Portside

While some communities are currently enjoying the fruits of the recovery, others have sunk further into poverty. According to the authors, this pattern of distress vs. prosperity not only “diverges between cities and states but even more starkly within cities at the neighborhood level." In the period of recovery following the Great Recession, the authors find, jobs in the median U.S. ZIP code grew at less than half the national rate.

To deal with our impoverished neighborhoods, it isn’t enough to get rid of the guns. The public squalor of our inner cities has to be addressed: schools modernized, affordable housing built, mass transit supplied, available jobs created. Gun control doesn’t cost much. Dealing with entrenched poverty costs real money, but less than we spend on the police, jails, drugs, alcoholism, and chronic illness — the dysfunction that comes from poverty.

The disparities in wealth that we term “income inequality” are no accident, and they can’t be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design.

Cops become instant media villains for decisions made in frenzied minutes or seconds. But the politicians and judges behind them spend months and years of calculation building walls to hide the same acts. Most of the time, they get away with it. Even in the most high-profile cases, justice is a marathon.

Tax havens cost the world’s governments hundreds of billions of dollars a year, promote corruption, and undermine the rule of law. They are part of a larger worrisome pattern in which the world’s corporations outrun the governing capacity of states.

These 400 billionaires have greater wealth than 190 million of their fellow Americans put together.

Bad news for consumers and workers: This year has already seen $4 trillion worth of mergers and acquisitions deals.

Congress’s 1965 decision to limit immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean coincided with an increase in that immigration—largely, as a result of U.S. policies, including support for vicious dictatorships in many countries, the funding of civil wars in Central America, and the promotion of neoliberal economic programs throughout the region. The result is our current undocumented population of about 11.7 million, including some 8 million workers.