Media

According to The American Pediatric Association’s Task Force on Child Poverty, one in five children live below the federal poverty level, and in addition to being an economic strain on families it’s also "the most important problem facing children in the US today.”

Groups of workers employed in service jobs at federal buildings around D.C. are picketing this morning outside the landmark sites at which they are employed over their low wages. The protest, organized by a new group calling itself Good Jobs Nation, includes people who work at federal building food courts, loading docks, memorabilia shops, and facilities that manufacture uniforms for the military.[...]

Today’s strike follows the release last week of a report from the progressive think tank Demos estimating that at least 1,992,000 workers receive $12 per hour or less while doing jobs backed by public funds.

Hundreds of low-wage employees of federal contractors walked off the job on Tuesday morning, demanding that President Obama sign legislation or an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay higher wages. The Washington, D.C., strike is led by a new campaign called Good Jobs Nation, formed earlier this month.

The National Voter Registration Act set the first ever national standards for mail-in registration and increased the number of places people could register to vote, including motor vehicle and public assistance offices. 

New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come.

Since NVRA was passed, citizens can now register to vote when they go to public assistance offices to apply for welfare or disability benefits, or at their local DMV when they apply for a drivers license — hence the nickname “Motor Voter Act” — and also allowed for mailed-in registration forms. The result was that over 30 million people registered via the new paths opened by NVRA in its first year.

Though Americans of all ages suffered as a result of the Great Recession, the downturn dealt a particularly harsh blow to young people, as employers opted for suddenly plentiful workers with more experience. As a result, nearly half of the nation’s unemployed are under 34 years old, according to an April report from public policy organization Demos.

The political history of race in America will record the Obama era as a breakthrough moment and a huge step forward. But any economic racial history will tell a nearly opposite story: Under the first black president, African-Americans have lost much of the wealth they built up over previous decades. The main culprit has been an ongoing foreclosure crisis that Washington has done very little to stop, even as it has shoveled trillions in nearly free loans to big banks who have enjoyed record profits.