This is the first installment in a three part series by DSA's Chris Maisano. All three installments were originally published in Jacobin Magazine.

Janet Lynn Parker is a middle-aged elementary school art teacher from Arkansas. She graduated in 1991 from Arkansas State University with a degree in art education and $25,000 in student loan debt. Unable to find a job in her field of study, she bounced around from job to job until 1999, when she finally found employment at a public school at an annual salary barely over $20,000. Over that time, her financial mounting difficulties forced her to ask for multiple forbearances and deferments on her student loan, pushing the balance of her educational debt up to about $70,000.

This summer marks the 50^th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.  Elementary and high school pupils study the march in class.  It ranks with the Boston Tea Party as that rare example of mass protest that is praised rather than deplored.  Largely because of the compelling oratory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it has become an iconic event in U.S. history.  How can Americans argue with rhetoric celebrating a dream of freedom?

Mother’s Day started as a call for women to organize for world peace.

Julia Ward Howe, a feminist, abolitionist and writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” issued the first Mother’s Day proclamation in 1870 following the devastation caused by the American Civil War and the start of the Franco-Prussian war in Europe.

International Worker's Day – May Day – 2013 took on special meaning this year, as the drumbeat for immigration reform got louder and louder.

On April 24 two groups of young people met up on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, and it wasn’t for the shopping. One group was striking retail and fast food workers who had walked off the job to protest low wages and demand a $15 minimum wage for downtown workers. The other group was students protesting Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s school closings. Many of the striking workers were only a few years older than the students.

Still part of the fight for economic and social justice

Over 1,000,000 people march in support of immigrants’ rights - May 1, 2006, Los Angeles. Photo by David Bacon.  http://dbacon.igc.org

In economics, austerity is the policy of reducing government spending by cutting social services such as health care, education, food assistance, and other welfare assistance.  Governments reduce spending by cutting money for these and similar services. 

Why did thousands of terrified apparel workers in Savar, Bangladesh, file onto the upper floors of the Rana Plaza building which local authorities had condemned and from which the shops and banks on the lower levels had already been evacuated?

The most recent Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) winter conference, “Students Fighting Austerity: The Future of Democratic Socialism in Neoliberal America,” was held over Presidents’ Day weekend at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York.