Jane Taylor: Poverty
O then, let the wealthy and gay
But see such a hovel as this,
That in a poor cottage of clay
They may know what true misery is.
Thomas W. Fraser: Overcoming Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘three evils of society’
We can still bend the arc of history through a ceaseless pursuit of beloved community.
Jefferson Carter: Cat & Transient
I swore I’d stop writing about liberal guilt
& about cats too, but I must confess
last night, I groomed our little black cat
with my tongue
Video: J.D. Vance| America’s Forgotten Working Class
J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence.
Video: Hurray For the Riff Raff | PA’LANTE
Winner of the 2019 Jury Award at SXSW, Director Kristian Mercado Figueroa’s music video PA’LANTE performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff takes us inside the Puerto Rican experience of life post Hurricane Maria and the pressures facing an estranged family attempting to reconnect amid the wreckage.
Ellen McGrath Smith: Good Friday, Fernhill Dump
Standing, a girl-boy, on the junked car in the dump,
some other kids across the dump standing on their cars
Rajan Menon: A Covid-19 Hell on Earth
How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable: A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net.
Arlene Weiner: Nobody’s coming to save the children
Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers: The Decade of Transformation is Here
Remaking the Economy for the People
Hama Tuma: Just a Nobody
The dead man was no one, just a man in tattered clothes, no shoes, just a coin in his pocket, no id cards, no bus ticket. He was a nobody, … Continue reading
Adrie Kusserow: Bus Station, Kampala, Uganda
For Willem, age 3 . We are lost. . Holding you tight, the drunks pawing me . as I weave through the stalls sticky with beer and urine . looking … Continue reading
Deborah Bogen: Rue Saint-Séverin
Dirt and hunger. Foreheads burnt, no, branded by heat. Backpacks. Paper cups. Bundles that are everything we own. Beneath the gargoyles, our babies sleep. We used to have houses. Once … Continue reading
Video: Willie King performs “It Takes a Good Woman”
This is legendary bluesman Willie King’s tribute to his mother, a very powerful performance about his upbringing in Prairie Point, a community in Noxubee County, Mississippi near the Alabama border.
Bernie Sanders: An Economic Agenda for America, 12 Steps Forward
The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or … Continue reading
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