Twenty Years of Deepening Poverty Since Pres. Clinton Shredded Welfare Safety Net 
withFelicia Kornbluh, Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality,
and Women's Studies at the University of Vermont. Her books
include The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in
Modern America and Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform After
Twenty Years, (with Gwendolyn Mink), forthcoming.

August 22 marks the beginning of "welfare reform's" 20th year, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Kornbluh says: "Playing to a racist imagination and dealing in sexist double standards, Republicans and Democrats came together 19 years ago to transform income assistance for the poor into a system of regulation, deprivation and punishment. The legislation that established Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF”), made limiting women's choices and ending single motherhood its goals. The nation's chief policy dedicated to impoverished families with children did not include mitigating poverty, enhancing opportunity, or attenuating inequality as its goals. As a result, while welfare rolls have declined, poverty still stalks single mothers and their children -- and extreme poverty is at crisis high levels. As we approach the 20th year of this disgraceful program, it is time to overhaul TANF principles and practices to support the family work single mothers do and open real pathways to economic security.

play stream
download

Read More...

New York Says $15 and a Union on 4/15

On April 15th Low-wage workers in NYC and more than 200 cities across the country  and more world wide held the biggest-yet day of action in their Fight for $15 campaign . What started with fast food workers in NYC on Nov. 2012 
has spread to home care and child care workers, retail, adjunct professors, and more, with ever-growing numbers of participants. and scattered reports of stores closed by the strike, at least temporarily. This organizing comes against a backdrop of stagnating wages, chronic unemployment. and 
underemployment. As many as half of workers in some low-wage industries are receiving some form of public assistance. Workers tell stories of struggling to pay rent and arrange child care, and even face sleep inequality. And the organizing is having an effect. Walmart and McDonald's and other major chains  recently announced wage increases are due to pressure from workers and in an effort to shut down further organizing. But workers participation on the April 15th actions proves that they are continuing  to organize in increasing numbers and arenas of struggle.
***************** 
play stream
download 

Read More...

Riding with Robin Hood to Take from Wall Street

and Distribute to Main Street!
with
The Robin Hood Tax campaigners who take to the streets

Think about it, in this the wealthiest country in the world the newest USDA data shows more than 48.9 million Americans lived in households struggling against hunger in 2012. But, despite this the House Republican Leadership’s Nutrition-Only Farm Bill just cut $40 billion dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the newest term for food stamps. They also voted to defund President Obama's health care law, setting up another fiscal showdown just before the October 1st  federal budget 

deadline. These draconian cuts are a renewed attack on all safety-net and poverty-alleviation programs. They say “where’s the beef, there’s no money”. 

But we say we’re sitting on a virtual pot of gold that could fund hunger, healthcare, and education.  So we’ll head to the streets of NY where Robin Hood and his followers say it's time to tax Wall Street to feed Main Street with a Robin Hood Tax.

http://archive.org/stream/BuildingBridgesTheRobinHoodTaxCampaignersTakeToTheStreets

stream

http://archive.org/download/BuildingBridgesTheRobinHoodTaxCampaignersTakeToTheStreets/robinhoodntl2.mp3 

download

Read More...

Long Term Unemployment A National Crisis
with Christine Owens, Ex. Dir., National Employment Law Project

Another month and another tepid unemployment report. The nation's unemployment rate just went up to 7.6% with no prospect for a significant decline in sight. The plight of the long term unemployed who represent over 37% of the unemployed is all but forgotten. Facing daunting odds in finding work, they are also being hit with federal unemployment benefit cuts, that states have been forced to implement due to sequestration and now qualify for fewer weeks of unemployment coverage than at any time since the beginning of the economic crisis. 

***************
The Economic Elephant

with Robert Reich, Prof. of Public Policy. UC Berkeley, and former

Secretary of Labor


What's really wrong with the economy, and why? Unemployment is still high and job creation hasn't made a big dent this many years into the so-called recovery. Who has the best plan? Is it the Keynesians? On the other end, the Austerics? They both neglect the economic elephant in the room - spreading wealth to the wealthy keeps buying power away from the 99%; it simply does not lead to economic recovery.

http://archive.org/stream/BuildingBridgesLongTermUnemploymentANationalCrisis

play stream

http://archive.org/download/BuildingBridgesLongTermUnemploymentANationalCrisis/longtermntl.mp3

download

Read More...

How Class Works: The RepublaCrats and Their Servant Economy
With
Jeff Faux, renowned economist, Founding Pres., Economic Policy Institute, author of The Global Class War and The Servant Economy

Faux explains why neither party's leaders have a plan to remedy America's unemployment, inequality, or long economic slide that America's political and economic elite spent so long making. While Republicans and Democrats brawl in public, in effect they have already cut a deal: the “American Dream” will have to be sacrificed. Faux will take us on a historical tour of the rise and fall of the idea that democratic government has a responsibility for shaping the future, delivers a savage indictment of Wall Street financiers and their Washington toadies who promote an age of austerity for the people and an age of gluttony for themselves.

http://archive.org/stream/BuildingBridgesTheRepublacratsServantEconomyWithJeffFaux_339  play stream

http://archive.org/download/BuildingBridgesTheRepublacratsServantEconomyWithJeffFaux_339/fauxntl.mp3 download

Read More...

America’s Not Broke. Not Even Close. Tax the Rich!

Overall average individual wealth in the United States has risen 23 percent
since the year 2000, to $236,213 per American adult. But, wealth has
become incredibly more concentrated. We are taxing the dollars that go to
our ever-richer rich at levels far below the tax rates that America levied just
a few decades ago. Now, both an analysis of our current predicament and
a series of proposals that can help open our eyes to a far more equitable —
and brighter — future,

with
Meizhu Lui, Director of Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative,
Insight Center for Community Economic Development
and
Chuck Collins, a senior scholar, Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
and Director of IPS’s Program on Inequality and the Common Good.
Co-author of the recent report, Unnecessary Austerity, Unnecessary
Government Shutdown.

play stream or
download

Read More...

Unemployment, Poverty and the “Great” Recession
with
Avis Jones-DeWeever, Exec. Dir., National Council of Negro Women,
Marc Morial President & CEO of the National Urban League, and
former Mayor of New Orleans,
Dean Baker, Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Signs of economic recovery, well, maybe for Wall Street, and the banksters,
but what about our street? Where’s the beef, where’s the jobs? The United
States is still experiencing its worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression.
Officially in of May 2011 the unemployment rate increased to 9.1%. In 2009
there were 43.6 million people living in poverty, the largest figure in the 51
years for which poverty estimates are available, and the numbers have been
climbing. This national crisis demands a bold plan to put people back to work
and to prevent those wielding the ax from chopping more jobs and cutting
further holes in the safety net and jeopardizing entitlement programs.

stream or

download

Read More...