Milwaukee Officials: Black Youth, Single Mothers Are Not Responsible for Systemic Failings—You Are

Charmaine Lang Rewire
Single mothers should not be blamed for young people's responses to a city that ignores or criminalizes them. Many of Milwaukee’s Black families have never experienced calm. They have not experienced a city that centers their needs and voices. Black youth fed up with their treatment are not creeps. Should they face unemployment, underemployment, police brutality, and racism—and face it without complaint?

The Ever-Growing Gap: Failing to Address the Status Quo Will Drive the Racial Wealth Divide for Centuries to Come

Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammed, Josh Hoxie and Eman Institute for Policy Studies
The typical millionaire receives about $145,000 in public tax benefits, while working families get a grand total of $174 on average. In 2043, minorities will be the majority and the will have doubled. The lingering effects of generations of discriminatory and wealth-stripping practices have left black and Latino households far behind white families, and may impact their economic trajectories in the decades to come.

The Labor Movement’s May Day Promise

Erica Smiley The American Prospect
Some cast the labor movement as dying or even dead, but even amid attacks on collective bargaining workers are finding innovative ways to organize.

The Death Gap

Sam Pizzigati OtherWords.org
The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

books

Matthew Desmond's `Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City'

Barbara Ehrenreich The New York Times
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.

Jesse Jackson: Gun Control Alone Can't Curb Violence

Jesse Jackson Chicago Sun-Times
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.

Dr.John & Odetta: Brother Can You Spare a Dime

This oldie was originally written during the depression (1931) by Yip Harburg, who was later blacklisted during the McCathy era. This video updates its relevance to the poor and disenfranchised in our nation today.

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