Departments

;

inequality

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    10/5/2021

    The Lesson of Venice's 17th Century Plague? Tax the Rich

    by Yong Kwon

    By making only a temporary commitment to public works funded by taxing the city's merchant elite, Venice emerged from the plague with an overburdened workforce, less ability to attract labor, and a declining economy. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    9/16/2021

    Homelessness and Eviction in the Land of the Free

    by Liz Theoharis

    Homeless activists in the 1980s and 1990s began to push back against the narrative that mass homelessness reflected the defects of individuals instead of a profit-driven housing system. As the Supreme Court has thrown out a federal eviction moratorium, that lesson is more relevant than ever. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    8/25/2021

    Not Everyone Can Afford to ‘Learn to Live With’ COVID-19

    by Kyle Harper

    "This two-track recovery, where protection against the disease mirrors wealth and power, unfortunately reflects a historical pattern that is several centuries old. The world’s only hope lies in breaking it."

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    8/19/2021

    The Real Political Danger of Inflation

    by Andrew Elrod

    Democrats have not lost elections because of inflation, but because they have imagined austerity politics as the only solution to inflation. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    8/18/2021

    Prison Tech Comes Home: Tenants and Residents in the Surveillance State

    by Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker and Nicole E. Weber

    Landlords have combined technologies developed for screening tenants in the 1970s with more recent digital surveillance and facial recognition systems developed in prisons to dramatically increase control over their tenants during an affordable housing crisis. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    8/17/2021

    Debt and Disillusionment

    by Rebecca Gordon

    "We know, in other words, that there are only a relatively small number of spaces in the cockpit of today’s economic plane. Nonetheless, we tell our young people that the guaranteed way to get one of those rare gigs at the top of the pyramid is a college education."

  • SOURCE: Commonweal
    8/17/2021

    Scrapping the Color Code: A Post-Racial America is Inevitable

    by Jim Sleeper

    The 2020 Census is showing that whiteness is no longer the civic and cultural norm, but also that bureacratic color-coding can't support a version of civic Americanism that can stand up to a growing white backlash. 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    7/20/2021

    The U.S. Tax Code Should Not Allow Billionaires to Exist

    by Josh Mound

    There have been historical precursors to the recent ProPublica report on the extremely low taxes paid by the ultrawealthy. Will this revelation lead to more lasting changes in the tax code that thwart the hoarding of wealth? 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/5/2021

    Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

    Columnist Thomas Edsall surveys recent research about the past and future economic impact of automation and artificial intelligence and concludes that Democratic elites have a short time left to get ahead of cataclysmic changes in employment or else the Trump phenomenon will only be a preview of political rage. 

  • SOURCE: New York Magazine
    5/2/2021

    Does Racial Justice Depend on Avoiding White Backlash?

    Two political scientists have concluded that emphasizing the class-based redistribution of policies will help the Democrats win more support. Critics argue that this finding is being used to sweep demands for racial equity under the rug. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    4/15/2021

    Whither the Religious Left?

    by Matthew Sitman

    Has the considerable effort spent for decades to court a "religious left" as a Democratic constituency been a waste of time? Why haven't faith-based social justice movements been more signiicant in the party's base? 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    4/12/2021

    America Needs to Empower Workers Again (Opinion)

    by Paul Krugman

    Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that the decline of labor was a political outcome; reviving unions requires changing the rules governing management during a union drive, but is a key to alleviating inequality.

  • SOURCE: History.com
    3/23/2021

    Why the Roaring Twenties Left Many Americans Poorer

    Despite popular imagery, many Americans – urban workers, African Americans, and farmers in particular – experienced the 1920s as an era of deprivation and hardship that flowed into the worse times of the Great Depression. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    3/16/2021

    We Were Warned about a Divided America 50 Years Ago. We Ignored the Signs

    by Elizabeth Hinton

    The 1968 Kerner Commission Report on civil disorders recommended a program of public employment, housing and school desegregation, and a basic minimum income to tackle economic inequality and racial segregation as conjoined problems, as well as police reforms. Lyndon Johnson shelved the report, and we pay the price today.