Video: Katherine Newman on the Near Poor

Katherine S. Newman is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs of the Woodrow Wilson School and Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Newman is an expert on urban poverty, occupational mobility, and subjective dimensions of economic dislocation, and is the author of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and several other books on poverty, downward mobility and school violence. This video was produced by the Woodrow Wilson School's Office of External Affairs.

If the video doesn't appear in your reader, you can watch it here. And you can check out Beacon Broadside's growing Video Log here.

Fred Pearce: Consumption Dwarfs Population As Main Environmental Threat

Today's post is by Fred Pearce, author of Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff. Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is environment consultant for New Scientist magazine, and his other books include When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. This post originally appeared at Yale Environment 360 (e360.yale.edu).

It's the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we are afraid to discuss it.

It sounds like a no-brainer. More people must inevitably be bad for the environment, taking more resources and causing more pollution, driving the planet ever farther beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This is a terribly convenient argument-- "over-consumers" in rich countries can blame "over-breeders" in distant lands for the state of the planet. But what are the facts?

The world's population quadrupled to six billion people during the 20th century. It is still rising and may reach 9 billion by 2050. Yet for at least the past century, rising per-capita incomes have outstripped the rising head count several times over. And while incomes don't translate precisely into increased resource use and pollution, the correlation is distressingly strong.

Moreover, most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population.

By almost any measure, a small proportion of the world's people take the majority of the world's resources and produce the majority of its pollution. Take carbon dioxide emissions-- a measure of our impact on climate but also a surrogate for fossil fuel consumption. Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world's richest half-billion people-- that's about 7 percent of the global population-- are responsible for 50 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.

Although overconsumption has a profound effect on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of our high standard of living extend beyond turning up the temperature of the planet. For a wider perspective of humanity's effects on the planet's life support systems, the best available measure is the "ecological footprint," which estimates the area of land required to provide each of us with food, clothing, and other resources, as well as to soak up our pollution. This analysis has its methodological problems, but its comparisons between nations are firm enough to be useful.

Healthy Food is a Luxury for Some Budgets

Today's post is from Mark Winne, the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. For 25 years, Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Connecticut area. Winne now writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community assessment, and food policy. For more information, go to http://www.markwinne.com.

Let me say from the outset that I eat well.

Not well in a maternal, "please finish your broccoli, dear" sense. I mean very well. I cultivate a large organic garden, buy grass-fed beef from a local rancher, and when I'm feeling particularly flush with cash, frequent my local Whole Foods.

I'll even eat at one of those bastions of gastronomic elitism like the Stone Barns Restaurant in New York or that citadel of all things "foodie," Chez Panisse in Berkeley. On one such occasion I celebrated my son's college graduation with a dinner at Stone Barns, where the tab for the two of us came to a cool $325.

It dawned on me as I was staggering out of the restaurant that I could have paid for 126 low-income children to eat school lunch that day at the current US Department of Agriculture reimbursement rate of $2.57 per meal. Better yet, 283 food stamp recipients might have had dinner on me that night at the average meal allotment of $1.15.

Such disparities in the way that different classes of Americans eat are disconcerting.

With our nation teetering on the brink of economic meltdown, a record 31.8 million of us are receiving help from the food stamp program, a thirteen percent increase over last year.

Food banks and food pantries have been overrun as well. More than 25 million Americans use emergency food assistance annually. While demand for "free" food is reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, at a cost to the taxpayer of $73 billion a year and climbing, it might seem odd that there is also an infatuation with higher-priced local and organic food.

The Economic Downturn and Student Loans: Some Practical Advice for Borrowers

Today's post is from Alan Michael Collinge, author of The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back and founder of StudentLoanJustice.Org, a grassroots organization, and political action committee.

Student loan companies will soon be lined up at the Federal Treasury, seeking loans against bundles of high interest, private loans that they made to students, often with their parents as co-signors. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of students and their families see their livelihoods wracked by student loans in ways worse, even, than defaulting home mortgage borrowers. As we progress through this economic downturn, there is a strong potential for increased predatory activities by the student lending industry, and borrowers need to be prepared to take extra steps to protect themselves.

A bit of history: federally guaranteed student loans have been largely impossible to discharge in bankruptcy for the past decade. The federal guarantee on these loans was used as the reason for removing this basic protection. It was a very weak argument—no other loans, federally guaranteed or not, have special exemptions from bankruptcy protections. In practice, this unique lack of bankruptcy protection has given the green light to lenders to attach penalties and fees onto debt without fear of the borrower. The largest lender in the country, Sallie Mae, saw its fee income increase by 228% between 2000-2005 (its loan portfolio grew by only 87% during this time), and their CEO bragged to shareholders in their 2003 annual report that their record earnings that year were attributable to collections on defaulted loans. So, no bankruptcy protection for the borrower means free money for the lenders, and lots of it!

Removing bankruptcy and other protections from federal loans wasn't enough for the student loan industry, however: in 2005, student loan giants Sallie Mae, Citibank, and others lobbied Congress successfully to remove bankruptcy protections, as part of the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill, for private student loans as well. No one seems to be able to find out who inserted this language into the bill—no Congressman can be found who is willing to claim credit. Nonetheless, it happened. That the student loan companies were able to get this passed was shocking to unbiased experts and analysts of this industry.

Thoughts on a New Way for USDA

Today's post is from Mark Winne, the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. For 25 years, Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Connecticut area.  Winne now writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community assessment, and food policy. For more information, go to http://www.markwinne.com.

How ironic that we must even ask our national policy makers to make the nutritional health and well-being of their people the U.S. Department of Agriculture's first priority. But due to the sheer weight of the marketplace and poor government policies, local and regional food systems of the early 20th century yielded to highly concentrated, chemically intensive systems of the post-World War II era. Now disparagingly known as the industrial food system, its voice was always the first to be heard in the corridors of power; its phone calls always the first to be returned by the Secretary of Agriculture.

But a fair wind is blowing, the market is shifting, the people are speaking, and some would even say that the leaders are listening. The pendulum is swinging in the direction of sustainable, local and regional food systems. Certainly for those with time, money, and good information, a healthy food supply is now at hand. No, the scales of justice are still not balanced. There's plenty of "good food" for the affluent, but not enough affordable and healthy food for those with limited wealth or access to quality food retail outlets. But at least those who speak up loudly for sustainably produced food are beginning to speak up for justice as well. The voice we are hearing more often than not is one that cries out for a food system that is both just and sustainable.

The mere structure of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, however, presents a lingering policy problem that thwarts those growing hordes of activists who see the promise of justice and sustainability being fulfilled at the community level. USDA is hopelessly fragmented into programs that assist farmers—mostly very large commodity farmers, as we know; programs (15 separate ones in all) that feed people such as food stamps; and programs that support conservation. If I walked into USDA headquarters in Washington, DC, and asked to see someone who could help me develop a local food system that respected our natural resources, rewarded farmers with a decent livelihood, and provided healthy food to all our residents, nobody would know where to send me. If I was super clever that day, possessed of infinite stamina, and extremely lucky, I might be able to piece together what I needed out of the various silos in the agricultural bureaucracy. But to my knowledge, no one has ever survived the attempt.

To View, To Eat, Perchance to Not

Today's post is from Mark Winne, the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. For more information, go to http://www.markwinne.com.

November has always been a confusing month for me.  Traditionally, it is the time when we Americans give thanks to a mixed bag of things from the bounty of the autumnal harvest to the blessings of that new flat-screen TV that now adorns the living room wall. It’s also the time of year when the U.S. Department of Agriculture issues its annual hunger count, known officially as the report on “Household Food Security in the United States.” By asking 40,000 of us a series of questions concerning our ability to purchase food, USDA’s researchers can determine with a reasonable degree of statistical certainty how many of us are, in the nomenclature of the Department, either “food secure,” “food insecure,” or, to avoid using the “h” word, have “very low food security.” 

What did they find for 2007? Well, if you’re a hedge fund operator who bet on growth in food insecurity, you’ll be reaping the rewards of your wager this holiday season. Compared to 2006 when 35.5 million Americans were either food insecure or suffering from very low food security, 36.2 million or 12.1 percent of the population fell into those categories. And with the economy swirling down the toilet, well-honed research skills are hardly necessary to project that 2008 will be far worse.

Forget Commercialism! The New Realities of Consumption and the Economy

Today's post is from Dr. Juliet Schor, an economist, author, and professor at Boston College. Dr. Schor is the author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century, and Do Americans Shop Too Much? She is co-chair of the New American Dream Board of Directors. This post originally appeared on the New Dream blog.

Spending our way to prosperity? Not this time around.

As a "New Dream" economist, I am asked all the time: won't consuming less hurt the economy? When there's less spending, people get laid off, their incomes fall and businesses, especially small ones, go bankrupt. This question is especially urgent today, given that the recession is deepening and spreading. George Bush was widely (and rightly) criticized for suggesting shopping as the patriotic response to 9/11. Would Barack Obama be wrong if he suggested the same?

Short answer: Yes. But with this topic, there's rarely a short answer. So here's the longer one.

Let's remember, first, that the economic crisis wasn't caused by a decline in consumer spending. It was triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble, Wall Street excesses, and some other factors. Consumers are cutting back now, but the decline in spending is one of a series of falling dominoes—more an effect of recession than a cause.

Home for the Holidays?

Today's post is from Jacqueline Olds, MD, and Richard S. Schwartz, MD, authors of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century. Drs. Olds and Schwartz are both psychoanalysts and Associate Clinical Professors of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Olds teaches child psychiatry and Dr. Schwartz teaches adult psychiatry at the McLean and Massachusetts General Hospitals. Married to each other and with two grown children, they each maintain a private practice in Cambridge, MA. They have written two other books, Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life and Marriage in Motion.

On the front page of the Boston Globe, just beneath the story on surging unemployment, is another headline. "Guess who's not coming to dinner? Amid slump, holiday travel plans stall." The economic crisis threatens to disrupt one of the few moments when we, as Americans, regularly remember that electronic connections can't replace a family meal. Thanksgiving has been the time to emerge from our wired (and wireless) solitude to move real bodies through physical space, over clogged highways and through packed airports to be at the table with our families for the holiday. But even before the economic crisis, it was already tempting not to go.

These days, we can do so much from home – our work, our shopping, our socializing, our game-playing. It's not only convenient; it's also high status. It shows that we have access to all the latest technologies of connection. It shows we are freer than neighbors who are still tied to commutes and schedules. Busyness itself has become high status, an upwardly mobile contest to see who can keep more balls in the air. With so much to do, who has time to run to the store? Or to pack up for the holidays?

Obamanomics for the Missing Class

Today's post is from Victor Tan Chen, co-author (with Katherine S. Newman) of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and the founding editor and president of INTHEFRAY Magazine. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Newsday and the Minority Law Journal, and in the book Chutes and Ladders. He is a Harvard doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy.

Now that Barack Obama has won the presidency, and the Democrats have broadened their majorities in Congress, the picture looks a little less bleak for the country's poor and near poor families.

In policies ranging from taxes to health care, from housing to job creation, Obamanomics will likely provide some welcome relief from the status quo of the last eight years, during which the ranks of low-income households grew. In 2000, 29.2 percent of the population, or 81 million Americans, lived on household incomes of less than twice the poverty line. In 2007, 30.5 percent of the country, or 91 million Americans, fell into this bottom category of poor and near poor households.

In our book The Missing Class, Katherine Newman and I looked at the situation of near poor families at the end of last decade and the beginning of this decade. Rates of poverty and near poverty were steadily falling from their peaks in the early 1990s. Americas economy was roaring. But as we described in our book, even in those boom years near poor families were struggling mightily to find quality health care, housing, and education for their children.

Now that another downturn is upon us, the economic fortunes of the less well-off look far worse. And having just approved a massive infusion of government money to prop up the country's floundering banks, the federal government — even with a progressive president at the helm — will find its options even more limited than is usually the case during recession times, as half-a-trillion-dollar budget deficits feed interest rate rises and worsen the market malaise.

Greenspan Passes the Buck

Today's post is from Marilyn Sewell, senior minister at the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon. Sewell is the author of Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Mid-Life and Beyond and Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic Childhood, and the editor of two collections of poetry, Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry and Cries of the Spirit: More Than 300 Poems in Celebration of Women's Spirituality. This post also appeared on her personal blog, Reflections.

People are mad at Greenspan. Yes, the Lord of the Stock Market, the One True God we worshiped, has failed us, we see. Alan Greenspan, almost three years after retiring as chair of the Federal Reserve, is realizing that free markets don't always self-correct. Last Thursday he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "Those of us who have looked to the self interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief."

Lawmakers asked him to say, "I was wrong, and I'm sorry." Pretty simple. But Greenspan declined. At a time when unprecedented numbers of people all over the nation are losing homes and now losing jobs, as well, the former Chair refused to accept responsibility for the crisis. He did say, however, that his faith in deregulation has been shaken. We were hoping you might have noticed sooner, Mr. Greenspan. And since you have fiercely opposed deregulation for almost 15 years, one would hope that you would at least apologize for letting ideology rather than market realities determine our economic policy. "The whole intellectual edifice . . . collapsed in the summer of last year," he said.

Factory Farms, Dirty Water, and the Bible: Part Two

Today's blog post is part two of two (part one is here) by Mark Winne about the environmental and social impact of factory dairy farming. Winne is the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

This is part two of a two-part story. Read part one here.

The Power and the Politics of Big Dairy

Nothing gets as big as the dairy industry in New Mexico without political support and the strategic exercise of economic power.  The hardhat adorned photo of New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson, proudly displayed by the New Mexico Dairy Producers Association at statewide agricultural expositions, breaking ground at the Clovis cheese plant is testimony to political support for the industry. In the words of Cindy Padilla, [former] Director of the Water and Waste Management Division of the NM Environment Department (NMED), the state agency responsible for issuing and monitoring dairy wastewater discharge permits, "our agency must balance the need for economic development with environmental protection."  The question, however, is precisely where is that balance.

Under the provisions of the U.S. Clean Water Act a prospective dairy operator in New Mexico must first obtain a wastewater discharge permit from the NMED. The evaluation of the application is based solely on the conditions at the proposed site of the dairy farm and representations made by the applicant. The NMED does not evaluate conditions in the surrounding area such as the number of dairy farms already in existence, the proximity of those farms to that of the permit applicant, or the total impact that a certain number of farms could have on the public's health or environment.  In fact, according to Ms. Padilla, there is no upward limit on the number of permits the department can issue, which means the number of dairy farms is only limited by the amount of land and water rights dairymen can purchase.

Air quality oversight fares even worse. In spite of the concerns raised by residents of Curry and Roosevelt counties, including the high rates of asthma, the NMED does not monitor air quality anywhere in New Mexico except in the state's southern-most region. According to department spokesman, John Goldstein, "we have no plans to monitor air quality in dairy areas at this time."

Factory Farms, Dirty Water, and the Bible: Part One

Today's blog post is part one of two (part two is here) by Mark Winne about the environmental and social impact of factory dairy farming. Winne is the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

Just an hour west of Texas, the gentle swells of New Mexico's high plains calm to a pancake flat sea of grass. Crossing into Curry and Roosevelt counties at the state's eastern edge, the empty landscape, broken only by the occasional grain elevator and abandoned village, quickly gives way to a discomfiting motion. Strung out along the highway's edge in a nearly unbroken chain are cow pens filled with thousands of black and white Holsteins slithering in the summer heat like giant schools of beached eels.

Got milk? Eat Taco Bell cheese? Slurp Yoplait yogurt? Chances are pretty good this is where the main ingredient comes from. Curry and Roosevelt counties now enjoy the dubious distinction of being at the heart of the Great American West's dairy industrial complex. With barely 20,000 dairy animals in 1992, the two counties now feed, milk, and clean up after 120,000 cows at 58 operating dairy farms, a number that by all accounts will double in a few short years. And to sop up all this milk (only 30% is used for fluid consumption), Curry County is now home to North America's largest cheese plant, which extrudes a Velveeta-like product at the rate of one truckload per hour.

What do these many farms do to a place? At four tons of manure per cow annually, 120,000 cows produce as much excrement as the city of Los Angeles. The odor in the surrounding communities is bad enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon, and the hordes of flies stop outdoor picnics before the potato salad is uncovered. Besides being a nuisance, the winged insects are also disease vectors for a variety of bacteria-related illnesses. They may be one reason why Curry County's asthma rate is three times higher than New Mexico's statewide average.

But the dairy industry's most problematic contribution is not easily seen or sniffed. Since large dairy farms – labeled by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – and milk processing facilities use more of the region's limited water supply than other users, they present a serious threat to the counties' main water source, the Ogallala Aquifer. And at the same time that the industry is sucking the ground dry, nitrates from the manure are finding their way back into the ground water in such concentrations as to alarm public health workers and state officials.

McCain and Obama on Colombian Free Trade: Business as Usual

Today's post is from Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal. For the past eight years his work has primarily focused on the US war on drugs and Colombia's civil conflict. He is the author of several books including Crude Interventions: The United States, Oil and the New World (Dis)Order (Zed Books, 2006) and Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of US Intervention (Inota, 2002). He also teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

In the final presidential debate, the South American country of Colombia briefly became a central theme in the U.S. election campaign, not so much because of its infamous history of drug trafficking and civil conflict, but because of international economic policies. In November of 2006, the Bush administration signed a free trade agreement with the Colombian government. However, its ratification in Congress has been stalled because many Democrats oppose the pact on human rights grounds. During the debate, Republican candidate John McCain decided to take the offensive against his opponent Barack Obama by attacking the Democratic candidate's opposition to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement. The arguments presented by each candidate are telling with regard to the degree of difference between the two of them on international economic issues.

In the debate, McCain repeatedly made Colombia a topic of discussion. In fact, as Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker put it, McCain appeared to have a "strange preoccupation" with the South American country. In actuality, McCain was preoccupied with suggesting that Obama's opposition to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement exemplified the Democratic senator's protectionist tendencies and that such an economic approach would be bad for Americans. "I just recited to you the benefits of concluding that agreement, a billion dollars of American dollars that could have gone to creating jobs and businesses in the United States, opening up those markets," McCain argued.

Obama responded by suggesting that the United States should ensure such agreements contain adequate human rights and environmental protections, particularly in the case of Colombia where more unionists are killed each year than in the rest of the world. "We have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights," Obama declared, suggesting that human rights trump U.S. trade interests.

Not surprisingly, McCain's position on free trade agreements is consistent with that of President George W. Bush, who again urged Congress to ratify the U.S-Colombia pact the day after the debate. McCain, like the Bush administration and many other Republicans, advocates the expansion of the neoliberal, or "free market," global economic order that has been established over the past quarter century. But is Obama's position markedly different?

A Green Bailout

Today's post is from Van Jones, founder and president of Green For All, a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. The Green Collar Economy, published by HarperOne, is his first book. Jones blogs regularly on politics, the environment, and economics at Huffington Post.

Maybe the Wall Street bailout package is a good idea.

But the only thing I know for sure is this: even if we avert a total economic meltdown, we will still be in a recession. Millions of Americans still will be without jobs -- or in real fear of losing their job. Worse, we will still be dependent on dirty fuels like oil and coal, which are draining our monetary resources and cooking the planet.

The Earth and everyday people will still be suffering.

At this point, I am willing to concede that Wall Street and the big bankers need some propping up. But while we are at it, we should find a way to bail out the little people -- and the planet, too.

So how about a green bailout -- to help both? We already took an important step in that direction. Perhaps the only thing in the whole bailout package that is inarguably good is the support for the U.S. clean energy sector.

In Markets We Trust

Today's post is from Peter Laarman, executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting, a network of activist individuals and congregations headquartered in Los Angeles. He is the author of Getting On Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel

On the US Dollar bill: "He favors our undertakings."

The Great True Faith of our times may have been badly shaken in recent days; but faith that is shaken remains, at its core, a matter of blind devotion.

And while Merrill Lynch is gone forever, that big bronze bull still flares its massive horns down at Bowling Green Park, a few blocks south of Wall Street. The sculptor parked his four-ton creation right in front of the New York Stock Exchange immediately following the 1987 crash. He thought the symbol of a robust market might bring needed good luck, and to this day traders will sneak by and rub the behemoth's testicles to aid their fortunes.

Just a harmless superstition, you may say. Yet the obeisance that our whole culture pays to the financial markets, to their "self-regulating" wisdom and beneficence, bespeaks a kind of mass enchantment or mass superstition. Surely there was something delusional in the huge bets that money managers were placing on financial instruments (credit default swaps, exotic derivatives) that even they and even the ratings agencies didn't understand. Surely there is something equally delusional in the idea that covering these bad bets with taxpayer money will "fix" the problem.

Link Roundup: Welcome to New Readers, Rev. Forrest Church, Divorce as a Health Care Strategy

In the run-up to tonight's Vice Presidential debate, which will be hosted by Gwen Ifill, we're seeing an slight uptick in traffic from conservative blogs linking to her cousin Sherrilyn Ifill's post on The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama. For those of you who clicked through to read the entire post, then stuck around to see what else we talk about here, welcome.

Or you might have come here from Galleycat, where Ron Hogan said something nice about us again this week. We're happy to see you, too!

Good Reading Elsewhere:

"After two or three poignant farewell sermons, I'm almost embarrassed this morning to be seen in public upright." Rev. Forrest Church was featured in a moving story about last weekend's sermon at the Unitarian Church of All Souls. Rev. Church posted on Beacon Broadside in July about his book Love & Death.

Sara Robinson does some myth debunking regarding the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime crisis. (Link via Susan Campbell's Fear, Itself blog at the Hartford Courant).

"Neither of us wanted a divorce. We thought we'd be soulmates, forever and forever. But we couldn't afford to go to doctor any more and couldn't afford medication." Long-married couples divorce in order to get necessary health care. 

"Polar bears, Priuses and Ph.D.s aren't going to do it alone." Green-collar dynamo Van Jones in Time on how green jobs can save the economy and the earth.

Recent Beacon Broadside Posts:

Weathering the Storm: Keeping Some Control in a Financial Crisis by Nan Mooney

Books Still Burn Here by Christopher Finan

The Unetane Tokef: A Jewish Model for Collective Responsibility by Danya Ruttenberg

From the Director: Remembering Robert Giroux by Helene Atwan 

Weathering the Storm: Keeping Some Control in a Financial Crisis

Today's post is from Nan Mooney, author of Not Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class. Mooney's work has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, The Daily News, The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Seattle Weekly, Women's eNews, and various other publications. Her website is www.nanmooney.com.

These days, whether you're a college student or a retiree, it's pretty hard not to reside on the edge of a financial panic. After all, if mega-institutions like Lehman Brothers and AIG can't weather our current financial storm, how is one middle class individual or family, struggling even before the you-know-what hit the fan, supposed to scrape by?

Though you can feel fairly confident that the government won't be knocking on your door with a $700 billion check anytime soon (that money's spoken for), as members of today's struggling middle class it is possible to hang on to some control over our money and our future.

Link Roundup: Student Loans, Funding Locally-Owned Markets, Cow Gas

Kathryn Joyce (whose book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement will be released by Beacon this winter) compares the candidacy of Sarah Palin to the biblical story of Esther.

The student loan credit crunch may just be a "convenient" distraction for lenders who would like to keep attention away from predatory lending practices, says Alan Collinge, author of The Student Loan Scam.

On Democracy Now!, David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, discusses how aggressive tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes some undocumented immigrants too afraid to evacuate in the face of dangerous hurricanes.

The state of Pennsylvania brings fresh, healthy food to underserved populations with a grant-funding program for locally-owned grocery stores in low-income communities.

A special diet can help reduce cow methane emissions (which is to say "bovine flatulence") and thus reduce the impact of cattle farming on global warming.

Quotable Link Roundup: Obama, Reverse Graffiti, Climate Change

"To understand military sexual assault, let alone know how to stop it, we must focus on the perpetrators." Helen Benedict on why soldiers rape.

"To us sofa slouchers, these teen Olympians are heroes. But they have the nation's pediatricians on edge." A Baltimore Sun op-ed by Mark Hyman about young athletes. Also check out Hyman answering questions about how to be a good sports parent.

"I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him - and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son." Kelley Bulkeley, author of American Dreamers, analyzes the dreams of Barack Obama.

"[T]he artist's weapons are cleaning materials and … the enemy is the elements: wind, rain, pollution and decay." The Environmental Graffiti blog, in a convergence of title and topic.

"They're being asked now to tighten their belts, and there simply aren't any notches left, so that I think what we're going to see is people going into a huge amount of debt." Nan Mooney, author of Not Keeping Up With Our Parents, on NewsHour (available in transcript, audio or video).

"At the nation's extreme western edge, sitting over 2500 miles from the U.S. mainland, Kauians are as vulnerable to high food and energy costs as a people can be." At the Slow Food Nation blog, Mark Winne highlights the special challenges faced by a Hawaiian food bank.

"There's historical truth, which I don't discount at all, and there is, co-existing with it, a deeper truth about what it is to be a person and what it is to live your life in alignment with the sacred." Danya Ruttenberg, author of Surprised by God, at the Cultural Criticism and Beauty Tips blog.

Related Beacon Broadside posts:

Helen Benedict on female veterans.

Mark Hyman talking about Debbie Phelps, mother of Michael Phelps, the greatest Olympian in history.

Kelly Bulkeley telling Americans to get more sleep, and dissecting dreams of the presidential candidates (posts one and two).

Nan Mooney discussing how economic equality is hurting the middle class.

Mark Winne about high food prices and the food gap between the rich and the impoverished.

Link Roundup: Foreclosures, Swing Voters, Farmers Sharing the Bounty

At the Root, Kai Wright discusses the hit black homeowners are taking in the mortgage foreclosure crisis, a topic he addressed earlier in this excellent article at The Nation. Kai has previously contributed to Beacon Broadside on gay teens and James Baldwin.

David Moore deconstructs some sloppy NYTimes poll analysis on Obama and the racial divide at the Huffington Post.

Mark Winne continues his blogging at Slow Food Nation, discussing a program in Bellingham, WA, where volunteers harvest surplus produce to help stock the local food banks. The Nashville City Paper had this review of Winne's Closing the Food Gap last week.

At the Boston Globe, Howard Zinn reminds John McCain and Barack Obama that "no one wins in a war." Also at the Globe, a new religion blog from Michael Paulson. (Thanks, Michael, for the link to our post from Forrest Church.)

University of Wisconsin math prof Jordan Ellenberg, at his blog, Quomodocumque, challenges John Tierney's dismissal of the gender gap in the sciences. Maybe Tierney, who seems to think that "women on average just aren't as interested as men are in these disciplines," should read about Maria Mitchell.

We missed this when it originally posted, but just after Independence Day the LA Times had this article on the Jefferson Bible:

The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:
"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

And in the department of "Wow, I feel old," the naked baby on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind is now 17. They grow up so fast!