Hits, misses from DOE on college pricing tool – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

The Washington Post “Color of Money” columnist, Michelle Singletary, and I have something in common. We are both sending a kid to college next year. A recent column is focused on the financial realities of paying for college, and she is none too impressed with a new tool provided by the Department of Education to price out the cost of college. It’s available here. I agree with Singletary’s critique of the site, but I also see a lot of value, and I’ll get to that later.

Singletary wants the site to include a financial aid shopping sheet and she notes that the Obama Administration apparently will have 600 colleges providing financial aid information on the site as of 2013-2014. There will be several important pieces of information, including the costs for the year, estimate of monthly payments graduates would expect to make on federal student loans. Singletary says “and they will supply information about the percent of students who enroll, graduate and repay their loans.” Actually that information is there now and I found that incredibly helpful as a parent.

So here’s what I liked about the site. I have an aversion for for-profit colleges, as I’ve noted in this blog previously. I think they steal money from largely lower-income, military, and minority students, charge ridiculous tuition and when they do even provide a degree – their default rates are very high – that degree is often worth little in the marketplace.

I tested the information available on the site. I plugged in Strayer University in DC, a for-profit entity, to the search engine. Average tuition is $29,000+, graduation rates are 22.7 percent, and the loan default rate is 13.9 percent. Compare that to Catholic University, a well-regarded and longstanding nonprofit university, also in DC. It may be the least difficult of the four major universities in DC to get into. Tuition is $34,000, graduation rates are 68.3 percent, and default rates are 1.7 percent. Yes, it costs $5,000 more a year than Strayer, but your chances of graduating are far greater and your chances of defaulting on your student loans are far lower.

Let’s try Georgetown University, also highly regarded and in DC, and very selective. Tuition is $26,000. Graduation rates are 93.8 percent and default rates are 1.3 percent. What does that tell you? If you go, you’re likely to graduate and you are very unlikely to default. That’s a good investment.

To my mind, Catholic and Georgetown are priced similarly to Strayer, but are far better investments I think this information is critical for parents and students of all ages. The information I’d like to see added to the site now is how easily graduates find jobs and what they make once they get those jobs. The site wasn’t able to provide that critical information. I have seen that somewhere but I wasn’t able to locate that here. In the next few months, I hope the Education Department make that available.

Thanks to Michelle Singletary for giving these new tools much-needed publicity. The sites are far from perfect, but they do provide some critical information that savvy consumers should be able to use to make a good investment in theirs or their children’s education.

Celebrating Let’s Move’s third birthday – National Consumers League

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By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow and Michell K. McIntyre, Director of NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft

This week, First Lady Michelle Obama is touring the country to celebrate the third anniversary of her Let’s Move initiative. The goals of Let’s Move are:

  1. Creating a healthy start for children
  2. Empowering parents and caregivers
  3. Providing healthy food in schools
  4. Improving access to healthy, affordable foods
  5. Increasing physical activity

Through her various activities, Obama has increased national focus on alarming rates of childhood overweight and obesity; currently, one-third of children fall into this category. By putting the spotlight on increasing the health of school lunches and the importance of physical activity, Let’s Move has started important national conversations about the health of our children.

Additionally, the First Lady has worked with various restaurants and grocery store chains to develop healthier options, in the case of restaurants by decreasing the amount of salt and calories across their menus and by adding healthier default options to their children’s menu. By working with grocery stores committed to decreasing the number of food deserts by building new stores, Obama is also addressing the question of equitable access to healthy food.

While all of this work to ensure our children have a fair shot at a healthy future is beyond admirable, the companies the First Lady has chosen to work with to achieve these goals are not always so admirable. Specifically, both Walmart, the largest retailer in America, and Darden Restaurant Inc, the largest restaurant group in the U.S. and owner of the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, LongHorn Steakhouse and other restaurants, face widespread criticism about their treatment of workers, including numerous cases of wage and hour violations ranging from unpaid overtime to unpaid minimum wage to forcing employees to work off the clock – all forms of wage theft.

Despite revenues easily topping $113 billion, the average Walmart associate makes just $8.81 per hour and working full-time (which Walmart defines as 34 hours per week) would make just $15,576 per year. That means hundreds of thousands of people who work full-time at Walmart still live below the poverty line, forcing many to utilize state subsidized benefits. Three major studies – one in Georgia, one in California and one in Massachusetts – found that Walmart was the company whose employees were most reliant on government assistance. Making Change at Walmart estimates that Walmart employees cost taxpayers more than $1 billion nationwide.

Between July 2005 and June 2011, Walmart settled an estimated 70 state and federal class action wage and hour lawsuits and lost one jury trail, involving well over a million current and former employees and costing the company over $1 billion. The lawsuits covered wage and hour violations that occurred between the late 1990s and 2010, including unpaid wages and lack of legally required breaks. Walmart also faces gender discrimination class action lawsuits stemming from their policies and practices on promotion and pay.

Darden has also had their share of employment problems, ranging from wage and hour violations to racial and gender discrimination lawsuits and policies that result in below poverty level wages for employees. As a part of the restaurant industry, Darden is allowed to pay tipped workers the tipped minimum wage – a mere $2.13 an hour. Tipped workers rely on restaurant customers for the majority of their wages. Even at $7.25 an hour, workers only earn $15,080 a year, well below the income level needed to lift a family of three out of poverty ($19,090 – based on data from the Department of Health and Human Services). With more than half a billion in profits in 2010 alone, Darden can surely provide better wages and benefits to its workers.

According to ROC United’s Saru Jayaraman, whose book “Behind the Kitchen Door” highlights Darden’s practices, employees report they are forced to work through their breaks, off the clock, and overtime without proper compensation.

Last fall Darden ‘tested’ a program to move full-time workers to part-time in order to avoid paying health benefits under the ACA. When consumer backlash ensued and profits tanked for the last quarter, (CNBC article “Darden Profit Sinks as Restaurant Promos Fall Flat” and Washington Post article “How Not to Succeed in Business: Promise to Dodge Obamacare Mandates”) Darden abandoned this ‘test program’. Like Walmart, Darden faces gender discrimination lawsuits as well as racial discrimination lawsuits.

We admire the First Lady’s Let’s Move initiative, but she can and should also play a much bigger role in promoting both fair and equitable workplaces while touting healthier food and lifestyles.

Remembering C. Everett Koop – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

C. Everett Koop’s recent passing reminds us what it means for a public official to put America’s health over ideology. Koop served as Surgeon General of the United States from 1981-1989, appointed by President Reagan. He was a practicing physician who conducting groundbreaking surgeries on babies with birth defects, when he was appointed by Reagan to the post.

Koop’s evangelical upbringing and strong opposition to abortion evoked fear among women’s groups that he would use his post to preach against abortion. He determined early on in his tenure that since abortion wasn’t threatening the health of women, he wouldn’t spend the Surgeon General’s resources on the issue.

Instead Koop, who the New York Times calls “the most influential surgeon general in American history,” devoted his energies to fighting smoking in the United States and raising awareness about AIDS and HIV prevention.  He warned about the consequences of smoking, noting that 300,000 people every year at the time were dying from smoking.

Several senators from tobacco states wanted him ousted from the job. He was unfazed, and his campaign was effective: When he came to the SG job, 33 percent of Americans smoked. Nine years later, the percentage had dropped to 26. By 1987, 40 states were restricting smoking in public places and 17 banned it inside workplaces and offices.

Koop also prepared the first extensive report on AIDS and HIV infection during the early years of the disease’s emergence. He resisted demands from conservatives to remove the recommendations that people use condoms if they weren’t practicing abstinence or monogamy. “Too many people place conservative ideology far above saving human lives.”

He lived a long life and happy life, marrying for the second time at age 93. We owe C. Everett Koop a debt of gratitude for his brave crusades against smoking and AIDS. Americans should remember him as one of the great public health pioneers and a truly outstanding Surgeon General.

LifeSmarts Nationals 2013: Looking for a few GREAT volunteers! – National Consumers League

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By Brandi Williams, LifeSmarts Program Manager

The National Consumers League is hosting its 2013 National LifeSmarts Championship in Atlanta from April 20-23 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, and volunteers are needed! We expect teams from 30+ states and the District, plus at-large teams representing student leadership organizations FCCLA and FBLA, to be in attendance — the largest number of student teams to attend Nationals to date!

Now you can become a part of this incredible opportunity to support teens from across the country as they strive to become future consumer and worker champions!

Please join us and share your time and expertise with these exceptional students by volunteering as competition officials. Volunteers serve as Question Masters, who read the questions and interact with the players on stage, or Judges, who sit on a panel of 3-5 and determine if players’ answers are correct.

If you are planning to join us at Nationals as a volunteer, please click “Register Now!” to complete the Registration form. Hotel reservation details are included on the registration form.

REGISTER NOW!

As friends of LifeSmarts, we welcome you to spread the word about LifeSmarts with colleagues in your industry. By reaching out to your network to share the LifeSmarts mission, you can increase awareness about educating today’s youth today, so they become savvy consumers tomorrow.

Thank you again for your continued dedication to LifeSmarts, and for considering this invitation to play a key role at this national event. Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions.

Introducing the all-new Fraud.org! – National Consumers League

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By John Breyault, Vice President of Public Policy, Telecommunications and Fraud

NCL is proud to announce the relaunch of its anti-fraud education and advocacy campaign, Fraud.org. Today’s announcement is the culmination of nearly a year of work by the League to update its signature anti-fraud program to address the continued challenge of fighting rampant online and telemarketing fraud.

For more than 20 years, anti-fraud education and advocacy have been at the center of NCL’s mission. In 1992, under the leadership of former NCL President Linda Golodner, NCL launched the Alliance Against Fraud, a coalition of groups from the governmental, business, non-profit, and labor communities all united around the common goal of educating and empower consumers to avoid telemarketing scams. This collaboration led to the creation of the National Fraud Information Center, which operated one of the first consumer hotlines dedicated to counseling consumer victims of telemarketing fraud.

In the mid-1990’s millions of consumers were getting online for the first time via home dial-up connections and early broadband networks. This provided fertile ground for scam artists to use the new communications medium to reach millions of potential victims. In 1996, in response to the dramatic growth in Internet-based scams, the League launched Internet Fraud Watch and the original incarnation of Fraud.org. Then, as now, the program was designed to help consumers find up-to-date information on emerging scams and connect them with law enforcement and consumer protection agencies. In the 2000’s the NFIC/IFW (rebranded as NCL’s Fraud Center) regularly published educational brochures, Web content, and anti-fraud educators’ toolkits to help consumers and the agencies that work with them to fight back against fraud.

A new decade has brought new leadership and new challenges to the Fraud Center. With the vast majority of the U.S. population connected to broadband and carrying mobile phones, con artists have never had a more lucrative audience for their schemes. According to estimates from the Financial Fraud Research Center, the annual cost of consumer financial fraud in the U.S. is approximately $50 billion, on par with the annual gross output of the radio and television broadcasting industry. There is a global community of scam artists, as networked and tech-savvy as any Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Their global reach makes it especially difficult for American law enforcement to prosecute the con artists. As billion-dollar scams like the Bernie Madoff case illustrate, even savvy consumers remain vulnerable to fraud.

In the face of this, NCL has not been idle. In 2012, under Executive Director Sally Greenberg, the League launched Fraud Alerts – a monthly email service designed to directly alert consumers to emerging scams and empower them with tips on how to avoid being defrauded. Through the Alliance Against Fraud, NCL will in the coming months redouble its efforts to identify emerging scams and develop new tools to help consumers avoid becoming fraud victim statistics. Today, NCL continues that mission with the relaunch of its anti-fraud campaign. Focused on its iconic Web site, Fraud.org, NCL remains committed to consumer education and empowerment in the fight against fraud.

Through a complete overhaul of its design, the new Fraud.org will make it even easier for consumers to find the information they need to avoid scams. The new user experience includes:

  • An updated search function to help consumers search for scams in multiple ways, enabling them to go directly to a specific type of fraud or, using a more advanced search, identify the type of scam they’ve been exposed to if they aren’t sure;
  • Content that is easily shareable via social networks so that consumers can quickly pass along fraud warnings to friends and loved ones in need;
  • The ability to sign up for regular Fraud Alerts to help consumers stay abreast of emerging scams before they become victims; and
  • As always, consumers who have been victims of fraud or been approached by scammers can file complaints through our secure online complaint form. These complaints are then shared with our network of law enforcement and consumer protection partners.

Even with these new resources, the League can’t do it alone. Fraud.org depends on partner organizations and individual consumers to join in the fight against fraud. That’s why we continue to encourage consumers to come forward and report scams via the secure online complaint form on Fraud.org. We are also seeking to expand the membership of the Alliance Against Fraud, so that, through a growing coalition of like-minded partners in the fight against fraud, our concerns will be better heard by policymakers who can help make a difference.

The relaunch of Fraud.org isn’t just about a new Web site. It’s about rededicating ourselves to the notion that no one deserves to be a victim of fraud. With the new resources of Fraud.org and the collective power of the Alliance Against Fraud, we stand a real chance of putting a dent in the pain that scam artist inflict on consumers every day. We hope you love the new site! Check it out today.

President’s Day reflections – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Happy President’s Day! Over this holiday weekend, I’ve been reflecting on last month’s Inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President, and imagining how much NCL’s founders and champions would have liked this man. First off, they would have been proud that our American electorate has voted overwhelming for the second time to send an African American to the White House. During her most active organizing years, Florence Kelley often decried the disreputable treatment of her Black colleagues who were many times banned from hotels and restaurants when social workers or women’s groups gathered at conferences across the country.

Secondly, though our president is moderate in all of his actions, he also has a strong progressive streak that leaders like Florence Kelley, Frances Perkins and Josephine Roche would have greatly appreciated. After being elected with a healthy margin, Obama seems willing to be a little more daring, and thankfully not intimidated by those who fixate on debt and, instead, focus on other priorities: championing comprehensive immigration reform, addressing the pay gap between men and women in the workplace, raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation, and educating pre-schoolers and giving them a leg up on their future.

The President also announced the formation of a commission to address the rampant problems in the nation’s voting system—and hailed a 102-year-old North Miami woman named Desilene Victor, who endured hours of waiting to vote in the last election. These issues would all have won favor with NCL’s leaders.

Obama challenged his opponents on their opposition to tax increases for the rich at the expense of kids and seniors: “After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks?” Another issue near and dear to the hearts of the NCL’s founders.

The president also called for an infrastructure-boosting bridge-building program and insisted, very forcefully and long overdue that climate change be at the top of the agenda; no, these were not programs that Kelley, Perkins or Roche knew of in their day, but I think they would have approved, largely because these programs mean jobs for working Americans and will protect future generations.

Four Loko labels changing – National Consumers League

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By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow

Several years ago, Four Loko, a caffeinated alcoholic beverage, gained notoriety for its role in the hospitalizations of several college students.  Amid enormous public scrutiny and rumors that the FDA was planning to ban the drink, the product was reformulated to remove the caffeine.  Despite this important change, concerns about the drink still remained.  At long last, these concerns will finally be addressed by a settlement finalized by FTC.  This settlement will do two important things to protect consumers.

  1. Four Loko will be required to seek approval for an alcohol facts label.  This label will bear important information about alcohol content and number of servings per container, information consumers need in order to make informed decisions about consumption.
  2. Four Loko will also be required to make the packaging resealable so that the product can be consumed over multiple sittings.

These changes will hopefully lead to a safer and healthier product.  Certainly the strong enforcement action the FTC has taken sends a message to all companies that they need to be honest with consumers and scrupulous about their labeling.

Federal medical privacy rules strengthened; Medication adherence must be protected – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) published its long-awaited final rule revising the nation’s federal medical privacy requirements under the HITECH Act of 2009 – a.k.a. the “HIPAA Privacy Rule.” NCL, a founding member of the Best Privacy Practices Coalition, congratulates HHS for strengthening consumer privacy and data security protections, and enhancing enforcement for HIPAA violations by covered entities and their business associates.

The final rule attempts to strike a balance between patients’ privacy concerns and the meaningful benefits of sponsored and non-sponsored communications that can improve adherence to prescribed therapies and greatly improve patient health. Notwithstanding HHS’s efforts, there remains some tension between certain of the privacy protections and the goals of bolstering public health.

The problem of poor medication adherence is a major, and significantly under-appreciated health problem. Studies suggest that nearly three-out-of-four Americans do not take their medication as directed and that the cost to the health care system of non-adherence annually is a $290 billion. To address the problem, NCL is leading a medication adherence public awareness campaign, Script Your Future (www.scriptyourfuture.org). NCL’s campaign is designed to help patients take their prescribed medication as directed and better manage health problems such as diabetes, COPD, asthma, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

To help combat this problem of poor adherence, most pharmacies, health plans, and doctors provide a broad range of patient-directed communications regarding prescription drug therapies, including communications that encourage patients to stay on prescribed therapy. NCL’s views these communications, particularly “refill reminders,” as tools that help patients follow their medication regimen.

While we are pleased that the rule does allow use of “refill reminders” we are concerned that HHS’s final rule is more restrictive than the prior HIPAA Privacy Rule in requiring patient authorization (opt in) for health care providers’ (and health plans’) capability to use patient information to execute certain sponsored patient communications programs (refill reminders are excepted). To its credit, in addition to codifying the statutory exception for “refill reminder” messages, HHS also maintained the exception for sponsored communications that are delivered in face-to-face settings (e.g., in the pharmacy or doctor’s office).

In particular, we are concerned that the statutory exception for “refill reminders” is available only if compensation received by the covered entity provider or plan is “reasonably related” to the entity’s costs of making the communication. Although Congress included this “reasonable in amount” limitation in the HITECH Act, NCL believes that HHS has gone too far in its preamble interpretation by limiting such compensation to only certain direct costs. Specifically, under the final rule, HHS considers permissible costs to be restricted to those of labor, supplies, and postage to make the communication and that they include “only the pharmacy’s cost of drafting, printing, and mailing the refill reminders.” It sounds like a minor point, perhaps, but we are concerned that this could have a negative impact on patient adherence. We think that a broader definition of costs is called for, including such things as computer hardware, software, and other overhead – because we don’t want to inhibit in any way communications that can help improve the likelihood of patient adherence to medication.

We also are concerned that, from a policy standpoint, the “reasonable compensation” requirement may inhibit HHS efforts to promote medication adherence, and in the end does little to advance patient privacy. For instance, HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) requires and rewards patient adherence programs in several respects, including through physicians’ “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHRs). Furthermore, in order for vendors implementing Medicare part D to qualify for reimbursement, they must make use of CMS’s Medication Management Therapy Programs (MTMP), which are, by their very nature, adherence -focused incentives. In addition, HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has studied the comparative effectiveness of medication adherence interventions and funds adherence educational programs.

We’re concerned that HHS’s interpretation of “reasonable compensation” may not be grounded in good public policy and could actually hamper sponsored adherence efforts, which are widely regarded as beneficial to public health. In the final rule, HHS signaled its intention to issue informal guidance on the “refill reminder” exception. NCL hopes that, in so doing, HHS will make clear that the exception serves an important public health function and that “reasonable compensation” ought to be interpreted in the broadest possible fashion in order to ensure that we are doing all we can to promote improved medication adherence.

Time to stop the delays! – National Consumers League

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By Michell K. McIntyre, Director of NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft

Happy anniversary! Besides being Valentine’s Day, today is also the two-year anniversary of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Occupational Safety & Health Administration’s (OSHA) submission of a draft proposed rule to reduce exposure to life-threatening silica dust to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The review was supposed to take 90 days — but two years later, the draft rule is still there, languishing in regulatory limbo while workers continue to be exposed to the deadly dust.

Exposure to silica, one of the oldest known workplace dangers, can result in lung cancer and silicosis. Breathing in the tiny bits of silica, basically sand, is something nearly 2 million workers face everyday on jobs ranging from construction to manufacturing.

The legal limit on how much silica dust workers can inhale was set decades ago but in decades since science has shown that the limit needs to be cut in half.  It’s time to move the proposed rule out of OMB and make it law.  Too many lives are at risk to keep sitting on this life-saving rule.

Pausing to think about plight of world’s 300,000 child soldiers for a moment – National Consumers League

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makiBy Reid Maki, Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards

Today is an important day if you care about the welfare of children. Advocates have named February 12 “International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers” to highlight one of the worst forms of child labor. It’s hard to imagine that in 2013 the use of child soldiers is alive and thriving, but the BBC estimates that there are 300,000 child soldiers internationally. This number includes children of elementary school age who are handed automatic weapons and asked to kill, as well as others who are used for slave labor to support armies. Since January 2011, child soldiers have been used in at least 19 countries.

Many of the children suffer the worst forms of psychological warfare from their captors, who in many cases break them down by forcing them to kill or maim their friends or family. Many girls are sexually assaulted and forced to serve as sexual slaves. Many child victims are given drugs to keep them compliant. Their years of enforced service often produce intense psychological scarring that makes it hard to return to their communities. In some cases, they are shunned by their villages. Hear one girl’s compelling story in this YouTube video.

The Child Labor Coalition has tracked dozens of stories regarding the use of child soldiers over the last year and engages with its members to perform advocacy to reduce the use of child soldiers. Most recently, the warfare in Mali led to the recruitment of child soldiers, including children as young as 12. In early January, the United Nations decried the use of child soldiers in the Central African Republic, and in India, reports emerged that the militant group, the Garo National Liberation Army was using children in a variety of roles to support combat, including possibly the use of armed children. In early December, 2012, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on two “March 23 (M23)” leaders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for allegedly using child soldiers.

Not all the news has been bad. In June 2012, Burma made significant strides in reducing its use of child soldiers when it released an action plan to tackle the problem. In 2012, Yemeni authorities said they were committed to stopping the use of children in the military.

The challenges governments face to end the use of child soldiers are often formidable, however. A February 6th Huffington Post blog by Jake Scobey-Thal noted that despite some progress, child soldiers are still being used in Burma and cited the International Labour Organization that their numbers may be as high as 5,000.

Two members of the Child Labor Coalition, World Vision and Human Rights Watch (HRW), have been leaders in the effort to pressure the US government into abiding by a congressional law, the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, which prohibits military aid to countries that use child soldiers. They’ve also provided a valuable service with early warnings when civil strife reaches the point that children begin to be dragged into military conflicts as they have been recently in Mali, Syria and the DRC.

Is the U.S. doing enough to protect children from becoming child soldiers or from being harmed by military conflict? On February 5th, HRW cited recent recommendations by the United Nations (UN) committee of experts and urged the United States to do more to protect children harmed by conflict. The UN committee had expressed alarm about reports that hundreds of children have died during US airstrikes in Afghanistan over the last four years and noted that children have been arrested and detained in Afghanistan. US laws, said the committee of experts, have also excluded former child soldiers from securing asylum here.

“The US can and should do more to protect children affected by armed conflict,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at HRW, who urged the U.S. to “take decisive action” on the children rights committee’s recommendations to address these problems.

In November 2012, Jesse Eaves, a senior policy advisor for child protection for World Vision told IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis that the use of presidential waivers which is becoming a frequent occurrence is weakening the authority of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act. “When the United States government gives a waiver to a country identified in the State Department’s [Trafficking in Persons] report as country using children in their national military, this weakens the authority of the law by not holding the country accountable for removing children from their armed forces,” said Eaves.

In a press release about International Day to End the Use of Child Soldiers, Amnesty International called on governments to adopt a global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) to prevent armed forces, like those in Mali, from using weapons to recruit children as soldiers. Final talks on an ATT treaty are scheduled to occur in March, and according to Amnesty, “the current draft ATT text proposes weak rules to help prevent arms transfers to states or groups using child soldiers.”

Clearly much work remains to be done to get the U.S. and other governments to do the right thing when it comes to child soldiers, but working together, the members of the CLC and its allies hope that in the near future the use of child soldiers will be banished. Readers interested in this issue should visit the White House comment page and let their concerns about the use of child soldiers and presidential waivers of the provisions of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act be known.