Media

It's now been twelve years since Bill Clinton signed into law the historic welfare reform act of 1996.

Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, documenting – among the many ravages of poverty – that millions of children in the richest country on earth went to bed hungry every night. His book inspired two Democratic presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, to launch a war on poverty, then estimated at more than 20 percent of the population.

Following up on our last post on the link between climate change and extreme weather, a new scientific study was released that found that manmade climate change increases the probability of extreme weather patterns. The study was a joint effort between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. and the Met Office in the U.K.

Since 2008, working families have done everything they can to get by – changing spending habits, paying down debt, taking on 2nd (or 3rd jobs), digging into savings and retirement funds, and even cutting back on medical care – but they’re still falling behind.

So far, as a result of the LIBOR scandal -- in which Barclays manipulated the all-important London Inter-bank Offered Rate, which governs hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans, securities and derivatives -- the bank has been fined over $450 million by regulators and its CEO and COO have resigned. A broader investigation is underway. The implications of the episode to the new financial regulatory regime currently being implemented are wide-ranging and only slowly emerging.

President Obama opened up a fissure within his own party when he called yesterday for repealing the Bush tax cuts for households making over $250,000. Other Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have argued for a repeal that would only affect households making over $1 million.

NEW YORK – Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington's classic exposé The Other America blew open the reality of widespread poverty in the United States, and while it paved the way for policies that have improved the lives of millions of Americans, the problem persists today. Today, Demos and The American Prospect are co-hosting a conference and launching an interactive data visualization to examine why proven solutions to poverty are going unheeded, leaving 46.1 million Americans in poverty in 2010.

Are big corporations taking over American elections? It depends whether you ask liberals or conservatives, who can’t even agree on the basic facts.

In the liberal universe, big corporations have swallowed politics. Common Cause President Bob Edgar summed up this version of reality at a press conference in March, declaring: “We, the people, will not stand idly by while the country’s major corporations use their massive wealth to buy our democracy.”

The home mortgage crisis and Great Recession destroyed a generation of economic progress for African-American families. Now, reports the Washington Post, the discriminatory impact of credit scores and reports could cement the disadvantages into place for decades to come.