Class Politics

In 1925, the greatest muckraking journalist and advocate for the working man, Upton Sinclair, believed that the cause in which he believed needed to be clearly and concisely explained - in plain English - for the benefit of the American worker. He contended that the elected government was run by the financial supporters of the political parties; that big business, with the support of the courts and legislatures and media at all levels, was exploiting and mistreating workers, and focusing their efforts every day to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy - but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged.

J. D. Vance erzählt die Geschichte seiner Familie - eine Geschichte vom gescheiterten Aufstieg und von der Resignation einer ganzen Bevölkerungsschicht. Seine Großeltern, echte Hillbillys, das heißt Angehörige der weißen Arbeiterschaft, versuchten, mit Fleiß und Mobilität der Armut zu entkommen und sich in der Mitte der Gesellschaft zu etablieren. Doch letztlich war alles vergeblich. Misshandlung, Alkoholismus und Armut sind wesentliche Eigenschaften des Hillbilly-Lebensstils.

Taking up that challenge and drawing from Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews, You Mean It or You Don't will spur today's progressives from conviction to action. It is not enough, authors Hollowell and McGhee urge us, to hold progressive views on racial justice, LGBTQ+ identity, and economic inequality. True and lasting change demands a response to Baldwin's radical challenge for moral commitment. Called to move from dreams of justice to living it out in communities, churches, and neighborhoods, we can show that we truly mean it.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

Black Picket Fences is a stark, moving, and candid look at a section of America that is too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the Black middle class. The result of living for three years in "Groveland", a Black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy has written a book that explores both the advantages and the boundaries that exist for members of the Black middle class.

For millenniums, the elites have had access to knowledge that was out of bounds from the common folk. The knowledge was only known by those at the top of ruling hierarchy and was passed down to the next generation only. This knowledge enabled them to continue being at the top of hierarchy and rule those who are beneath them, establishing their stronghold over positions of power and influence. Ninety percent did not know anything about them and speculated about their lives and ideologies. They pondered and thought of conspiracy theories.

The “pink tax” has gained widespread recognition in recent years, but what happens when you look at the costs that define a woman’s entire life, especially across racial lines? In The Double Tax, Harvard researcher Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman summarizes the disparities that women face as they navigate life’s biggest moments. Not only do the numbers reveal that women incur higher costs than men, but also that Black and white women lead vastly different lives, marked by dramatic gaps in job opportunities, salaries, housing costs, childcare access, and generational wealth.

There's a college affordability crisis happening in the US right now. Tuition rates have soared, while increases in blue collar wages have slowed to a crawl. This adds up to a painful realization for lower-income young people desperately hoping to go to college: there's no way to pay for it. Bobbi Dempsey shares her brutally honest first-person account of the struggle to pay for her children's and her own education on a working-class salary.

Ever since the 2016 election, pundits have been saying our country has never been more divided - that if progressives want to reclaim power, we need to be "pragmatic", reach across the aisle, and look past identity politics. But what if we're getting the story all wrong? In The Marginalized Majority, Onnesha Roychoudhuri makes the galvanizing case that our voices are already the majority - and that our plurality of identities is not only our greatest strength, but is also at the indisputable core of successful progressive change throughout history.

The growing wealth inequality continues to dominate headlines. The divide between the haves and have nots in America is increasingly political and tensions are rising. On one side, the wealthy wield power and advantage, keeping the system operating in their favor, all while retreating into enclaves that separate them further and further from the poor and working class.

This story is set in the village of Tirhat, a village where, in day-to-day life, you can see glimpses of the recent past and today's change. This story is a true depiction of reality - of the inequalities and the struggles the people of this village face. With memorable characters that seem to talk to you and a great story, this book will surely leave a mark on its listeners.

The first half of Chris Hughes's life played like a movie reel right out of the "American Dream". He grew up in a small town in North Carolina. His parents were people of modest means, but he was accepted into an elite boarding school and then Harvard, both on scholarship. There, he met Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and became one of the co-founders of Facebook. In telling his story, Hughes demonstrates the powerful role fortune and luck play in today's economy. Through the rocket ship rise of Facebook, Hughes came to understand how a select few can become ultra-wealthy nearly overnight.

Dylan Ratigan is mad as hell. Infuriated by government corruption and corporate communism, incensed by banksters shaking down taxpayers, and despairing of an ailing health care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a failing educational system, Ratigan sees an America that has allowed itself to be swindled and robbed. In this book, his first, he rips the lid off our deeply crooked system—and offers a way out.

For most of us, the idea of life inside the golden triad of Park Avenue, Sagaponack, and St. Barths is just as exotic as the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Luckily, Richard Kirshenbaum has a VIP pass to the Upper East Side and is willing to share the wealth - of gossip. His New York Observer column on uptown social life provides a fascinating glimpse behind the gilded curtain into the swanky restaurants and eye-popping vacation destinations where the one percent gathers.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to How the Other Half Lives and learn about the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century had to endure.

The author of The Celebration Chronicles - an exposé of Disney’s small town community development - returns to the outskirts of the Magic Kingdom with Sunbelt Blues, an eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban homelessness crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World’s backyard.

In Labor's Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew Cherlin offers a new historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America, demonstrating how momentous social and economic transformations have contributed to the collapse of this once-stable social class and what this seismic cultural shift means for the nation's future.

The United States is the richest country on earth, yet has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. One in seven Americans live below the poverty line, a line which hasn't shifted over the last fifty years, despite the efforts of successive governments and extensive relief programs. Why is there so much scarcity in this land of dollars? In Poverty, by America, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond examines the nature of American poverty today and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

From the number one best-selling author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, a provocative, far-reaching account of how the middle class got stuck with the bill for globalization, and how the blowback - from Brexit to Trump to populist Europe - will change the developed world.