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Crushing Labor Unions and the Middle Class: Is this the American Way?

DIANE RAVITCH Diane Ravitch's blog
Inequality across much of Europe has widened, but it is still quite modest when compared with the vast income gap in the United States.The question is whether relative equity can hold as workplace institutions that for decades protected European employees’ standard of living give way to a more lightly regulated, American-style approach, where the government hardly interferes in the job market and organized labor has little say.

How Inequality Became as American as Apple Pie

Jessica Weisberg The Nation
The word “inequality” makes conservatives uncomfortable, as if it invokes class struggle, the 99 percent versus the 1. They much prefer “mobility,” which connotes a purely aspirational relationship to wealth and the wealthy.

The Pope Versus Unfettered Capitalism

John Nichols The Nation
Condemning the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism and the “idolatry of money,” Pope Francis argues in a newly circulated apostolic exhortation that “as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”

Wishbone

Rob Rogers Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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The Changing American Family

Natalie Angier The New York Times
Researchers who study the structure and evolution of the American family express astonishment at how rapidly the family has changed in recent years. Fewer women are becoming mothers, and those who do are having fewer children. Families are becoming more socially egalitarian but, as economic disparities widen, the marital class divide has sharpened. Fewer women are becoming mothers and one big reason is the soaring cost of raising children.

Inequality Is a Choice

Joseph E. Stiglitz The New York Times
I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do . . . I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns.

Inequality for All

In this movie, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich uses humor and a wide array of facts to explain how the massive consolidation of wealth by a precious few threatens the viability of the American workforce and the foundation of democracy itself. Now opening: check for local listing.

Tidbits - September 19, 2013

Portside
Reader Comments - U.S. Support Military Rule in Honduras; the New New Left; Stephen Colbert and Vladimir Putin; Income Inequality; Still more - GMO labeling; Occupy Wall Street and NYPD police tactics; Announcements - Welcome to Hebron - Bay Area-Sept 25; Lopsided Crisis: Ongoing Impact of the Great Recession - New York-Sept 27; Immigration Reform Concert & March - Oct 8- Washington, DC; Jobs with Justice-San Francisco - Bridging Solidarity and Power Together -Oct. 10
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