Friday, November 27, 2009

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Another big fight

Good Jobs Chicago: challenging big box stores to bring good jobs to our city.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

You get a food stamp, you get a food stamp, everybody gets new food stamps!

The headline declares: Food Stamps Will Feed Half Of US Kids. But this is actually understating the findings. That prediction is based on stats collected in "1968 through 1997", according to which:
Overall, about 49 percent of all children were on food stamps at some point by the age of 20, the analysis found. That includes 90 percent of black children and 37 percent of whites.
So that's already happened. It's in the past and present, not the future.

Pause: Almost all black people (at least under the age of 60 or so) have been on food stamps. I read this article hours ago, and my mind is still metabolizing just that little snippet.

But (moving on) you can't just project that similar stats will be seen in the future. Income inequality has gotten worse, not better. And then came the latest financial / economic crash, which siphoned billions out of poor and (disproportionately) minority households (I forget where I read just how many billions, but it's a big number), and looks to be headed for a yet more spectacular sequel before too long.

Well, I've been working on not ending on downers, so here's a joke:

You might be living in a fundamentally unjust economic system if....