Emma Goldman's Legacy: Tenement Talk from April 9, 2014

Police in Chicago’s Darien suburb said that they were investigating a possible hate crime after an elderly Sikh American was assaulted by a man, who referred to him as a “terrorist” and “Bin Laden.”

Just days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Inderjit Singh Mukker said that he was driving to the grocery store when a man repeatedly cut him off, according to The Hindu.

Mukker pulled over to the side of the road to let the man go around him. But instead, the man stopped, reached into Mukker’s car and began punching him. Mukker lost consciousness, and “suffered a fractured cheekbone and lacerations to his cheek,” a statement from the Sikh Coalition explained.

After being transported to the hospital, Mukker recalled that the man yelled “Terrorist, go back to your country, Bin Laden!” and other racial slurs.
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When Donald Trump took the stage to deliver a short stump speech at today’s anti-Iran deal rally in Washington, D.C., he did so to blaring sound of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World.”

As could have been expected, the band did not appreciate his use of their song. Bassist Mike Mills responded to questions from reporters on Twitter with three words: “Cease and desist.”
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Mills promised an official statement from the band shortly...

UPDATE – 8:15 P.M EST The Daily Beast received an emailed statement from lead singer Michael Stipe, where he appeared to turn up the heat on Trump and Cruz. “Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you — you sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men,” Stipe reportedly said. “Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign.”

A Texas congressman, Joaquin Castro, attempted to negatively influence the minds of Latinos in Texas in regards to Bernie Sanders. HIS SUPPORTERS WERE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will meet with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) on Wednesday, according to a source with direct knowledge of the meeting.

"Leaders in the CBC have been wondering when Sanders was going to come around," said an advisor to a senior member in the CBC. "It appears he sees an opening with his growing polling numbers and frankly it's about time."

According to an invitation, "the meeting will be an overview of CBC priorities and a conversation on pressing issues impacting the African American community."
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The meeting also comes as Sanders is expected to unveil a criminal justice reform bill later this week.
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A new book by two of our nation’s foremost poverty researchers, Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, reveals the desperate circumstances that hundreds of thousands of children and their parents increasingly face: living with virtually no cash income in an economy that requires it to meet nearly every human need.

In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Edin and Shaefer trace this disturbing trend to the 1996 welfare law, which has gradually but inexorably gutted the cash assistance safety net for families with children. Attention to this often neglected side of our nation’s extreme economic inequality is especially timely as policymakers from both parties consider reauthorizing the 1996 welfare law. As the book vividly shows, we are long overdue to take a different path — one that upholds our nation’s values, including our responsibility to protect and empower the most vulnerable by eliminating extreme poverty.

Living on less than $2.00 per person per day is the World Bank’s standard for measuring poverty in developing countries. Through rigorous data analysis and in-depth interviews, Shaefer and Edin document the dramatic rise in extreme poverty since the 1996 welfare law. Similarly, research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities confirms a rise in “deep poverty” — income below half the poverty line, or below roughly $10 per person per day for a typical family — and shows that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1996, reduces deep poverty far less than its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Research shows that early childhood poverty causes short- and long-term harm, in turn posing enormous costs to our economy.

To be sure, many experience $2.00-a-day poverty for months, not years. But trying to make ends meet with such minimal cash resources can be devastating even for the shortest periods. For many families, perilous work, unpredictable work schedules, and housing instability add up to much longer periods of destitution. Through story after story, Shaefer and Edin show how the inability to afford basics like personal hygiene items and transportation, combined with insufficient work and meager public benefits, can drive people towards abusive relationships, precarious housing, mistreatment by employers, and impossible choices between breaking the law and feeding a child.

How did we get here, and how do we get out?
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