HR CLINTON: LEAVE NO CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND REFERENCE BEHIND

NBC - During the question and answer session, when Clinton was asked about helping the Latino community, she cited her work for the Children's Defense Fund.

"During the course of my work on behalf of the Children's Defense Fund and many of the other positions and jobs that I've had, I have worked closely with practically every community in America. I don't know any that I haven't worked with. Obviously, I have deep roots and very strong relationships in the African-American community and in the Latino community, because I think it's important that we see ourselves as the United States of America, that we see ourselves that we are all part of the American community. But different communities have different needs.

[From an interview with Marion Wright Edelman, head of the Children's Defense Fund, July 2007]

AMY GOODMAN, DEMOCRACY NOW: [Hillary Rodham Clinton] used to be the head of the board of the Children's Defense Fund, of the organization that you founded. But you were extremely critical of the Clintons. I mean, when President Clinton signed off on the, well, so-called welfare reform bill, you said, "His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children." So what are your hopes right now for these Democrats? And what are your thoughts about Hillary Rodham Clinton?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics. We have to build a constituency, and you don't - and we profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we need healthcare, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.

And yet, you know, many years after that, when many people are pronouncing welfare reform a great success, you know, we've got growing child poverty, we have more children in poverty and in extreme poverty over the last six years than we had earlier in the year. When an economy is down, and the real test of welfare reform is what happens to the poor when the economy is not booming. Well, the poor are suffering, the gap between rich and poor widening. We have what I consider one of - a growing national catastrophe of what we call the cradle-to-prison pipeline. A black boy today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, a black girl a one-in-seventeen chance. A Latino boy who's born in 2001 has a one-in-six chance of going to prison. We are seeing more and more children go into our child welfare systems, go dropping out of school, going into juvenile justice detention facilities. Many children are sitting up - 15,000, according to a recent congressional GAO study - are sitting up in juvenile institutions solely because their parents could not get mental health and healthcare in their community. This is an abomination.