Helen Curry reads through her shopping list while searching for foods for the "Stop Senior Hunger" food drive.
The food will be distributed to low-income seniors. (AP Photo/Messenger-Inquirer, Jenny Sevcik)

This week, the Center for Community Change (CCC) released new research that details the way low-income Americans think and talk about living on the edge. It found that the language being used by policymakers and others to describe them is turning off the very people it is supposed to help.

The project surveyed over 1,700 participants who were identified as living below 200 percent of the poverty line ( ... Read more »

Besides struggling to make ends meet because of low wages, millions of part-time workers in America also face uncertainty over when they will be called in to work. Erratic schedules and last-minute notice make it hard for these workers to find other work, go to school and make arrangements for child care or caring for aging parents.

As The New York Times reported last week:

About 27.4 million Americans work part time. The number of those part-timers who would prefer to work full time has nearly doubled since 2007, to 7.5 million. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 47 percent of part-time hourly workers ages 26 to 32 receive a ... Read more »

A Nicholas Lemann profile of Janet Yellen in the New Yorker, based on interviews with her, is creating quite a stir, and for many of the wrong reasons. The article verges on fawning, but even after you scrape off the treacle, it’s not hard to see how aggressively and consistently the Fed chair hits her big talking point, that’s she’s on the side of the little guy. As correspondent Lee put it:

She’s simultaneously Mother Teresa (spent her whole life caring about the poor without actually meeting any poor people) and Forrest Gump (present when all bad deregulat ... Read more »

From our fields to our forks, huge corporations have an overwhelming amount of power over our food supply every step of the way.  Right now there are more than 313 million people living in the United States, and the job of feeding all of those people is almost entirely in the hands of just a few dozen monolithic companies.  If you do not like how our food is produced or you don ... Read more »

It was good to hear President Obama say that reining in Wall Street’s high-risk behavior is an “unfinished piece of business.” It would be even better if this observation were quickly followed by action — the kind of concrete action he can take immediately, with or without Congress’s cooperation.

The president made his remarks in an interview with host Kai Ryssdal on public broadcasting’s Marke ... Read more »

In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a “war without borders” led by the United States of America and its NATO allies. The conduct of the Pentagon’s “long war” is intimately related to the restructuring of the global economy.

We are not dealing with a narrowly defined economic cri ... Read more »

 

As levels of inequality increased in wealthy countries over the past 30 years — especially in the US — some economists argued that it was a subject their discipline shouldn’t worry about. Economists, they said, should concern themselves with efficiency and growth, and not worry about how the fruits of a society’s productivity are distributed.

The lopsided recovery — with corporate profits ... Read more »

Conspiracy of the Plutocrats: Secrets of the Wealth-Inequality Explosion Revealed

Piketty protégé Gabriel Zucman explains how the world's wealthiest are scamming governments for trillions.

The growing wealth gap in developed countries is an incredibly disturbing development. New research  ... Read more »

Stymied by the partisan gridlock, President Obama’s recent directives to bar federal contractors from discriminating against gay employees and to cut carbon pollution are bold examples of how presidents have used their executive powers to address critical issues when Congress has failed to adopt much-needed legislation.

For example, in 1961, as civil rights protests were gaining momentum, President Kennedy used his executive powers to order firms doing business with the federal government to refrain from discriminating against employees based on their race. President Johnson in 1965 issued an executive order establishing the Office of Federal Contract Compliance to implement this mandate to use “affirmative action” to address racial disc ... Read more »