If female-headed single-parent families (FHSPF) did not exist, conservatives would have to create them–because they are so useful in explaining any and every thing that has gone wrong in the U.S. for the past 50 years. For Senator Daniel Moynihan in the 1960s, FHSPF were the explanation for African American poverty. For President Ronald Reagan in the '80s, FHSPF provided the “welfare queens” (implicitly African American) who enjoyed lives of leisure on our tab.

Cornel West gave a wide-ranging interview to Chris Maisano, YDS co-chairs Beth Cozzolino and Matt Porter, and Maria Svart during the YDS winter conference, on the legacy of the 1963 March on Washington and the challenges facing the country and the left today.

Immigration to the U.S. is a consequence of changes in Latin America brought about by the U.S. Latin American Empire.

So, what’s not to like about the US economy?  The stock market is making all time (nominal) highs, corporate profits at record levels, housing prices rising – well, maybe there’s still the question of jobs: the lack thereof. 

Statement of the DSA National Political Committee.

Québec student leader Jérémie Bédard-Wien attended the recent Young Democratic Socialists student conference in New York city as an official representative of the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), formerly CLASSE, the national student organization formed to stop tuition hikes in Québec. Jérémie has acted as treasurer, co-spokesperson, and member of the executive committee of ASSÉ, and he sat down after the plenary session for an interview with Democratic Left.

Michael Harrington’s The Other America (TOA) is rightly given credit for recognizing the poor who were invisible to 1950s affluent society and for spurring LBJ’s War on Poverty. The result was a real and sustained decline in poverty. Among the poor, TOA’s biggest impact was on senior citizens. With the creation of Medicare, members of the over-65 age group (disproportionately female) went from 50% more likely than the rest of the population to be poor to 50% less likely. But despite Harrington’s illumination of the invisible poor, his lamp left a huge shadow that obscured a fundamental characteristic of the poor, both then and now: they are more likely to be women than men.