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Tag: Poverty

Lynne Segal

Remembrances of the late author have focused on her best-selling Nickel and Dimed with only rare acknowledgement of the major roles she played in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.

Michelle Morse, Bram Wispelwey, Dorothy Roberts, Ruha Benjamin

A recording and transcript of our event on inequities in medicine and child welfare.

Max Haiven
With the invasion causing a global shortage of sunflower oil, palm oil is back on the rise. But the commodity’s bloody history is instructive of how global capitalism can and can’t be fixed.
Nate File
Inspired by the work of James and Grace Lee Boggs, many young Detroit activists are turning to forms of mutual aid to meet the needs of their communities.
Andrew Ross

We must end the widespread practice of funding government budgets by extorting poor people apprehended for minor offenses.

Derecka Purnell, Elizabeth Hinton
Activist Derecka Purnell interviews historian Elizabeth Hinton about her new book, America on Fire, and how the label “riot” discredits Black political demands.
Ellen Wayland-Smith

Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy continues a long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American whiteness.

Rajan Menon

Everyone agrees that child poverty is a problem. Why are Democrats and Republicans so bad at addressing it?

Rob Nixon

Monarch butterflies may be gone in thirty years. Saving them seems apolitical, but environmentalists have landed in the sights of drug cartels, illegal loggers, Trump supporters, and even clandestine avocado farmers.

Brent Cebul
Policing is not the only kind of state violence. In the mid-twentieth century, city governments, backed by federal money, demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.
Nicholas Rush Smith
As we know from South Africa's crisis, political and social fault lines will shape the contours of joblessness.
Angus Deaton, Joshua Cohen
Boston Review talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton about COVID-19, the relationship between culture, financial hardship, and health, and why capitalism’s flaws are proving fatal for America’s working class. 
Jamala Rogers, Jason Q. Purnell, Walter Johnson, Colin Gordon
Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis. This is the result of racist policies which collapsed the social safety net while setting blacks in the path of danger.
Scott W. Stern

Conservatives have long been sounding the alarm about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance.

Leandro Ferreira, Paul R. Katz

Despite President Bolsonaro's COVID-19 denialism, a small Brazilian city has one of the most ambitious responses in the world.

Mordecai Lyon
While the government and some banks have announced mortgage moratoriums, they have not insisted that rent relief be passed on to tenants. Many renters don’t know what they will do come April 1, let alone May 1.
Liz Theoharis
The Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran and cuts to SNAP benefits are two sides of the same war that the rich are waging against the global poor.
Walter Johnson

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains.

Emma Park, Kevin P. Donovan

Kenya's poor were among the first to benefit from digital lending apps; now they call it slavery.

Pedro A. Regalado, Salonee Bhaman
New York public housing is plagued with problems, but it possesses a democratic advantage that voucher systems lack: residents can hold the state accountable not only as tenants but as constituents.
Brandon L. Garrett
The misdemeanor system is four times the size of the felony system. With so many gradations of minor crimes—many involving fines in a very informal process—prejudice and inequality shapes prosecution.
Elizabeth Catte

It's time to rewrite the narrative of “Trump Country.” Rural places weren't always red, and many are turning increasingly blue.

Lesly-Marie Buer
Harm reduction strategies have their roots in 1980s HIV activism, but they are starting to spread in rural America in response to the opioid crisis.
William J. Barber II, Toussaint Losier
William J. Barber II on the the successes of civil disobedience, the failures of electoral campaigns, and why the South holds the key to transformation in this country. 
Donna Murch
The success of OxyContin hinged on racially bifurcated understandings of addiction. The fundamental division between “dope” and medicine, after all, has always been the race and class of users.
Joshua Cohen, Deborah Chasman
By examining the opioid crisis alongside the War on Drugs Murch brings an otherwise familiar story into new territory.
Marisol LeBrón
In the 1990s, Puerto Rico showed Washington how militarized policing and privatization can extract profits from poor people of color.
James G. Chappel
Many Amazon holiday orders will be fulfilled by homeless retirees, America’s newest precariat. Taking better care of them is part of feminism’s next big challenge.
S. Ani Mukherji
Scott Walker and Paul Ryan broke from Wisconsin’s long progressive history. But as liberals search for what went wrong, they must not ignore the state’s legacy of systemic racism and inequity. 
Jocelyn Simonson

The Mass Bail Out at Rikers Island shows that freedom is a critical part of public safety.

Judah Schept, Sylvia Ryerson
Eastern Kentucky will soon get a fourth federal prison but remains as poor as ever. The region deserves better.
Thad Williamson

The persistence of black poverty has become a permanent feature of U.S. democracy. We need an expanded political imagination to dismantle it.

Maytha Alhassen
Trump’s Muslim ban was not just an abberation: U.S. citizenship has long been predicated on whiteness as it was understood in 1790.
Joseph H. Carens

The moral right of states to apprehend and deport irregular migrants erodes with the passage of time.

Elizabeth Catte

J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has been held up as a guidebook for understanding the 2016 election, but his logic is rooted in an enduring and dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.

Mark Nowak, Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad on writing, struggle, and hope in difficult times.

Brishen Rogers

Critics of raising the minimum wage claim that it decreases employment, but they are missing the larger point.

Lauren Carasik

A recent conference made it clear: military and corporate interests will prevail.

Sujatha Gidla
Sujatha Gidla, born an untouchable in India, tells the story of her family.
Marshall Steinbaum
Capital in the Twenty-First Century raised important questions about inequality that the Ivory Tower would rather ignore.
Anke Hassel

Basic income is a seductive poison that would benefit the margins of society at the expense of the middle class and immigrants.

Brishen Rogers

Cash grants have a role to play in building a decent future for work—alongside much else.

The Undercommons

A basic income that supplemented existing welfare structures could make everyone safer while ending the most pernicious forms of policing.

Michael Faye, Paul Niehaus

Recipients of basic income continue to work, spend less on vice, and are able to invest in long-term plans.

Marshall Steinbaum

Two new books argue that the student debt crisis is a media myth. But they ignore the exploitation of disadvantaged students by for-profit colleges.

Erik Loomis

States are stealing from orphans to pad their budgets. And it's legal.

Elizabeth Anderson

How did we come to view social insurance as socialist?

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Just in time for the holidays, get any three print issues of Boston Review for just $35 – that’s 40% off the cover price!

Before December 9, mix and match any three issues for one low price using code 3FOR35.

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