Media

Every day brings more reminders of the terrible unfairness that besets our country, the tragic reversal of fortune experienced by millions who once had good lives and steady jobs, now gone.

An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone chronicles “The Fallen: The  Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class” and describes a handful of middle-class men and women made homeless, forced to live out of their cars in church parking lots in Southern California.

Yesterday, Wells Fargo was slapped with $175 million fine for systematically steering minority homeowners into higher interest loans -- and, indeed, providing financial incentives for brokers to stick borrowers with the highest rates they could. Abhorrent behavior.

An essential element of the American Dream is ensuring that each generation has greater opportunities than the last. What, then, do we make of a generation that can earn more than their parents, but still can't seem to climb the economic ladder?

The think tank Demos has been doing a really stellar job commemorating the anniversary of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” — as mentioned in my poverty charts post yesterday — and their best item so far is this series of beautiful interactive charts illustrating the state of poverty in America:

Nearly every week comes more evidence that the culture of the financial sector hasn't changed much since the crisis of 2008. Greed remains the norm, along with lax ethics.

A few weeks ago, I described Wells Fargo's subprime mortgage machine as "capitalism at its worst." According to a June Washington Post

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.

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

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.