 
nation that allows large numbers of its children to grow up in 
poverty, afflicted by poor health, handicapped by inferior 
education, deserted by parents and cut adrift by society, is 
doomed to societal chaos and eventual collapse. And America, 
no doubt, will follow this pattern.  
 
Children and youth, who have traditionally served as a source 
of hope and inspiration for any nation, any society, now signal 
here, in this country, by their endangered status, the near 
genocidial conditions into which American society has slipped:  
How can this society survive if homicide is already the leading 
cause of death for its children?  How healthy can this society 
be if suicide is the second leading cause of death for its 
children?  How can this society expect to progress and thrive 
when at least half of its young men and women are destined to 
be unemployed?  What can American society expect if half of its 
children will probably never graduate from school, and many of 
those who will graduate lack the basic skills needed to simply 
survive in the 21st century? American society, which offers to 
millions of its children only an unstable and grim future, should 
expect deep trouble in response. 
 
The nation simply cannot continue to compete and prosper  in 
the global arena when more than a fifth of its children live in 
poverty and a third grow up in ignorance as in America today.  
When almost 15 million children are in dire need, scorned and 
hated by the political establishment, what kind of fool can 
expect that life in America will be better 20 years from now 
than it is today?  "Children who go unheeded are children who 
are going to turn on the world that neglected them", says 
Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles.
 
And as Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the 
Children's Defense Fund said, some time very soon "the rage 
and pain of these homeless, hopeless, abused, alienated 
children will explode in communities all over America".  As 
I see it, the future of American society is almost guaranteed 
a blood bath - one that will someday make the 1990s look like 
the good old days...  Well, in my opinion, this society will 
get exactly what it deserves...
		
         
         					March, 1997


THE  END