Poverty

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice […]

Agriculture

Food Sovereignty vs. Food Aid: Why Small-Scale Farming Suffers

Daniel Martin Varisco

( Tabsir.net ) – The early major civilizations in the Middle East and Asia with their head start several millennia ago had one thing in common: an agricultural base that fed not only people but led to development of states and their services. Major river systems like the Nile and Tigris/ Euphrates, the Ganges of […]

Donald Trump

From the Greatest Generation to the Trump Generation: Can America’s Drastic Decline be Reversed?

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – I find nothing strange in Joe Biden, at 79 (going on 80), being the oldest president in our history and possibly planning to run again in 2024. After all, who wouldn’t want to end up in the record books? Were he to be nominated and then beat the also-aging Donald Trump, or […]

Climate Crisis

How Climate Emergency could further Punish Inflation-Ridden Economies, with Record Heat Waves across US, UK and Europe

The Conversation

By Derek Lemoine, University of Arizona | – Hundreds of millions of people struggled to keep cool amid a sweltering summer heat wave as cities across the U.S. and mainland Europe experienced record-high temperatures. In the U.K., thermometers topped 104 Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) on July 19, 2022, the highest ever recorded. While all this […]

Employment

Does the Future Belong to People Who Profit Off Our ‘Excessive Wealth Disorder’?

Sam Pizzigati

( Inequality.org ) – If Dustin Hoffman should ever do a remake of The Graduate, the classic 1967 film that launched his famed cinematic career, what might be the 2020s update for that film’s most iconic exchange? A good many of us still fondly remember that poolside party scene. A 21-year-old “Benjamin” gets pulled aside […]

Employment

Why Keeping Workers Poor Is actually Bad for Business

Sam Pizzigati

( Otherwords.org) – CEOs at America’s biggest low-wage employers now take home, on average, 670 times what their typical workers make. But we don’t just get unfairness when a boss can grab more in a year than a worker could make in over six centuries. We get bungling and inefficient businesses. Management science has been […]

Inequality

One-Off Demonstrations are not Enough: Progressives need Standing Mass Organizations

Tomdispatch

By Beverly Gologorsky | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – To begin, an anecdote. This past summer, a pigeon walked through my open balcony door while my attention was elsewhere. I shooed it out, but when I turned around two more pigeons walked out of my bedroom. In the 20 years I’ve lived in my apartment, […]

Africa

The Economic Consequences of the War: Why the Conflict in Ukraine Is a Disaster for the Poor of This Planet

Rajan Menon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In 1919, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book that would prove controversial indeed. In it, he warned that the draconian terms imposed on defeated Germany after what was then known as the Great War — which we now call World War […]

Epidemics

The Poor at the Crossroads: The First and Worst Hit by Pandemics of Every Sort

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The 54th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., just passed. Dr. King was shot down while organizing low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. At that time, he was building the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to organize America’s poor into a force to be reckoned with. In […]