AMY GOODMAN: This Saturday, thousands of people will gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to participate in an event called Stand for Children. The rally is organized by the Children’s Defense Fund and is co-sponsored by 3,700 other organizations. It’s being billed as a national day of renewal, celebration and commitment to our nation’s children, where young people, seniors and Americans from all walks of life will make a commitment to do better for our children, young people and our families. We now turn to Ruth Seidel. She is a professor at Hunter College here in New York City and author of a new book called Keeping Women and Children Last: America’s War on the Poor.

Why don’t we begin, Dr. Sidel, with you telling us what is the state of America’s women and children?

RUTH SIDEL: Well, women and children are in a very precarious situation. Among the millions of poor people in this country, women and children make up the overriding majority. Seventy-five percent of poor people are women, and 40% of poor people in the United States are children. Among children under the age of 18, one out of every five lives in poverty. And among children under the age of 6, a shocking one out of every four officially lives below the poverty line.

AMY GOODMAN: A quarter of the kids below the age of 6 lives in poverty in this country?

RUTH SIDEL: Exactly, exactly. And when I try to teach that to my students and make the numbers mean something for them, I count it out, literally, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, in the classroom, so that they can understand how really incredible a number that is.

AMY GOODMAN: How has it come to be that a quarter of the kids under the age of 6 live in poverty?

RUTH SIDEL: I think there are many, many reasons. Obviously, one is the cutbacks, which have been ongoing for the last decade or more in this country, actually, since Ronald Reagan. Another is the devaluing of the paycheck, of the minimum wage, and of people who even earn above the minimum wage. People are losing money. They are not making the same kind of money they did 20 years ago. Obviously, the increase in single-parent families, because female-headed families are much more likely to live in poverty than dual-parent families. I think that there are many, many reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you proposing should be done to diminish the number of people in poverty, maybe even to end poverty in this country? I know that’s a revolutionary idea.

RUTH SIDEL: Right. Well, I think that we could come close to ending poverty in this country. I think there might always be a few poor people, but we could certainly come a long way. I think we should move in many directions. Obviously, raising the minimum wage is very, very important, so that working people, millions of working people who now live in poverty, could be raised above the poverty level, if we raise the minimum wage enough. We also ought to have a real safety net for all of our families. Virtually every Western, industrialized society already has a universal family policy, which prevents millions of people from falling into poverty in the first place. A universal healthcare for all of our families, daycare and access to after-school care for the families who need it, perhaps children’s allowances, paid parental leave, a whole panoply of services and, really, guarantees that would prevent many of our families from falling into poverty in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you talking about what the Republicans are calling big government?

RUTH SIDEL: Yes, I think I am. I think some of it can be done by private industry. I think private industry could do a great deal more in daycare and maybe even in after-school care and in healthcare and in many other ways. But I think that, as last resort, the government will have to step in. I think they will have to create jobs. If we don’t want mothers on welfare, we really want them out in the workforce, those who wish to go to work, we’re going to have to create jobs for these people, jobs that pay above the poverty line. Pushing people off of welfare into jobs that pay below the poverty line gains us, I believe, essentially nothing, in fact may lose the families a great deal. So, the government, I think, will have to step in to create jobs. Government will have to step in to create the kind of safety net that, again, virtually every other Western, industrialized society already has. I think that we need government to make our society the kind of humane, caring society we want it to be.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, last year, when I was covering the first hundred days of Congress down in Washington, I was hearing endless debates among, well, I would have to say, overwhelmingly white and male congressmembers talking about why young women — and we’re really talking about girls here, teenagers — have children, and talking about cutting them off, talking about taking them off of the welfare rolls when they have more children on welfare, because they contended that’s why they were having kids, to get rich. What do you think of this whole trend?

RUTH SIDEL: There is virtually no evidence that women or girls have babies in order to get welfare. Sure, people, researchers or journalists, are going to be able to find the one or two or 10 or 20 cases. But overall, virtually all teen pregnancy is unintended and unplanned. Studies show that 85% of teen pregnancy is unintended. And certainly, people are not having children in order to get those miserly welfare checks. It’s not even cost-efficient. They can’t even take care of their children on those checks. So that I think the thinking is really fallacious. Over the last 20 years, AFDC benefits have dropped nearly 40%, and the number of single-parent families, particularly young women having — women having children outside of wedlock, has grown significantly. So, the evidence just isn’t there.

AMY GOODMAN: What can be done to stem the tide of teenage pregnancy?

RUTH SIDEL: I think what we have to do is offer our teenagers real options. We know that in order to postpone child bearing, in order to encourage people even to have fewer children in those countries in which they want to do that, the way to do that is more education, more job opportunities and raising the standard of living. We know how to do this in countries all over the world. What is incredible is that we don’t adapt that knowledge to our own society.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about some of those countries. You are an international scholar. I knew your work in college, your work on women and children in China. You’ve also studied the health and human services system in Britain, in Sweden. What systems do they have, from China to Britain to Sweden?

RUTH SIDEL: Well, it’s hard to combine Third World countries — and China still is a Third World country — to Britain and Sweden, etc. But the thing that they have in common is a belief that the society is at some level responsible for the well-being of all of its children. I think that this really is a fundamental premise of many of these countries. And it’s out of this fundamental premise that many of their policies come. We are stuck, I believe, in an individualistic mode where we feel that we have to take care of ourselves and that it is evil for government or the society to help take care of families. I think what we have to understand is that families cannot go it alone in the last part of the 20th century, in the 21st century. It is impossible. It’s our ideology. It’s our American dream. But it doesn’t make sense, and that we have got to institute some of the same policies these other countries have in order to help families nurture and care for one another.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve just returned from the People’s Republic of China. While you say you can’t compare a Third World country, as you consider China today, and the United States, are there lessons we can learn from China?

RUTH SIDEL: Well, China is a very difficult example, because, of course, China has some excesses that none of us like, along with some really model programs that many of us like a lot. There is just no question that the daycare provided in China is truly terrific. It’s magnificent. It’s caring. It’s not yet for everybody, but there is many really quite marvelous experiences with daycare in China.

AMY GOODMAN: What is it? How is it formed?

RUTH SIDEL: Well, it’s organized both according to the workplace and within the neighborhood. There are many magnificently talented teachers who really love children. I think the Chinese really love children. Again, I say this against a backdrop of, you know, some accusations against the Chinese about their treatment of female babies and all the rest. So, I know it’s a tricky thing to say.

Healthcare, of course, was also a model, really, for the Third World and, some of us thought, even for developed nations many years ago. While they’re phasing out barefoot doctors and some of the experiments that they used 20 years ago, nonetheless, they’ve kept some of the local control and the local encouragement of less professional, not completely professionalized healthcare system. I think that, above all, again, in China, they recognize that we are all responsible for one another’s well-being. Even in their rush to get rich and get rich quickly, one only hopes that the Chinese don’t lose some of the models that they developed that so impressed many of us many years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to professor Ruth Sidel. Her latest book is Keeping Women and Children Last. She’s in Washington now, going to be attending tomorrow’s Stand for Children rally. What do you think is the most important message that you’d like to see come out of this rally?

RUTH SIDEL: I think the fundamental message is that there are millions of Americans out there who really care about the well-being of children and who feel it is a societal responsibility to make sure that in this incredibly affluent, rich society of ours, that there are not 15 million children, as there are, of poor children, as there are today, that our infant mortality rate should not be 18th in the world, that our Black infant mortality rate should not be double our white infant mortality rate, that we shouldn’t have children who are hungry and homeless in this very rich society of ours. I think if we can get through the message that there are millions and millions of Americans who will not accept those conditions in this rich society, we will really, or Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund and all the other organizations that are supporting the march will really, have accomplished something.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you think, then, the Republicans have garnered as much support as they have? I mean, more than half of the people in this country are women, and many of those women are mothers. Where is the mandate for the kind of revolution that they’re putting forward?

RUTH SIDEL: I don’t think there really is a mandate. And I think that’s one of the fallacies that we are suffering from at the moment. I think the 1994 election was not a mandate for the “Contract on America,” as many of us call it. I think it was really rather a mandate for change. I think that people were discouraged. They were disheartened by the politics that they were seeing, and they voted for new people. I don’t think that they voted for such policies, particularly against poor children. And I think that when people are polled and asked if they would be willing to have their income tax raised so as to help poor children in this society, overwhelmingly they respond that they would. I think if the issues were put to people fairly, and they really understood the statistics, they really understood the genuine conditions under which people lived, that there would not be any such mandate. And I think we’re gradually finding that to be the case.

AMY GOODMAN: The trends of increasing poverty in this country certainly go back before the Republican domination of Congress. It went through the Democrats, as well. What do you think is the legislation that’s necessary to help kids in poverty, to help all kids?

RUTH SIDEL: I think, again, I would go back and certainly support raising the minimum wage, which would raise millions of working families out of poverty immediately. I also think that we need a complex system of universal guarantees for all of our families, not just for the poor, not just for the rich, but for all of our families. Again, we need universal healthcare. We’re one of two industrialized countries that doesn’t have some kind of universal healthcare system. We need access to daycare, access to after-school care. Again, we should consider children’s allowances. We certainly need paid parental leave. Without it, single families and poor families cannot take parental leave. We need decent housing. We need — we need nutrition for all of our children and mothers. It is possible to do all this. The resources are there. It is cheaper in the long run to prevent people from falling into poverty than to deal with the problems of poverty. We can do it. What we need is the political will.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you seen any experiments around this country where people are lifting themselves out of poverty or communities are working together to end poverty in a specific area?

RUTH SIDEL: I don’t know that it’s possible, really, to do it within an individual community, and I don’t know of such experiments or such successes. I do believe that people in the United States are compassionate, and were they to understand the depths of the poverty that many children live in, that would not be acceptable to them. And I think that they are ready for those kinds of experiments, rather than the experiments on the state level, the, quote, “experiments on the state level,” which are really a form of doing away with the welfare system. I think doing away with welfare is a mistake. Block-granting welfare is a mistake. What we need is some way of combining welfare benefits with work options and with guaranteed family policy, and in that way, we can raise families above the poverty line.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re in a presidential election year, of course, President Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. Is there anything they’re saying that makes sense to you?

RUTH SIDEL: Not a lot, unfortunately. I hate to say that, but there is not a lot. I think everyone is pandering to the fear and anxiety of the American people today. I think many Americans are fearful of their own lives. They’re fearful of their own jobs, their own healthcare, their own children’s education. And I think that they need someone to blame for the problems that remain unsolved in their own lives, and the poor are just too handy a scapegoat. And if you add race to poverty, you really have a scapegoat that works. And I think both parties are really scapegoating the poor. And this is, after all, what the Stand for Children demonstration is also all about, that we will not permit the poor, particularly poor children, to be scapegoated for the many problems we have in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dr. Sidel, this is certainly one way to get the message out, this massive rally that is going to take place tomorrow. Are there other suggestions you have for people? Because it is an election year, the politicians have to listen just a bit more. There’s a little opening of that window for a few months.

RUTH SIDEL: Right. I think there are other options. I think everybody who understands the facts about poverty, rather than the mythology about poverty, has got to speak up. We have got to counter the stereotypes. We’ve got to counter the scapegoating. And we’ve got to go out there and reform the question. The question has been articulated: What is wrong with welfare, and how do we fix it? I don’t think that is the question of our time. I think the question of our time is — the issue of our time is poverty. And the question of our time is: How do we help families to raise themselves out of poverty so that all of our children can have a decent life? We’ve got to reframe the question and get out there and say it over and over again on those call-in shows and in letters to the editor, in our church groups, in our community groups and around the coffee table where we work.

I want to emphasize that in this election year, all people who are concerned about the well-being of children, and particularly about children in poverty, should ask their — the candidates who are running for office in their area: What about poor children? What are they going to do about poor children? What are their expectations that “welfare reform,” quote-unquote, which, of course, is not reform in my mind, will do for children? How will they help to raise the millions of children out of poverty in their — if they’re elected to office?

AMY GOODMAN: If people want to get information from the Center for Study of Family Policy at Hunter College here in New York City, where can they call?

RUTH SIDEL: They can call Hunter. Actually, they can call the Sociology Department at Hunter, which is 212, of course, 772-5585.

AMY GOODMAN: That number again?

RUTH SIDEL: 772-5585.

AMY GOODMAN: And that, of course, the 212 area code. Well, Dr. Ruth Sidel, we want to thank you very much for joining us this morning.

RUTH SIDEL: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: On this day before the Stand for Children rally that’s taking place tomorrow in Washington, D.C. And we want you to stay with us, because this whole program is devoted to young people, to children. Coming up, we’re going to be hearing from Marian Wright Edelman, who, with the Children’s Defense Fund, is organizing this massive rally tomorrow. We’re also going to hear from a young woman, 15 years old, Wendy Diaz, who was in Central America working for Walmart, who was making Kathie Lee line of clothes. She’s going to be talking about what it means to be a child in Central America working for a U.S. corporation. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Tomorrow’s Stand for Children rally is being billed as a nonpartisan event, because no politicians, no elected officials of either major party, have been invited to speak or use the event as an election year photo opportunity. However, the fact of the event has given politicians a chance to make a statement and take a stand on the fate of children in this country. According to statistics from the Children’s Defense Fund, the group sponsoring tomorrow’s rally, every day in the United States, three children die from abuse or neglect, 15 children are killed by firearms, 91 babies die, 1,407 babies are born to teen mothers, 2,660 babies are born into poverty, 2,833 children drop out of school, 6,042 children are arrested, and 8,493 children are reported abused or neglected. On the eve of this children’s march, President Clinton took the opportunity to speak out about children, but he used the occasion to bolster his image as tough on crime — clearly a favorite campaign issue. Speaking at a Black Pentecostal convention in New Orleans, Clinton endorsed curfews for children under 17 years old.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: It basically says, if you’re young, after a certain amount of time, you ought to be home and not on the street, where you can get shot or fall in with a bad crowd. Now, you want to know if it works? During the very first year, youth crime dropped by 27% during the curfew hours, armed robberies dropped by a third, auto thefts fell by 42%.

AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton, citing a Justice Department report on curfew programs in seven cities. Children’s issues are a particular concern to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been affiliated with the Children’s Defense Fund for many years. Here are some excerpts of her reading from her most recent book called It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.

HILLARY CLINTON: All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, are responsible for deciding whether our children are raised in a nation that doesn’t just espouse family values, but values families and children. I have spent much of the past 25 years working to improve the lives of children. My work has taught me that they need more of our time, energy and resources. But no experience brought home the lesson as vividly as becoming a mother myself. When Chelsea Victoria Clinton lay in my arms for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the love and responsibility I felt for her. Despite all the books I had read, all the children I had studied and advocated for, nothing had prepared me for the sheer miracle of her being.

Even though our national rhetoric proclaims that children are our most important resource, we squander these precious lives as though they do not matter. Children’s issues are seen as soft, the province of soft-hearted people, usually women, at the margins of the larger economic and social problems confronting our country. These issues are not soft. They are hard, the hardest issues we face. They are intimately connected to the very essence of who we are and who we will become. Whether or not you are a parent, what happens to America’s children affects your present and your future.

Government has to do its part to reverse the crisis affecting our children. And to do so, it cannot retreat from its historic obligations to the poor and vulnerable. Yes, we must work to balance the national budget, but we cannot afford, in the long run, or for much longer in the short run, to balance it on the backs of children. They do not deserve to inherit our debts, but neither should they be denied a fair chance at a standard of living that includes healthcare, good education, a protected environment, safe streets and economic opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton raises the issue that’s become a central controversy of tomorrow’s march. While over 3,700 advocacy and religious groups around the country have endorsed the event, right-wing groups are not participating. The Family Research Council says the Children’s Defense Fund is advocating big government is the answer. The Family Research Council is holding a press conference today. Pacifica was able to obtain an advance copy of the statement to be made by Gary Bauer, the president of the FRC. He says, “For the Children’s Defense Fund, the organizer of the impressively named Stand for Children rally, the best advocate a child has is a government official or bureaucrat. But government is often part of the problem, both by implementing family-unfriendly policies and diminishing the importance of the people who best love children: parents.” Those, again, the words of Gary Bauer.

At a press conference yesterday, Marian Wright Edelman echoed the theme of Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, and emphasized that everyone — government, families, communities, religious institutions, schools and businesses — all must play a role in improving the lives of children. One reporter asked Edelman why the Children’s Defense Fund felt it had to organize a massive demonstration.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Oh, because it’s time. It’s time. You know, I and many of the people who work together for children and have done so for many decades, you know, have tried everything. We have done our research, and we’ll continue to do our research. We’ve issued our report on the conditions and needs of children, and we will continue to do so. We have lobbied. We have done our leadership training. But it’s not been enough. We need a movement.

We have come, after many years of incremental progress, you know, two steps forward and then some steps backwards, to a 1994 period when all of our efforts for many years, beginning with President Roosevelt’s attempt to build a safety net, were threatened with those who not only did not want to move forward in preparing our children for the 21st century, but who were trying to dismantle the child nutrition and child care and income and health safety nets. And I guess I said to myself, “What kind of leaders, at a time when 10 million children don’t have healthcare, have the temerity to debate a Medicaid block grant that would take healthcare away from another 3 million children rather than strengthen that health safety net? What kind of people would be trying to talk about welfare reform that would make another million children poor rather than fewer children poor? What kind of people permit its leaders to talk about the sins of abusing and neglecting children, which kills them every seven hours, and then lets our leaders dismantle the child welfare system? What kind of hypocrisy? How much hypocrisy are we willing to tolerate, when our governors and our president go off to an education summit, and we talk about, as they ought to talk about, preparing our children for the year 2000 and goals 2000, at the same time in the Congress, the governors and others and members of the Congress are talking about taking away the health and safety and quality standards for childhood child care to get our children ready for school?” So, there’s a disconnect here between our values that we preach and our values that we practice. And it’s enough.

More importantly, you know, the problems of our children are escalating with the breakdown in family and community. And violence is everywhere, and our children are growing up in a prison of terror. We issued a child gun death report about a month ago that showed not only has the violence against children by guns become routine in our nation, it is increasing, has almost doubled over the last decade. What is it going to take for us to stand up and say that the killing of children in the world’s leading military power is wrong and that we will stop it? So, it’s just enough. Our cup of endurance runneth over with the neglect of our children, from preventable sickness and illness, from guns, from miseducation. And it is time for America to do better.

There is no way that we will ever be able to give our children a healthy and a fair start under any of the terms of the budgets being proposed by the White House or the state houses or the Congress. We need a change in paradigm. We need to say that we’re going to have different priorities that put our children and families first. And so that’s why we’re standing, because we’re on the cusp of a new millennium, and we will never be able to have a strong America unless we have strong children. It is a statement to every politician of every persuasion that they’re not doing enough for all of our children, that we must change, in a very fundamental way, the priorities, investment priorities of our nation, that puts our children first, that this nation can, like every other industrialized nation, give all of its children healthcare, that this nation can, like every other industrialized nation, keep its children safe from gun violence.

So, we’re saying the children, who don’t vote and aren’t Republicans and Democrats, must not be political footballs in an election year and must be left off the budget chopping table and not — that’s not enough, because we’re tired of reacting to other people’s agendas. They must be positively protected, that they must all be ready for school and must be healthy and well fed, and that their chances to succeed should not depend on the chance of the state they were born and of the parent that they were born to.

REPORTER: Do you feel let down by the Clinton administration? I remember early on in the administration there were many very positive, I mean, the Head Start announcements and the school lunches. Do you feel since then there’s been a letdown in focus by them?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, we have made much progress, as you say. We have a reauthorized Head Start program. There’s a new Family Medical Leave Act on the books that the president — that was his first signing. We have a family preservation law that was passed after two vetoes by the former president. We have an earned-income tax expansion, which has done more to lift people out of poverty than anything that we’ve had in a long time.

But all of those have been threatened. And so, we face, again, the dismantlement of both these new victories, as well as many of the old, hard-earned incremental victories. And we think that the president and the Congress must stand up and say, “We will not go backwards. We will go forwards.”

And so, you know, we must have a movement. We must make it clear that there is a broad-based constituency out here that wants to have one house of justice for all of our children, and not one house for the rich child and one house for the poor child, not one house for corporations and the Pentagon and another house for poor, working- and middle-class families. And so, that is why we’re taking this step to build a movement to say we want positive policies that retain what we have, but, more importantly, move ahead to prepare our children the way in which is required.

AMY GOODMAN: Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, sponsor of tomorrow’s Stand for Children rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Edelman says tomorrow’s march is not a one-day-only event, but it’s the beginning of a movement.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: And on June 2nd, we’re going to go back home inspired with a “can do” attitude and keep standing for children. We will maintain our 800 number at Stand for Children, our website at Stand for Children, our continuing interaction to keep our 3,700-plus groups together to share how we are volunteering and tutoring and mentoring. We will continue to stand for children in citizens’ forums throughout this year. We will stand for children through watching out and child watch visitations in many, many communities throughout the country, particularly in the 10 states which have a majority of poor, white, Black and Latino children. Three hundred and fifty college students and their adult sponsors will go on June 2nd for two weeks of training, and they will be standing up for children in freedom schools in 28 sites this summer, teaching them to — teaching young children to read and to resolve their conflicts without violence. We will be standing up together by the tens of thousands with congregations all over America on Children’s Sabbath in October. And we will be standing up on November at the voting time to make sure that we vote for people who indeed value our children, and not just with their words.

And so, this is not just one day. This is the beginning of the next phase of our great movement to leave no child behind. And we hope that it will give hope to the children who are going to come, many of whom have never been out of their neighborhoods, along with many of their parents, and who will see that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who believe in them, who are willing to work for them, to have them have a healthy and educated and happy future.

AMY GOODMAN: Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, sponsor of tomorrow’s Stand for Children rally. Democracy Now! will be at tomorrow’s Stand for Children rally, and on Monday, we’ll bring you highlights of the event and analysis from author Holly Sklar.

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AMY GOODMAN: Des’ree on this special edition of Democracy Now! focusing on children’s issues.

AARON ASMORE: I suppose people don’t care anymore. Or maybe people feel elections have no effect on them. I admit, if I were old enough to vote, at times I might feel the same. But then again, maybe the only reason people don’t vote is because they don’t know all the facts.

AMY GOODMAN: Youth Radio commentator Aaron Asmore of California.

AARON ASMORE: In the recent primary, only about 30% of all eligible voters actually went to the polls. The rest of the people stayed home. Nonvoters may not realize that they are letting the small population of people who do vote decide every American’s political destiny. Since I’m only 17 years old and not able to vote, I feel let down by those of us who do have that right and don’t use it. People can’t be expected to care about every single election issue, but they should stay informed in order to represent not only themselves, but also those of us who can’t vote. Some people might say that their one vote isn’t all that important, but if 50,000 other people with that same attitude decided to go out and vote, I guarantee that their actions would make a very big difference.

Before the civil rights movement, Black people were actively kept from voting through threats and physical violence. Now that we have won that right and share it with other citizens of this country, we must use it to the best of our abilities, even if the outcomes are not as satisfactory as we would like them to be. Whether we are voting for the best of the best or even the lesser of the two evils, we must vote if we want to make a difference. The fact that we try is all that matters. Eventually we will see a change. With the perspective, I’m Aaron Asmore.

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Asmore is a commentator for Youth Radio in Berkeley, California. Next up, 15-year-old Wendy Diaz tells her story working for a U.S. corporation in Honduras. Stay with us.