Subject: Equality
Woody Widrow reviews the United for a Fair Economy (UFE) report Born on Third Base: What the Forbes 400 Really Says About Economic Equality and Opportunity in America. The report, he says: coincided with the release of the Forbes 400, an…
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Dr. King had a broad and nuanced vision of what justice meant. We all know about his struggles for…
Equitable regions are stronger, healthier regions for everyone. This is becoming more and more of a bedrock understanding within our field. This understanding has transformed much of the work of community development, leading us to more collaborations with regional efforts…
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Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” touted his own company’s health insurance policy, offered half-baked, pie-in-the-sky solutions (“make it easier for individuals to make voluntary, tax-deductible donation[s] to…
Fortunately, Hurricane Gustav did not turn out to be another Katrina. But as major storms go, it appears mild only by comparison. After Gustav, hundreds of thousands were without power; evacuated citizens struggled to get by in shelters; the sewers…
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Tonight, the first evening of the Democratic convention, America was reintroduced to its grass roots. Some memorable moments: Jimmy Carter addressed the hall via video from New Orleans. As he walked through the still-devastated neighborhoods, he talked with residents about…
Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Democrat of Ohio, died yesterday after suffering a burst brain aneurysm. Tubbs Jones, 58, was the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress. She was first elected in 1998 to represent Ohio’s 11th District, which…
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Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion. So asserts the New York Times’ review of The Dark Knight,,…
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“Katrina” is a loaded word, less associated with an actual hurricane than it is with catastrophic destruction from natural disaster, breathtaking flaws in effective federal emergency response (or lack thereof), ineptitude of the executive branch, and a sobering magnifier of…
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Concentrated poverty and hypersegregation generate wide-ranging costs in almost every major U.S. city, particularly for less favored populations. New Orleans clearly fits this description. Cedar Rapids less so. The problems facing residents of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane…
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Check out Greg Squires’ challenge in yesterday’s article on The Nation’s Web site to talk about race in a way that matters during the presidential campaign. Despite all the coded barbs during the primary season about race — “hard-working white…
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The Republican vote was as high as ever. But the Democratic candidate still won — because more Democrats turned out to the polls than ever before. The electorate had expanded, and the demographic had shifted. Working class city-dwellers suddenly realized…
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The day before Obama’s thrilling clinching of the Democratic nomination, I met with a group of high school students at the Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy, an alternative, activism-oriented high school in Chicago’s mostly immigrant Pilsen neighborhood. The students were planning…
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The huge news this past week, of course, was Scott McClellan, who, a few years too late, called his former White House boss a big, fat liar.
But “big fat” was key in another story that got a few day’s notice.
A New York Times article reported that childhood obesity rates in the U.S., while still high, have stopped climbing after two decades of steady upward creep.
The May 28 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association released survey data from the Centers For Disease Control that detail the numbers, still damn grim–some 32% of kids falling into the overweight and obese percentiles, 17% obese.
But, for the moment, the rates have stopped growing.
Why the plateau? Experts were circumspect in their comments. The sunnier assessment: concerted educational campaigns and coordinated local efforts have schools trading Fritos for fruit and have sent kids huffing out to the playground at recess. more
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I’ve been thinking about democracy a lot lately. It happens every time there’s an election. Every time I start getting bombarded by mailers for candidates and propositions. Every time I realize how susceptible people are to propaganda. Week before last,…
National Housing Institute
