By Martha J. Bailey
For many, today’s 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of War on Poverty is little to celebrate.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson stood before Congress and declared war on poverty. His plans included broadening the food stamp program, extending minimum wage coverage, increasing education funding, and providing “hospital insurance” for older Americans. Johnson spoke of millions of Americans who lived on “the outskirts of hope,” and challenged the country to “replace their despair with opportunity.”
First contemporary findings on how the risk of arrest varies across race and gender Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are…
SOUTH SUDAN, HOME OF THE LOST BOYS, AGAIN IN CHAOS
Jan 7 (GIN) – South Sudan may be barely on the radar screen for most Americans but a bitter split in the ruling coalition threatens to make it one of the worst humanitarian disasters in Africa.
By Joseph Guyler Delva
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti (HCNN) — Haiti’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, said on Monday that the citizenship issue caused by a constitutional court ruling in the Dominican Republic…
By Richard Eskow
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity,” said Nelson Mandela, “it is an act of justice.”
When the War on Poverty began a half-century ago, it was widely seen as the moral obligation of a wealthy nation.
By Robert Reich One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest…
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers launched a three-day strike, demos outside embassies, and the largest refugee protest in the country’s history –
By Chris Hedges
This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.
In our last article, “Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer than You May Realize [3],” we defined where today’s social-political movement is within the eight stages of successful movements [4].
Praise the Lord! It looks as though Democrats are starting to act like populists as we go into 2014. A few weeks ago, President Obama declared economic inequality has become the “defining challenge of our time.”
The fresh page of a new year—what a thrilling place to be. And to kick off 2014, Colorlines asked several community leaders to share their racial justice wishes for the year.