Richard Eskow: Here’s the truth: Most minimum-wage workers are adults, the majority of them are women, and many are parents who are trying to raise their children on poverty wages.
Testing the New Pope’s Commitment to Poverty
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Walter Moss: Since the new pope seems to have a good sense of humor, he might appreciate the following irony: Although the Catholic Church he now heads bars women from the priesthood and his church is often accused of gender bias, the twentieth-century person who most forcefully embraced the ideals of St. Francis was a woman — Dorothy Day.
What Teachers Do
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Mark Naison: Teachers are some of the most selfless, generous people in our nation. They deserve better than what they are currently getting from our political leaders and mass media
Time to Retire the 99 Percent
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Walter Brasch: It’s time to retire the 99 percent. Not the people, but the slogan that identifies the Occupy Movement.
Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games
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Rob Tossberg: The odds are 99 to 1 you and I are the schmucks, working for scraps while the 1% take a pound of our flesh and look forward to eating our young.
What’s Happening to the “Human” in Human Services?
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Vivian Rothstein: We seem to be taking the humans out of a system that I thought was organized to make life better for actual people. As the cynics say, human services would be so much easier if it weren’t for the humans.
Are Republicans Smoking Too Much Pot?
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Rob Tossberg: I am no fan of Clinton – a child of poverty who forsook the poor and gave us deregulation – but our country seemed to prosper with his policy of, as Republicans call it, ‘Tax and spend’ government.
World Bank: Drastic Reformer Needed to Right a Failing Agenda
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Matt Kavanaugh: The blogsophere and Washington rumor-mill are working overtime right now on the question of who might be the next president of the World Bank.
David Brooks’s Anti-Poverty Program: “Bourgeois Paternalism”
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Joseph Palermo: After telling his readers he isn’t going to blame the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior, David Brooks plows right ahead and blames the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior.
Occupiers Rally in Beverly Hills Park Wednesday Evening
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On Wednesday, February 15 from 4 – 7:30 pm, Occupiers will rally at the Will Rogers Memorial Park at9650 Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills to call attention to the corrupting influence of money in politics.
Homeless in Los Angeles
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Jerry Drucker: In all of Los Angeles County, except for Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own census counts, the 2011 census count of the homeless was 51,340, 3% less than 2009 at 52,931.
Welfare “Reform” Laws Deepen, Perpetuate Poverty
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Sherwood Ross: In passing TANF, Congress and Bill Clinton made good on their promise to ‘end welfare as we know it.’ It’s time to end welfare reform as we know it instead.
Retirement: Sitting on a One-Legged Stool
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Vivian Rothstein: According to the American Association of Retired People (AARP), a frightening 35 percent of Americans over 65 currently rely only on Social Security (an average person gets benefits of $14,000/year) to survive.
The Moral Question
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Robert Reich: The appropriation bill the House passed June 16 would deny benefits to more than 700,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year. What kind of country are we living in?
The Texas Economic Model
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Steve Hochstadt: Republicans don’t mention poverty, because they don’t plan to do anything about it. The millions of poor Americans are invisible to Republican politicians. They pretend that trickle-down economics will reach the poor, but it hasn’t and won’t.
Smiley, West’s Anti-Poverty Theme Isn’t Hiding Anti-Obama Sentiment
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Anthony Asadullah Samad: Poverty’s important, but it must be addressed in the context of lifting the nation. The Poverty Tour, masked as a stealth anti-Obama campaign, is no way to get it addressed. For all of our sakes, let the megalomania stop and the healing begin, my friend.
The Perils for Obama of Not Talking About Poverty in America
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Joseph Palermo: By not speaking about the poor and poverty in America President Obama allows the Reagan era “welfare queen” construct to go unchallenged and, even worse, creates a vacuum that’s already being filled by right-wing pseudo-scholars.
‘Let Them Eat Cake’ 2011-Style
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Mariah Adin: As a record number of Americans live below the poverty line to claim that poor children are doing well because they grow up to be “one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs… in World War II” or that “the poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago” only serves to show how awful it was one hundred years ago, not how wonderful it is today.
Famine Strikes Again: Will America Respond?
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William Lambers: East Africa is in the throes of famine. U.S. relief efforts over the past century show that we have always been willing to respond to humanitarian crises.
Our Fellow Felons
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Hannah Petrie: Even though the rates of drug-dealing and drug-using occurs equally among different races – (think weed here) whites deal to whites, blacks deal to blacks, Hispanics to Hispanics – it’s the people of color who get busted. And once you’re labeled a felon – and denied access to employment, housing, and other rights — your chances of returning to a straight and normal life are extremely low. It is a system designed to keep felons felons.
More Riches for the Rich
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Steve Hochstadt: But neither party has tried very hard to protect the poorest Americans from the outsized greed of the wealthy. About half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and all of them are beholden to the very wealthy for donations to their constant campaigning.
Keeping Public Schools Public
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Craig Williams: As progressives, we should also argue that educators need more funding just to deal with the increased poverty created in large part by the private sector.
Ecuador’s Social Spending Increase Lifted Many Out of Poverty
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Brian McAfee: An important aspect of President Correa’s policies has been a noticeable and ongoing reduction in poverty.
Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Who Need It Most
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Mark Naison: While people are losing their homes, jobs, and medical coverage, new school professionals are flooding communities with programs that have offer little to the people they were allegedly designed to benefit.
Deception Alert: “Liberal” Huffingtonpost Distorts the Education Debate
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Adam Eran: Waiting for a race of cyborg/celebrity super-teachers distracts from the egregious income inequality and the childhood poverty that worsens educational outcomes in the U.S.
Subsidized Childcare Breaks Poverty Cycle
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Tracy Emblem: Subsidized childcare allows a parent to work, look for a job, or attend a work-training program or school with a defined graduation plan. Self-sufficiency is the goal – to lift families out of poverty, and off of the welfare rolls and into taxpaying jobs
Port-au-Prince Still Buried Under Rubble of Competing NGOs
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Georgianne Nienaber: Honestly not wanting to be cynical and sincerely wanting these programs to succeed–looking at the organizations that “benefit” from the Clinton Bush Fund–one sees the list of usual suspects of foreign NGOs and religious organizations.
Why Poverty Spreads Across America
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Sherwood Ross: Pockets of poverty, like the sores of some malignant disease, are spreading across America, as its states and cities go broke and bankrupt.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Defending Teachers and Teaching
Mark Naison: Every time I walk into a classroom, I am trying to do for my students what the best teachers I had did for me; to capture my imagination to such a degree that what went on in that class would be etched in my memory for life.