Fresh audio product: Trump & the fascist creep, urban governance via nonprofits
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): May 18, 2023 Jeff Sharlet talks about his new book, The Undertow, essays on the increasingly violent and authoritarian politics on the right unleashed by Trump • Claire Dunning, author of Nonprofit Neighborhoods, on urban governance by philanthropists
fresh audio product: child poverty, more on Chile, and the politics of grievance
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): September 15, 2022 DH on child poverty: how much was it down? • another view of the Chilean constitutional referendum, this from Mario Pino • Arielle Angel, editor of Jewish Currents and author of this article, explores the problems with organizing your politics around grievance
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): April 30, 2020 Lauren Sandler, author of This Is All I Got, on homelessness in NYC • Cathy Cowan Becker, author of this review of the Jeff Gibbs–Michael Moore documentary Planet of the Humans, on why it’s so bad
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 3, 2019 Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough, on the paradox of human rights discourse arising alongside great inequality, and on the difference between poverty reduction and income compression
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: March 24, 2016 Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba, on the art scene in that country as Obama visits • Sam Stein, author of this article, on neoliberal housing programs, de Blasio style March 17, 2016 Ben Zachariah on the activities of India’s fascist BJP government at home and abroad • David Rieff, author of The Reproach of Hunger, on the economic development racket
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archives: July 11, 2013 Gilbert Achcar of SOAS on the uprising and coup in Egypt • Adolph Reed on the new generation of (neoliberal) black politicians (with a coda on how poverty came dominate American discourse on inequality)
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archives: June 6, 2013 Sungur Savran on the Turkish uprisings • Slavoj Zizek on the limits of spontaneity (excerpt from a conference talk—full video here) • Lee Badgett on LGB poverty (paper here)
Fresh audio product, lots of it
Freshly posted to my radio archives. Sorry, don’t know why it took so long. Very often the podcasts are up for subscribers well ahead of the web page update, though. September 13, 2012 Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute on the State of Working America • Melissa Gira Grant, author of this fine piece, on sex workers and their self-appointed saviors September 6, 2012 Christian Parenti talks about the politics of climate change on the occasion of the publication of the paperback version of Tropic of Chaos August 30, 2012 Joel Schalit on a militarized, post-democratic Israel • David Cay Johnston on Romney’s taxes August 23,… Read More
The boom in Food Stamps
One area where the languishing U.S. economy is breaking records these days is in need. One measure: more than one in seven Americans is now on Food Stamps, an all-time record. Here’s a graph of the share of the U.S. population drawing benefits from what used to be called the Food Stamp program, and is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is no doubt some bureaucrat’s idea of catchy. As of September, the latest month available (data here), over 46 million people, or almost 22 million households, were… Read More
Radio commentary, Feburary 6, 2010
[Sorry for the delay. Better late than never, I hope.] suburban poverty In our national imaginary, suburbs are places of affluence, and even a complacent isolation from social problems. As is often the case with received wisdom, this one’s in need of a fact-check. In a new paper, Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr of the Brookings Institution find that suburbs are home to the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. Before continuing, I should note, as I always do when I talk about our official poverty line, that… Read More
Radio commentary, December 17, 2009
Happy Beethoven’s baptism day. Fed begins to withdraw some indulgence On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve held one of its regular policy-setting meetings, which happen every six weeks or so, and decided to do nothing, for now. That is, it left the interest rate under its direct control, the so-called federal funds rate, the interest rate that bank charge each other for overnight loans, unchanged at 0. Ok, it’s averaged 0.12% for the last few weeks, which is pretty close to 0. It also said in the statement accompanying the decision that it… Read More
Radio commentary, September 10, 2009
Thursday morning brought the release of the annual income, poverty, and health insurance numbers from the Census Bureau for 2008. As you might have guessed, the first year of the recession was pretty bad news for just about everyone. Median household income—the income right at the middle of the income distribution, with half of all households having higher incomes, and half lower—fell by 3.6%, the biggest yearly decline since these figures begin in 1967. All racial and ethnic groups took a hit: non-Hispanic whites were off 2.6%; blacks, off 2.8%; Asians, 4.4%;… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on September 16, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, September 15, 2010
[Been a while since I posted one of these. Too many things to do, too little time. Sorry. Much more, including graphs, in the forthcoming LBO.] Thursday morning brought the release of the Census Bureau’s annual income, poverty, and health insurance numbers. These are drawn from a special edition of the Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey. The regular survey, which covers about 60,000 households, is what the monthly unemployment figures, among other things, are based on. This special survey, done every March, covers 100,000 households. This is a very large sample, though… Read More