By CHRISTOPHER WILLS and DEANNA BELLANDI, Associated Press Writers
Thu Feb 21, 3:22 AM ET
CHICAGO - Just 23 years old, Barack Obama was nicknamed "Baby Face" by mothers as he tried to organize poor people on Chicago's South Side to join together and pressure the city to fix potholes, clean parks and remove asbestos insulation from public housing.
Those small battles among the decayed neighborhoods and the unemployed left by departing steel mills and factories taught a naive new community organizer that politics included backroom deals not discussed in civics books. Those practical lessons formed the basis of his promise today to fix a broken political system and give people hope.
People who worked with Obama then say he was so naive that he initially didn't understand how people with money and prominence got extra attention from politicians.
Over three sometimes frustrating years on the South Side, Obama met community leaders and politicians who later provided crucial help for his political career, but he also concluded that to make real change he would have to leave the streets and study law.
"What Chicago did for him was teach him how to be practical," said Jerry Kellman, who hired Obama for the organizing job. "The world is not always an honest, nice place. If you want to do honest, nice things, you still have to understand what makes things move."
Today, Obama calls his work as a community organizer "the best education I ever had" and often cites it as one of the reasons he would make a good president.
"We have been told by the cynics that you can't build change from the bottom up. But one of the things that I've learned as a community organizer is that it is the American people who are the true agents of change in this country," he said in one speech.
moreIn D.C., He Offers Contrast With EdwardsBy Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 19, 2007; A04
While John Edwards was winding up a tour of America's most impoverished areas, another Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), came to Anacostia yesterday to stake his own claim as a poverty warrior -- and to present a vision for fixing struggling inner cities that directly challenges that of Edwards.
In a speech at the Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus, or THEARC, Obama did not mention the former North Carolina senator and trial lawyer who has made poverty a centerpiece of his 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. But Obama appeared to allude to Edwards in asserting his own authority as an anti-poverty crusader, which he said was based in his work as a community organizer in Chicago.
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But the competing claims to the issue also underscore the deep divisions over how best to solve the problem. Edwards has focused on the malignant effects of the concentration of poverty in inner cities. He has argued for dispersing low-income families by replacing public housing with a greatly expanded rental voucher program to allow families to move where there are more jobs and better schools.
"Too many Americans today are segregated in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty -- many more than in 1968," he said yesterday in Prestonsburg. "These families are cut off from opportunity -- far from good jobs and schools, far from many examples of success, far from the bright light of America."
Although Obama offered some of the same proposals as Edwards, such as a transitional jobs program and an expanded earned-income tax credit, he presented a sharply different overall objective: fixing inner-city areas so they become places where families have a shot at prospering, without having to move.
As an example, he cited the Harlem Children's Zone, an initiative that seeks to improve one section of that New York neighborhood with an array of services, including prenatal counseling, early childhood education and free medical services. Obama urged replicating the program in 20 cities, which he estimated would cost a few billion dollars a year. "If poverty is a disease that infects the entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation," he said. "We have to heal that entire community."
There are downsides to both approaches, experts say. A federal experiment called Moving to Opportunity found that families given vouchers to move out of inner-city public housing reported improved health but few gains in earnings, educational outcomes and the well-being of teenage boys. Those studying the results say many families did not move far enough, possibly because of a lack of affordable housing in better areas.
At the same time, many attempts to lift blighted areas have been unsuccessful, which is one reason Edwards has argued for a more radical approach. There are few examples of skill-development initiatives, beyond the Harlem one, that have succeeded on the scale Obama proposes. He would increase funding for the Community Development Block Grant program, but billions spent on jobs and housing through the grants over the years have failed to turn around many areas.
The candidates' contrasting approaches to inner-city blight point to broader differences in their perspective, said Greg Duncan, a Northwestern University economist. Edwards grew up in rural North Carolina and often seems more comfortable in rural settings than in urban ones, whereas Obama got his poverty education on Chicago's South Side and speaks more freely about the cultural underpinnings of urban ills, such as absent fathers.
more Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Legislation would aim to cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senators Barack Obama (D-IL), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA) today hailed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's passage of the Global Poverty Act (S.2433), which requires the President to develop and implement a comprehensive policy to cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief, and coordination with the international community, businesses and NGOs. This legislation was introduced in December. Smith and Congressman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) sponsored the House version of the bill (H.R. 1302), which passed the House last September.
"With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces," said Senator Obama. "It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America's standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere. I commend Chairman Biden and Ranking Member Lugar for supporting this bill and moving it forward quickly."
"Poverty, hunger, and disease will be among the most serious challenges confronting the world in the 21st century," Senator Hagel said. "This legislation provides the President of the United States the framework and resources to help implement a comprehensive policy to reduce global poverty. It is the human condition that has always driven the great events of history. This is a responsibility of all citizens of the world."
"Global poverty directly impacts our national security. We must rally private sector and government resources to eliminate extreme global poverty and to fight global disease." said Senator Cantwell. "With more than 1.1 billion men, women and children throughout the world living on less than $1 a day, it is of the utmost importance to make sure these people get the help they need and push for sustainable economic growth. We need to do more to save lives in the poorest countries and extend our hand to people in need."
"Global poverty is one of the greatest moral and security challenges facing the world today. Nearly 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day and close to a billion live on less than $1 a day. This bill represents a major advance in our effort to address global poverty. After introducing this measure in the House for the past several years, I am pleased to see the Senate Foreign Relations Committee take significant steps toward its final passage," Congressman Smith said.
For years, America has committed to improving the lives of the world's poorest people. In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015. We are halfway towards this deadline, and it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day.
The Global Poverty Act:
- Declares it official U.S. policy to promote the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme global poverty in half by 2015.
- Requires the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to carry out that policy.
- Includes guidelines for what the strategy should include - from aid, trade, and debt relief, to working with the international community, businesses and NGOs, to ensuring environmental sustainability.
- Requires that the President's strategy include specific and measurable goals, efforts to be undertaken, benchmarks, and timetables.
- Requires the President to report back to Congress on progress made in the implementation of the global poverty strategy.
The legislation is supported by a broad range of groups, including Bread for the World, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, CARE, Oxfam America, Habitat for Humanity International, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Borgen Project, United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, RESULTS, Micah Challenge USA, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
By Les Blumenthal
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — It isn't a high-profile bill, but the Global Poverty Act has lit up the conservative blogosphere, and even Rush Limbaugh has gotten into the act.
Quietly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives last fall with bipartisan support, the bill, sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, would require the president to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to help reduce extreme global poverty.
Conservative critics — including talk-radio host Limbaugh and Tony Perkins, who heads the Family Research Council — claim that the measure would cost U.S. taxpayers $845 billion over the next dozen or so years. They also charge that it would tie the United States to the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which, among others things, calls for banning "small arms and light weapons" and ratifying the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty and the Convention on Biological Diversity.
They've sought to tie the legislation to much broader goals promoted by the United Nations, including that nations spend 0.7 percent of their gross national product on eradicating poverty and providing other assistance to the world's poor.
Smith says there's no link and points out that no additional spending is mandated in his bill.
He said the attacks weren't aimed at him but rather at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he recruited last year to be the bill's chief Senate sponsor. Smith is the chairman of the Obama campaign in Washington state.
more (PDF)
Obama urges alumni to help fight poverty2004 Report on Illinois Poverty (PDF)
Obama Announces Rural Poverty Summit (Updated)Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Changing the Odds for Urban America Washington, DC | July 18, 2007
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