ing lending practices are unfair. And I urge you to make sure that creditworthy businesses in our urban centers get the capital and loans they need. These businesses are a source of hope and a source of jobs.

Certainly we face a crisis of our cities. But what I most want to put to you today is that, above all, I think we face, and foremost in some sense of urgency, is the crisis of our young people. Not all those who were in the riots were black or Hispanic or of any one background, but they were all young. I was told that over and over again, all day in Los Angeles.

As the Pastor of the Paradise Baptist Church, A.D. Iverson, told me, we are losing our young to alienation, hopelessness, frustration, and anger, to the epidemic of crack cocaine, to gangs that replace family, church, or any other institution that instills the values of responsible citizenship and productive workmanship.

Two days ago, on the floor of the Senate, I proposed a different way of viewing this crisis and issued a challenge to leadership at all levels of society, a challenge to bring about the rebirth of the Civilian Conservation Corps of old, to bring it forth in new terms, in modern terms, not so much for our parks and forests, but for our cities and the reconstruction, the rebuilding of America.

You've seen that point made in the Washington Post in the last few days by Arthur Ashe and by David Broder. It's an idea that brings together Arthur Ashe and Marion Wright Edelman, Bill Buckley and Bill Clinton, General Schwarzkopf and Barbara Mikulski,

It's an idea, not of the right or of the left, but out of the best of America's experience, an idea that is old in the sense that it worked, worked once for millions of young men in the Great Depression whose lives were changed, as they went to work and learned the qualities of productive workmanship and good citizenship at the same time, in teams under discipline with high goals, with projects that they're still proud of when they go back to see what they constructed in those years of the CCC.

The CHAIRMAN. Didn't they also learn, too, that their country cared about them, that they mattered?

Senator WOFFORD. But the key thing I think that happened is that instead of people coming to help them, they were asked to help do something about their country. Instead of welfare, they were given work toward great goals. As one young man in a youth service corps said to me, I chose this gang of the youth service corpsand there's an outstanding one in Los Angeles, as Congresswoman Waters knows, the Los Angeles Conservation Corps-I chose this because it's a better gang, different people, we're doing something that works, and I can change things, and I'm in action.

And I pressed him, and he said, well, why I really left the gang I was in he was a high school drop out-was that, for the first time, somebody came along and asked me to do something. All my life, he said, people have been coming to do good against me, coming to help me. And for the first time, I was asked to be of help for my community or my country.

I think that's the psychological essence of what I'm trying to say. To turn upside down the concept that we're trying to help, that we view young people as the problem, as the enemy, as the danger, to

view them as resources and as talent, and as labor that can be released. In the doing of these things, they learn the teamwork, the initiative, the responsibility.

There's a lot of talk about how self-esteem is important to instill in people. You don't instill it in people. They have to earn it, and they have to have a chance to earn it. That's what the CCC program of the 1930's did.

In the 1980's, all kinds of youth corps, some 60 full time ones, some hundreds of summer youth corps, have come up from the bottom, have percolated up with a general slogan of the CCC: Serve, Earn, and Learn. It's a way you can turn the lives of young people around, as they do something to rebuild our country.

And I would suggest that, in addition to making this the forefront of our youth jobs programs, that we in fact take the challenge of Los Angeles and show how you could challenge and enable young people in Los Angeles to help rebuild South-Central Los Angeles. Now in Pennsylvania I just want to say in passing, we are proud to believe that we lead the country with the largest number of youth corps of all kinds. But it's a movement that has come up beneath the surface all over this country.

The National and Community Service Commission that this body, the Congress, created 2 years ago, is now discovering, with hundreds of applications from these youth corps, the achievements of this last decade, the country knows very little about.

The first grants of that Commission have just been made, and will be announced soon. Hundreds of grants were turned down that would enable young people to serve, earn, and learn. And I recommend that fulfilling these requests be high on the priority list. But, I noticed on the chart the President had youth jobs as number 6. I'd put high on the priority list, youth jobs, but not make-work jobs, not jobs in which the young people are divvied out to social agencies and given the least important job in the back room or something, but work that is structured.

The CHAIRMAN. Focused work.

Senator WOFFORD. Focused work with big targets, with discipline, work in teams, the sort of thing that the CCC Program did.

I'd point out, also, it did it under the leadership and administration of the Army, and unemployed, retired army officers who were enlisted, and the role of the military in running the CCC has not been generally remembered or acknowledged.

At this moment, when our priorities in the world have been turned upside down, and we're trying to set our priorities right, and we're moving to convert from a war time economy to a civilian economy and hundreds of thousands or more Americans will be coming out of the military, there is talent there that once again could be the key administrators and teachers of a Civilian Conservation Corps anew.

The only additional point I want to make in pitching this ball to you in the first place, is that I'm not now proposing one large Civilian Conservation Corps for the Nation, one federally run corps.

In the period when I was working with Sargent Shriver in planning the war on poverty out in Watts, we imagined a 1 million strong Peace Corps to America, volunteers in service to America,

a federally run corps. I would not be putting that forth to you today.

One of the things I've learned over the years is I think that could be done better in a decentralized fashion in which we give vouchers to young people that pay their living expenses for 6 months or a year or more of work in a corps, but let these corps come up by cities, by counties, by churches and religious organizations, by academic organizations, by corporations, by community groups, come up from the young people themselves, the way the G.I. bill enabled young people to go to college, but they entered whatever colleges were willing to accept them.

If we enabled the young people of South-Central Los Angelesand I would say we need to make this a corps that reaches rich and poor, college bound as well as the disadvantaged, a truly representative diverse American corps-we can save another generation of young people from moving out of high school or dropping out of high school into the streets, into drugs, into gangs, and into the dependency systems of prison and welfare.

We know we can do it. It's become a self-evident truth that we need work, not welfare. Let's begin by giving work well structured in the best and most powerful form that the Civilian Conservation Corps pointed to. Let's begin with the young people of Los Angeles but let's move to a national plan that has the incentives that you were talking about, and has the challenge and enables young people, at just the crucial moment of coming of age in America, to discover their powers as citizens.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much.

Senator Cranston wants to make an introductory comment about Congresswoman Waters.

Senator CRANSTON. I'd just like to welcome Maxine Waters, who is a very articulate, very determined, very eloquent, and very effective representative of the people who went through the throes in Los Angeles so recently.

Delighted you're with us.

Ms. WATERS. Thank you very much, Senator.

The CHAIRMAN. We're very pleased to have you today, and we welcome you to the Senate side. I'm keenly interested in your observations and your advice to us.

STATEMENT OF MAXINE WATERS, MEMBER, U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Ms. WATERS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it is indeed a privilege to be here today.

The rebellion in Los Angeles and in other cities certainly shocked the world. It shouldn't have.

Many of us have watched our country, including our Government, neglect the problems, indeed, the people of our inner cities for years, even as matters reached a crisis stage.

The verdict in the Rodney King case did not cause what happened in Los Angeles. It was only the most recent injustice, piled upon many other injustices, suffered by the poor, minorities, and the hopeless people living in this Nation's cities. For years, they

have been crying out for help. For years, their cries have been unheard.

I recently came across a statement made over 25 years ago by Robert Kennedy, just 2 months before his violent death. He was talking about the violence that had erupted in cities across America. His words were wise and thoughtful.

He said, and I quote:

There is another kind of violence in America, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men and women because their skin is different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

What a tragedy it is that America still, in 1992, has not learned such an important lesson.

I have represented the people of South-Central Los Angeles in a combination of the U.S. Congress or the California State Assembly for close to 20 years.

I moved to Los Angeles and worked for the Head Start program in the heady days of the Great Society. Since then, I have seen our community continually and systematically ravaged; ravaged by banks who would not lend to us, ravaged by governments which abandoned us or punished us for our poverty, and ravaged by big businesses who exported our jobs to Third World countries for cheap labor.

Conditions in South-Central Los Angeles and in many other cities around the country are severe. In Los Angeles, between 40 to 50 percent of all African-American men are unemployed. The poverty rate is 32.9 percent. According to the most recent census, 40,000 teenagers—that is, 20 percent of the city's 16 to 19 year olds-are both out of school and unemployed.

An estimated 40,000 additional jobs were just lost as a result of the civil unrest the last 2 weeks. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce has said that at least 15,000 of these job losses will be permanent. This represents another 10 to 20 percent of SouthCentral Los Angeles' entire work force permanently unemployed.

Keep in mind, our region had one of the country's highest unemployment rates before the recent unrest. It is hard to imagine how our community will cope with the additional devastation.

What we have in many areas of this country is a breeding ground for hopelessness, anger, and despair. All the traditional mechanisms for empowerment, opportunity, and self-improvement have been closed.

Let me describe some of the failures that our community has endured.

We're in the midst of a grand economic experiment in this country. The Reagan-Bush philosophy suggests that if we get the Government off people's backs, and let the economy grow, everyone, including the poor, will somehow be better off. So what have we done in the last 12 years?

We've eliminated the Comprehensive Employment Training Act [the CETA program] and replaced it with the JTPA program. In this transition, the Federal commitment to job training has shrunk from $23 billion in 1980 to $8 billion now.

Let me talk a moment about the Jobs Training Partnership Act. Gentlemen, it doesn't work in many areas of this country. It certainly does not work in my community.

I decided to really learn about this program. When I was in the State Legislature, I chaired a Subcommittee of the Budget on State Administration. We had an employment development department in that committee. That's the department that receives the Wagner-Pyser monies, and that's the department that oversees the JTPA money, sending it down to the cities and the counties.

I fashioned a little program with Wagner-Pyser monies for about $350,000 to serve five housing projects. I decided that having walked the streets of Watts, having looked very closely at these public housing projects and seeing young males just hanging out day in and day out with nothing to do, that I would try and see if I could bring some services into these housing projects.

These are poor people piled on top of each other without any services, 5,000 families in one of them. Nickerson Gardens Housing Project, Imperial Courts, Jordan-Downs, Hacienda Avalon, I know them very well, having worked very closely in the past 5 years.

I sat down and I wrote a little pre-employment training program. And I created a program called Project Bill. I helped to organize it. I saw to it that residents were employed as resident coordinators. I asked the housing authority to give us living units, knock out the walls, and create a few offices.

They did that. We hired the resident coordinators, and a little project director, an accountant, secretary, and later on, someone to try and do case management. And we went out and we walked the housing projects and we put out the flyers.

The flyers explained that we were going to try and have a preemployment program. We wanted to recruit people to come in and learn how they could get connected to the Jobs Training Partnership Act programs.

On the first day of the first program in Jordan Downs Housing Project, the lines were around the corner. Young people, young men and women, welfare mothers, anxious to find out how they could get in employment training or how they could get a job.

The first day, we had to take in over 200, all the space that we could fill. In that program that I designed, we spent 4 days in each of the housing projects, and we'd keep rotating, trying to see all of the people there who want to come and find out how they can access some job training.

We learned a lot in the 5 years that we've been doing this. First of all, we learned that people really do want to work, they really do want to change their lives. And they came and they sat for 4 days.

I built into this program some very basic things, because I wanted to know if they knew how to fill out job applications, did they understand how to do good job interviews, did they understand what employers were looking for, did they understand what they had to do to get connected.

For 4 days, we spent going over job applications, we spent talking about what employers are looking for, we roll played in interviews, we talked about people grabbing hold of their lives, we motivated people and tell then no matter how bad things have been,