Trying to explain rising inequality without talking about unions is like explaining why the train is late – the tracks are worn, the weather is bad – without noting that one of its engines has been sabotaged.
American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income. Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children.
Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points.
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Economic Democracy Project's first event: Economic Democracy And The Struggle For Black Independence - Sept. 3 - New York
It was not hard for me to make the connection between the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, and the catalyst for my work to stop the climate crisis. To me, the connection between militarized state violence, racism, and climate change was common-sense and intuitive. We're all impacted by climate change, but we're not all impacted equally. It isn't incidental, it's institutional, and it's rooted in history.
Raw fury over Brown's killing may slowly fade, but the underlying resentment among Ferguson's young black residents about their treatment by a white police force will likely continue to simmer. Washington Post and Huffington Post journalists detained. Today, Governor Jay Nixon ordered Missouri Highway Patrol to take over supervision in Ferguson, MO.
The South, where 55 percent of America's black population lives, is increasingly looking like a different country. Fewer children can read; more adults have HIV; its residents suffer from the shortest life expectancies of any in the United States. Six of the eleven states that made up the former Confederacy are at the bottom. That deprivation tends to be concentrated in the parts of these states with disproportionately large African American populations.(long article)
From London to Liverpool to Glasgow our cities are taking inspiration from Manhattan. Yet an ugly vision lies behind its new developments.
Adapted from a longer piece in the current issue of New Politics (see link below). Fighting corporate education reform is less about restoring the old system to its former glory than building a just one for the first time.
Ultimately, Alderman Muñoz tells In These Times, the CPC hopes to do just that by using initiatives like a $15 minimum wage to bridge the sharp economic divides that plague Chicago and the country as a whole.
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