Today is International Women’s Day, a time for celebrating women’s achievements and calling for greater equality. The United Nations has focused this year’s events on ending violence against women—not with more pledges and promises but with real, concrete action. We have made some recent strides. Just yesterday President Obama signed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Yet far too many women continue to suffer at the hands of others: 70 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime according to the UN.
Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled “Passive Intervention.” The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.
More than five years into the downturn, it doesn't take much to get people excited about the state of the economy. The Labor Department's February employment report showing the economy generated a better than expected 236,000 jobs and the unemployment rate had fallen 0.2 percentage points to 7.7% was sufficient to get the optimists' blood flowing.
In one of the fiery oratories for which he was well-known, the late Hugo Chávez once stated his belief that "the American empire is the greatest menace to our planet." While his detractors have often sought to paint his rhetorical flourishes as a manifestation of unprovoked and unpopular extremism, to his death Chávez remained extremely popular with the majority of t
Looking to hire someone for a little landscaping work or a construction job? There might be a local agency that can offer free security services to ensure that workers will work as hard as possible for as little as you’re willing to pay: the local police department.Day laborers talk with a prospective employer on a street corner in Tucscon, Ariz. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. — Thomas Babington, On Horace Walpole (1833)
City Harvest Mobile Market food distribution site, New York. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)Since the beginning of the Great Recession, I’ve been waiting for a documentary to make the case that low-income people and the middle class are now in the same boat—that old distinctions people created to divide them are obsolete, with so many people living near poverty, or an illness, lost job, or disaster away from poverty.
That’s the tagline for the new film out by Participant Productions, entitled A Place at the Table, which looks at America’s growing hunger epidemic. Participant Media, which produced Lincoln, The Help and Food Inc., does not disappoint with its latest take on what America must tackle. And in light of the March 1 sequester cuts to social programs, the film’s timing couldn’t be more appropriate.
