Media

Concentrated poverty has a new address, and this time it's not in the inner city. For many Americans, moving to a house in the suburbs means they've "made it," and overcome the economic stumbling blocks that kept them in cramped city apartments.

Apple always seemed like the perfect company. Not so fast. When CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress on May 25, he didn’t come to talk about Apple’s latest amazing gadget or the need to grant more visas to computer programmers. Rather, in his maiden voyage to Capitol Hill as Steve Jobs’s successor, Cook had to defend the company’s tax-avoidance efforts. What should have been a triumph for Cook was instead an awkward encounter. [...]

Apparently Justin Bieber has nothing to do with the new Los Angeles billboard that uses his image and name to oppose raising the minimum wage, on the grounds that such a hike would keep the teenage unemployment rate high. 

It used to be that many Americans entered retirement having paid off their mortgages and most of their other debts. This should have been senior citizens' Golden Years.

Nowadays, more and more people over the age of 65 are struggling with mounting debt levels, fueled primarily by mortgages and credit cards. The average debt held by senior citizens has ballooned to $50,000 in 2010, up 83% since 2001, according to Federal Reserve data crunched by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. [...]

On May 21, I had the opportunity to testify before a Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on how federal dollars drive inequality by paying contractors who pay too many of their workers too little. The hearing was driven by a study from Amy Traub and her colleagues at Demos, a New York based think tank, that issued a report exposing the many ways that federal contracting often adds to the burden of the low income, especially those who earn less than $12 an hour, or less than $25,000 a year.

According to a recent study, Gen X and late baby boomers are on track to replace only about half of their current income when they reach retirement — which means they’ll need to seriously downgrade their lifestyles. Most financial planners recommend replacing, at the very least, 70% of one’s income.

For all the talk about inequality over the past two decades, scholars have known surprisingly little about what Americans think about the growing class divide and what they'd like to do about it, if anything. 

Next month the Obama Administration will begin a nation-wide campaign to encourage low-income Americans to take advantage of the health insurance options that will come with the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Sounds like a great idea, right? A long overdue publicity campaign for an important piece of legislation.

The Nation has an interesting cover story this week by a young radical named Bhaskar Sunkara, an editor at In These Times and a founder of Jacobin, a new neo-Marxist magazine. 

Sunkara's basic point is hard to argue with and it boils down to this: liberalism won't get far without a radical movement that presses for more fundamental change: