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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.

No, poverty is not a mysterious, unknowable, negative-spiral loop

Philip N. Cohen Family Inequality
Conservative arguments make it seem like poverty is a puzzle. But, according to Philip N. Cohen, we've already figured out ways of reducing poverty among large sections of the population. We should just use what works to reduce poverty.
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