Edwards Builds New Platform. U.S. Poverty Called Great Moral Issue.

[Chauga]

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post
Wednesday, June 15, 2005


John Edwards may formally deny he is a candidate for president, but it's awfully hard to tell. Last year's Democratic vice presidential nominee pulled into Iowa -- whose caucuses gave Edwards his biggest victory -- Tuesday to talk about poverty and moral values. He began at a housing conference, met with Maytag workers and wrapped up the day at a Democratic fundraiser.

Along the way, he criticized President Bush for a "failure of leadership" in Iraq and a refusal to deal with a growing national health care problem. Edwards said he may not speak with the same voice as Democratic Chairman Howard Dean, under fire for sharp attacks on Republicans, but the former North Carolina senator said he shares Dean's goal of putting the Democrats "back in power."

Seven months after he and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost their bid for the White House, Edwards is emerging with undiminished ambition and a fresh cause. The campaign he publicly admits to waging is one against poverty. In a new round of speeches across the country, he calls poverty "one of the great moral issues in America today."

Edwards, who won a following with his two Americas (rich and poor) campaign speech, accepted a faculty job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, designed as a platform on the issue. He signed a deal to put together a book on first homes and what they meant to the people who lived in them. And he has begun working with college students on more than 10 campuses to build anti-poverty activism.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061401435.html

[cornermouse]

1. Fighting poverty means that you have to bring the jobs back.

This weekend on one of those Wall Street shows (I don't know which one) if I remember correctly, they had someone who said that in 20(?) years, more than 80% of the world's money will be generated in China. With the other statistics he was stating, I took that to mean we still have about 20 or 30% of the world's money worth of jobs left to lose. That translates in to how many hundreds of thousands of jobs?