John Edwards for President: ARCHIVAL MIRROR-Call to Wage Poverty War; Former Senator Challenges Students to Enlist in Battle

Call to Wage Poverty War; Former Senator Challenges Students to Enlist in Battle

Apr 8, 2006 10:21 AM

Blake Aued
Athens Banner-Herald
Apr 8, 2006

Calling poverty "the great moral cause in America today," former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, speaking Friday in poverty-stricken Athens, asked Americans to recommit themselves to economic justice.

Edwards — the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate and a likely 2008 presidential candidate — delivered the keynote address at the University of Georgia's two-day Working in the Public Interest law conference. He had a message for the students in attendance.

"Young people on college campuses have changed this country before," he said. "You can do it again."

Students helped bring about civil rights for blacks, end the Vietnam War and topple apartheid in South Africa, and should now turn their attention to poverty, he said.

"I want to ask you to embrace this issue as the cause of your generation," he said.

The 52-year-old reminisced about idolizing former U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy in the 1960s.

"I still remember, as a teenager, watching Bobby Kennedy go through Appalachia and show the country the other America, the one most Americans didn't know existed, didn't want to think about," he said. "It's time for that kind of inspiration again."

That other America still exists, Edwards said. Thirty-seven million people in the United States don't have proper food or shelter, which he said should outrage more fortunate people.

About 30,000 of those people live in Clarke County, where local leaders have organized Partners for a Prosperous Athens to find solutions to the 28 percent poverty rate.

"It was almost like he was talking about us," Athens-Clarke Mayor Heidi Davison said after the speech.

Although many of the topics Edwards spoke about were reminiscent of his "two Americas" campaign theme in 2004, he said Hurricane Katrina, which displaced thousands of mostly poor Gulf Coast residents, shone new light on the problem of poverty.

"They live every single day on the edge of a razor, and it takes something a lot less than a hurricane to put them in a ditch," he said.

Among the specific remedies Edwards mentioned were raising the $5.15 an hour minimum wage, unionizing service industry employees, cracking down on high-interest "payday lenders," increasing tax credits for the working poor, and creating government investment accounts that would match wage-earners' contributions. He also lauded a pilot program in North Carolina that pays for qualifying students who also work to attend college, and encouraged faith-based groups to fight teenage pregnancy that contributes to the cycle of poverty.

Georgia legislators passed a payday lending law in 2004, but also have prohibited municipalities from raising the minimum wage. Georgia also is a right-to-work state where employees can't be required to join unions, making workplaces difficult to organize.

Of Edwards' ideas, Davison said she wants to better promote the federal Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage workers, and was intrigued by the matching investment accounts, which she said might be considered locally.

"It was an idea I thought was something we should look into," she said.

While briefly criticizing the war in Iraq, Edwards said America also should take a leadership role in fighting poverty abroad.

"Half the planet lives on less than $2 a day," he said. "Three billion people live on less than $2 a day."

Conditions in India, where he recently visited, are "inhuman," with flies and open sewers everywhere, and school taught on blankets in the street. He also criticized President Bush for failing to learn a lesson from former president Bill Clinton, who ignored genocide in Rwanda, by not responding to genocide in Sudan.

Edwards, a North Carolina resident, served in the U.S. Senate from 1998 to 2004. He ran for president in the Democratic primary in 2004, then was chosen to be U.S. Sen. John Kerry's running mate in the general election. He is now director of the Center in Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina.