Apartheid. USA 1988

June 8, 1987

‘Imagine the Mayor of New York calling an urgent news conference to announce that the crisis of the city's poor

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children had reached such proportions that he was mobilizing the city's talents for a massive rescue effort not unlike the one that saved us from bankruptcy 10 years ago,’ wrote Andrew Stein, president of the City Council of New York in the Times. ‘Almost 40 percent of our children - 700 000 boys and girls - now live in families with incomes below the poverty line. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has estimated that half of the babies born in the city in 1980 can be expected to be on our welfare rolls before they reach the age of eighteen’, Mr Stein continued.

Today's children of poverty are suffering in ways that would have dumbfounded those who knew the Great Depression: an estimated 3 000 babies born addicted to drugs every year, 10 000 children living in shelters and hotels for the homeless, 12 000 children who were abused or neglected so severely last year that they had to be removed from their homes and placed in foster-care. All too many poor children in New York are denied dignity even in death, according to a report by the Coalition for the Homeless. The report revealed that almost half of the infants under age of one who died in the city between 1981 and 1984 were buried in potter's field in unmarked graves that their families thus could not visit.

To understand what is happening we must return to poverty and its related disorders - family disintegration and teenage pregnancy. The likelihood of a child's growing up poor is four times as great if he is born into a household headed by a woman rather than a traditional two-parent home. And it is even more likely when the mother is a teenager. New York City has been massively afflicted by this ‘feminization of poverty.’ Though the city's population declined 11 percent between 1970 and 1980, the number of people living in female-headed families rose by almost 30 percent. The city's welfare rolls now consist mainly of minority-group women and children. Demographic projections suggest that this most vulnerable group will continue to grow as a percentage of the population at least through the next decade... The 13 000 babies born to teenagers in 1984 represent a

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staggering social economic cost. Seventy percent of those babies and their mothers can be expected to end up needing public assistance within 18 months. Earlier this year, the Washington based Center for Population Options released a study estimating that the cost of teenage pregnancy was 16.5 billion in 1985 alone...

In 1964 President Lyndon B Johnson declared America's first war on poverty with a battery of laws to improve education and to attack hunger and disease, from urban ghettos to the remote, gritty valleys of Appalachia. ‘If Johnson could witness what is happening in his native Texas today, however, he would surely shudder,’ wrote Frank Gibney Jr in Newsweek magazine.

In ‘The Valley’, as the heart of the squalor in the lower Rio Grande valley is known, up to 250.000 American citizens live in more than 400 rural slums. Unemployment in these colonies runs as high as 50 percent, water supplies are fouled and chronic diseases are rampant. Schools in the main three counties are hopelessly overcrowded. ‘In short,’ reported the magazine, ‘the conditions in the colonies are the worst America has to offer. And the population is increasing so rapidly that studies predict it will double by the year 2000.’ Doctors in the Valley work overtime controlling basic illnesses seen only in developing countries. Their patients' lack of education and the high cost of medicine make health care a Sisyphean task. Diabetes, for instance, which can be easily controlled, frequently causes blindness and loss of limbs in the Valley.^109.

109. Newsweek magazine, from a report by Frank Gibney Jr