The real culprit here is the diminution of US productive capacity and supply chain disruption caused by four decades of neoliberal policies – disinvestment, deregulation, outsourcing - which have prevented supply-side measures to bring prices down.
The costs of recession are not simply limited to those workers who lose a job— they're incredibly widespread across the workforce.
We need and deserve a better unemployment insurance system. And to get it, we are going to have to fight for it, and not be distracted by the temporary, although needed, band-aids Congress is willing to provide.
Overviews of the Covid-19 crisis, new leaders for UK Labour, and reports from four continents
"Once again, it's the mismatch between the debt and the borrower's income, their ability to repay."
Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.
Downward mobility plus racial resentment is a potent combination with disastrous consequences. We know now that election 2016 is increasingly an open portal into an age-old American dark side of slavery, repression, internment, and know-nothing-ism that couldn't be grimmer. And behind it all, running like an interstate highway through our history, is a powerful sense of white skin privilege that has traditionally extended even to those who were relatively powerless.
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