I want to thank Work, Welfare, and Families for inviting me to speak today. I'd also like to thank the Institute for Women's Policy Research for the solid work they are doing documenting and explaining the disturbing increases in child poverty and deep child poverty during the 1990s -increases that resulted in no small part from the passage of what I personally think was a vicious, retrograde and irresponsible welfare reform bill in 1996.

Yes, could we get our so-called mainstream corporate media to understand 1 million plus black children living in extreme poverty or tens of millions of American without health insurance or regressive tax cuts for the wealthy few in the "advanced world's" most unequal society or for that matter the dangerous melting of the planet's Arctic ice caps as "a moral issue?"

In the social welfare and antipoverty advocacy community, we are all so angry about the crazy right wing George W. Bush administration and the Bush agenda I think that we sometimes tend to forget about the systemic and all-too bipartisan nature of the policies we are trying to defend our constituents against and also to forget about some of the problems that existed and deepened even as the economy boomed during the 8 years when we had a nominal Democrat in the White House.

The Clinton presidency ended without the passage of a national health insurance plan. There were no new presidential initiatives to protect the beleaguered rights of workers or to increase the real money value of the woefully inadequate minimum wage. The average wages for non-supervisory workers and the earnings of those in the lowest 10 percent of wage earners "remained well below those of the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations." Those wages stayed lower even than those of the Reagan/Bush I years. "Wage inequality - as measured by the ratio of the 90th to the 10th wage decile - increased sharply during Clinton's tenure in office," notes economist Robert Pollin, "even relative to the Republican heyday of the 1980s." The percentage of Americans living at or below the poverty level during the Clinton administration (13.2) was only minimally smaller than the corresponding statistic for the Reagan/Bush era (14.0).

More to the point of today's topic - deep poverty - the circumstances of the officially "poor" population worsened under Clinton. There's this interesting statistic called the "poverty gap." The "poverty gap" measures "the amount of money required to bring all poor people exactly up to the official poverty line." This "poverty gap," Pollin notes, rose from $1,538 in 1993 to $1,620 in 1999 (Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity [London: Verso, 2003], chapter two: "Clintonomics: The Hollow Boom").

Pollin argues and I agree that these terrible socioeconomic outcomes, which are especially discouraging when you realize they took place during an economic expansion, resulted in part from the Clinton administration's neoliberal slashing of federal family cash assistance for jobless single mothers and its related reliance on the capitalist labor market to improve the conditions of society's most vulnerable and truly disadvantaged people, including especially children and single mothers of color. That's like relying on the foxes to take care of the chickens.

I have little doubt that the Women's Institute is correct in its determination that the nation's most vulnerable children ended up faring worse over the course of the booming Nineties and that this is partly due to welfare reform. And of course it all got worse with the onset of the frankly overdue Clinton/Bush recession in early 2001, a downturn which seems to have had an especially bad impact on black communities. In early 2003 the Children's Defense Fund reported that more than one million African-American children were living in families with incomes less than half the US government's notoriously inadequate poverty level. This was up dramatically from early 2000, when "only" 686,000 black children were that poor.

Here in metropolitan blue state Chicago, where Democrats rule all branches of government and even before the recession and subsequent jobless recovery kicked in, 19.6 percent of the population lived in poverty at the turn of the millennium. More than half of that population, ten percent of the city's population, lived in deep poverty. Here as across the country, there was a strong racial dimension this all. In Chicago zip codes that have an above average black population for the city, 15 percent of the population lived in deep poverty. In the city's ten most African-American zip codes, each more than 90 percent black, 17 percent or more than one in six people lived in deep poverty.

Our most disturbing findings relate to children. In 15 of the city's 77 officially designated Community Areas at the relatively prosperous time of the last census, more than 25 percent of the kids were growing up in deep poverty even before the recession - at the peak of the Clinton boom. There were six neighborhoods - Oakland, North Lawndale, Washington Park, Grand Boulevard, Douglass, and Riverdale - where more than 40 percent of the children were deeply poor and in the last one (Riverdale) it was actually more than half.

All but one of these 15 neighborhoods are located in predominantly black stretches of Chicago's South and West Sides. The only exception is the Near North Side, which had the 10th highest percentage of deep poverty kids and anyone who knows the city can tell you that's because of the presence there of the Cabrini Green housing project. All but one of these community areas has black population percentage that is considerably higher than the city average. All but three of them are at least 94 percent black.

Things have certainly gotten considerably worse, poverty and child poverty have certainly widened and deepened in black Chicago, during the last two and half years. Between 2000 and 2002, we recently found, black Chicagoans' employment-population (E/P) ratio fell below 50 percent between 2000 and 2002. In the third year of the 21st century, less than half of the city's adult African-Americans were attached to the labor market.

These are some things you won't read about, by the way in this big fancy book that has just been released by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - Global Chicago (2004) - with assistance from it's friends at the Chicago Tribune and the John D. and Catherine T. MaCarthur Foundation and which has numerous glowing references to the glories of wonderfully global military-industrial corporate-welfare receiving Boeing Corporation - maker of the deadly B-2 Stealth Bomber and the savage Arab killing Blackhawk Helicopter - but no direct references to the uncomfortable, merely local pain and experience of thousands and thousands of black children living in the shadows of the great expanding world-connected corporate downtown and its growing ring of gentrifying condo complexes.

What precise role did welfare reform and/or various labor market factors play in the generation of all this terrible and highly racialized pain out in the semi-invisible, merely local and hyper-segregated poverty-concentrated neighborhoods of our great metropolis, recently anointed a "global city" by an eminent University of Chicago world sociologist? I don't pretend to know the full answer to that question, but I can tell you a few things on the basis of our forthcoming study Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago. I can tell you that child TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, formerly known as Aid for Families With Dependent Children) utilization fell dramatically in the city's fifteen most African-American neighborhoods during the four years after passage of the federal "welfare reform" bill. In Oakland, the mid-South Side neighborhood where more than 40 percent of the children lived in deep poverty in 1999, child TANF utilization fell from 48 percent to 24 percent of the children between 1997 and 2001. In Grand Boulevard, another mid-South 40 percent deep child poverty neighborhood and the home of my office, child TANF utilization fell from 74 percent of the children to 27 percent of the children.

Ruling neoconservative doctrine in the United States today cites such statistics as automatic proof that people are being moved off of "welfare dependency," out of poverty, and into something that conventional U.S. mainstream wisdom likes to call "self-sufficiency." But I can tell you that employment and economic opportunity in these communities did not increase in any proportionate measure to the declines that occurred in their children's access to public assistance during these years.

I can tell you that the same neighborhoods where children are poorest and blackest are also the ones that saw the least in the way of the heralded 1990s job expansion, which tended to fly right past the ghetto. Indeed, many of black Chicago's neighborhoods saw jobs losses in the 1990s.

I can tell you on the basis of a recent innovative study by the Boston Consulting Group that these very same neighborhoods - where it is an event when a sit-down restaurant goes up and even Wal-Mart is viewed as a potential development savior - received the least in the way of Chicago's private and public economic development funding (even job training funding!) at the beginning of the 21st century.

I can tell you that one public program did increase the "service" it provides to these neighborhoods. That program is called mass incarceration and felony-marking. You might just call it the War on Drugs, which was waged with such racially disparate ferocity in Chicago and Illinois during the 1990s that the number of black males with felony records was equivalent in absolute number to more than 40 percent of the city's black male adult workforce. I can tell you that a felony record is the single worst barrier someone can carry into the labor market in the contemporary United States and that it is an especially steep barrier to work in the public sector and that black Chicagoans continue to be particularly reliant on public sector employment to blacks and that a drug conviction is a barrier also to eligibility for public assistance.

This is all something to think about as the Bush administration proceeds with its version of welfare "reform" on the basis of the notion that marriage is the solution to poverty for single so-called welfare mothers. "Get married to whom exactly?" many of the supposedly welfare-dependent African-American women on the West Side and the South Side would probably like to know in neighborhoods where less than half of the males are attached to the labor market and where in some cases there's more people with felony records than there are legitimate jobs. Get Married, that's the ticket!

I can tell you that concentrated child poverty, not school funding inequality (which is really pronounced in Illinois), is the biggest cause of black and Hispanic educational "failure" in inner-city schools and so it's fine but in a sense almost irrelevant for Chicago Public Schools' young CEO Arne Duncan to finally put the intra-city school funding numbers out to show that the city's hundreds of 70 percent or more black schools actually may spend a little more per student than do schools with more integrated and white student populations.

There's three more things I can tell you. First, social welfare and policy researchers can crank out every solid fact-based study we want and I'm cranking them out believe me. We can produce as many as we wish but the masters of the current party in power across all three branches of the federal United States government in 2004 couldn't care less. They have a militant, coherent, and impregnable world view, a strident picture of how things work that they think has received a glorious new mandate and according to that view poverty and even child poverty is at the end of the day the result of deranged, perverse, illegitimate personal and cultural irresponsibility. According to that world view racism not to mention classism are over and done with - finished - as barriers to equality and upward mobility. And the only program the neoconservative are really interested in bringing to the most truly disadvantaged communities we serve is mass imprisonment or alternatively the opportunity to kill, die, maim, and be maimed in imperial adventures that only serve the economic elite.

Second, when these enemies of ours - and they need to be honestly and proudly identified by us as enemies - say they wish "to cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," we need to call them on their bluff and aggressively point out that they only want to starve the left hand of government and are more than happy to feed and expand the right hand of the state. They are pseudo-conservative radically regressive authoritarians and ultra imperialists who feed on cultural and political currents that deserve to be understood as something not completely different than a form of proto-fascism beneath all their talk of Christian and family and "moral" values. Bush and Rove and Norquist and some of the "conservative" Democrats target some parts of government for downsizing a lot more energetically than others. They are concerned to dismantle the parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent majority of the American populace and especially those parts that serve the most truly disadvantaged. The parts that provide service and welfare to the privileged and opulent minority and dole out punishment to the poor and deeply poor are generally reserved from the budgetary axe, even if we seen an occasional prison closing or two to help states balance their burgeoning deficits.

Third, those of us who want to adequately serve and fight for the poor are going to need to develop the same consistency and clarity and militancy of vision and purpose and agenda and world view as is exhibited by those who aggressively seek to tear up the last shreds of the social contract and to privatize, commodify, and imperialize every last bit of our public lives and commitments.

Towards the development of that clarity I want to say that as a person of the left, the radical not the Establishment "liberal" left, I am opposed to social inequality in and of itself, whatever its origins. The massive socioeconomic disparities that scar American and global life would be offensive to me - and supremely damaging to democracy and the common good in my world view - even if all at the top of the pyramid had risen to their positions from an equal position at the starting line of a "level playing field." There is no such field in really existing society, but the creation of such an equal beginning would not make it any less toxic and authoritarian for 1 percent of the U.S. population to own more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth (along with a probably higher percentage of America's politicians and policymakers) while more than a million black children live in deep poverty and more than 43 million Americans go without health insurance. As the great democratic Socialist Eugene Debs used to say, the point - is not to "rise from the masses, but to "rise with the masses." Serious progressive human welfare-ism and egalitarian sentiment is in fact about leveling before, during, and after the policy process.

This is quite different from the world view enunciated in Barack Obama's by-now famous address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where Obama praised America as the ultimate "beacon of opportunity" for those who exhibit "hard work and perseverance" and laid claim to personally embodying the great American Horatio-Algerian story of rising from humble origins to wealth and prominence. Obama quoted the famous Thomas Jefferson line about all "men" being "created equal," but omitted Jefferson's warnings about the terrible impact of unequal outcomes on democracy and popular government. He advocated a more equal rat-race, one where "every child in America has a decent shot at life, and the doors of opportunity [the word "opportunity" recurred at least five times in his speech] remain open to all." Sorry, those doors aren't even close to being "open to all." America doesn't score particularly well in terms of upward mobility measures, compared to other industrialized states. Inequality of condition is inequality of opportunity and every kid deserves "a decent life," not just "a shot" at one. And such a life isn't about living in a world of empire and inequality at home and abroad. Thank you.

-- Paul Street (pstreet99 (at) sbcglobal.net) is a writer, researcher, and speaker in Chicago, IL. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).