December 15, 2011 by legitgov ShareThis Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income 15 Dec 2011 Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans – nearly 1 in 2 – have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income. The latest census data depict [...]
Tag: class
December 16, 2011
December 14, 2011
The school of Jay-Z studies | Mychal Denzel Smith
Judging by the amount of fuss he caused, one would think Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson had floated the idea of abolishing child labor laws. In reality, all he had done was announce that this semester he would be teaching a course entitled “Sociology of Hip-Hop – Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z.” And it was [...]
December 13, 2011
Russians Look Ahead to Mass Protest, Presidential Election
Is Russia’s middle class on the march? People are angry, and are speaking out for clean elections and democracy. Two days after Russia’s largest democracy demonstration in a generation, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev responded with a few lines in Facebook. He wrote, “I agree neither with the slogans, nor the statements voiced at the protests.” [...]
December 12, 2011
David Montgomery obituary
David Montgomery, who has died aged 84 of a brain haemorrhage, was one of the most prominent historians in the US and the model of a scholar-activist. Along with the late Herbert Gutman, he was the most influential practitioner of the “new labour history“, which moved the study of workers away from the institutional history [...]
December 7, 2011
Obama speech declares ‘make-or-break moment for the middle class’
Barack Obama’s Kansas speech targets ‘fend for yourself’ stance of Republicans and corporations. Link to this video Barack Obama blasted his Republican foes and Wall Street as he portrayed himself as a champion of the middle class and laid out in the starkest terms yet the populist themes of his 2012 re-election bid. In a [...]
December 7, 2011
December 7, 2011
Obama: Economic Fairness is ‘The Defining Issue of Our Time’
President Barack Obama says restoring America’s prosperity and economic fairness is the defining issue of our time. The president went to the Midwestern state of Kansas Tuesday to restate his economic goals. In a nearly hour-long speech, President Obama stressed the importance of reforming the nation’s economy to give middle class Americans what he called [...]
December 5, 2011
Tolerance may be harder to spread than Tony Blair and John Kerry imagine | Andrew Brown
Tony Blair and John Kerry gave a joint session on Friday to a class at Yale as part of Blair’s Faith Foundation work, which was livestreamed across the internet to an audience that fluctuated between 50 and 70. The 6,999,999,930 of you who didn’t listen in missed something valuable. Seven years ago, they were among [...]
December 4, 2011
November 23, 2011
Food insecurity spreading in America
New York (CNN) — Students gathered as the chef sliced tomatoes with a plastic knife in a Brooklyn public school cafeteria. Their eyes followed as she held up a slender green cylinder before the crowd of parents and kids in plastic aprons and hairnets. “What’s that?” kids shouted. “It’s a scallion. But don’t eat it [...]
November 17, 2011
‘Class warfare in America’: remarks made at the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture | Robert Reich
Robert Reich’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, 15 November 2011. Video: YouTube/CalTV News I will believe that corporations are people when Georgia and Texas execute them. – Robert Reich, speaking during his 2011 Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, “Class warfare in America”
November 12, 2011
Blair Mountain and labor’s living history | Clancy Sigal
My first time in Westminister Abbey, London, I was taken inside by a coal miner friend who was down from South Wales for a brief London holiday. Suitably awed, we gawked at Poets’ Corner, the Coronation Throne, the tombs and effigies of prelates, admirals, generals and prime ministers – England in all its majesty and [...]