By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 14th, 2012 
I knew when I left for Europe that in all likelihood President Obama would be re-elected, though I was anxious. The stakes were high. If he won, as expected, my return from my few weeks visit would feel like I was truly returning home. If he lost, I would feel like I was venturing to an alien country, one that I had hoped had been left behind, a country trying to revert to a state that didn’t include me, and many others, as full citizens.
A key of the Obama election, presidency and re-election has been inclusion, and the Republicans were pushing back, clearly revealed in their voter ID, voter suppression campaign. The changing demography helps to explain the President’s victory, but his great gift to the country has been to show the country how these changes are our greatest strength. The changing demography plus Obama’s vision go a long way in explaining the election results and the forthcoming changes in the United States.
He did it again in his victory speech as the nation’s storyteller-in-chief. It was a beautiful conclusion to a less than beautiful election. The ugliness of the opposition to Obama left a bad taste in our collective mouths for months, in fact, for years, thanks to the Tea Party, Fox, Rush and company. Obama in his victory speech reminded the American public and the rest of the world to keep our eyes on the prize. I watched on CNN in my hotel room in Warsaw. Today, I watched again with my friends at the Theodore Young Community Center. We decided to share the moment together. We were inspired.
“Our man,” as my dear friend Beverly McCoy speaks of the president, first got our attention, by marking the accomplishment of a free election and celebrating all who took part, linking fundamental political facts with the theme of his campaign, but including those who campaigned against him:
“Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. (Applause.)
I want to . . .
Read more: Coming Home: Demography + Vision = the Re-election of Barack Obama
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 3rd, 2012 
As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.
Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:
I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?
Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:
How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it 
Anna Hsiao responded:
It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.
Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:
but how, really?
Anna:
Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….
While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:
People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. . . .
Read more: Romney – Ryan on Poverty: A Question and Exchange
By Gary Alan Fine, November 21st, 2011 
 One of my first contributions to Deliberately Considered was an essay on Glenn Beck (“Beck and Call”), a commentator who at that moment (February 2, 2011) was riding high. But who hears Glenn Beck today? He has a website that requires a subscription. In the past year, Mr. Beck has become marginal to the public debate, and perhaps in becoming marginal, the sharp fringe of the Tea Party has become so as well. He was the tribune for the aggrieved during the Tea Party Summer.
Last winter – back in the day – Glenn Beck was a roaring tiger. His claws were thought so bloody that when he attacked Frances Fox Piven, one of the leading activist scholars of social movements, a string of professional organizations rose to the lady’s defense, including the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. After the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, many progressives concluded that Professor Piven was next in line for assassination from the rightists roiled and boiled by Beck.
Today we frame Glenn Beck’s symmetry as less fearful. Those who worried that Professor Piven was walking on a knife’s edge might be surprised that her latest book, published in August, is entitled Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate. Glenn Beck has become Professor Piven’s marketing tool. Without Glenn Beck’s opposition, Piven’s writings might seem less essential. (As a fellow former president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, I am pleased that her deservedly influential writings have become essential. I am attempting to find someone of equal stature to hate me. The placid readers of this flying seminar know that I try my best.)
However, my point is . . .
Read more: Glenn Beck, Prophet?
By William Milberg, September 8th, 2011 
The failure of economics in the runup to and aftermath of the Great Recession has generated a lively debate about how to reform economics and more specifically about the renewed relevance of Keynesian economics, which had fallen out of favor since the 1970s. The Keynesian message, so important in this latest round of political wrangling over the increase in the US debt ceiling, is that cutting government spending in a slump will only worsen the unemployment problem. The role of expansionary fiscal policy, according to Keynesianism 101, is to provide demand for goods (and thus for employees to produce those goods) when the main sources of demand in a capitalist economy — households and businesses – are not providing a level of demand necessary to generate a socially acceptable level of unemployment.
Keynesianism 102 is about the multiplier effect of changes in spending. This is the notion that an increase in demand (from any source, not just government but certainly including government) will impact employment and incomes with a ripple effect. This includes a direct impact and then a secondary impact when the direct incomes are then spent (in some fraction) and an additional fraction of that is spent, etc.
There are two corollaries to the lesson of Keynesianism 102 that are worth mentioning because they have been raised in the current policy debate. The first is about the differential multiplier effect of a spending increase compared to a tax cut. Empirical studies show that the multiplier effect of the former is greater than the multiplier effect of the latter. The second is about the differential multiplier effect depending on the income of the recipients. Since the poor are more likely to spend a higher percentage of additional disposable income than the rich, a tax cut that benefits low-income people will have a bigger multiplier effect than a tax cut that benefits the rich.
These lessons have not been integrated into current economic policy in the US, where deficit spending and progressive tax reform and expanded benefits for . . .
Read more: Unemployment Equilibrium: Keynesianism 103
By Richard Alba, July 29th, 2011 
From the fracas in Washington, it would be impossible to know that Americans still live in the world’s richest country. In 2010, the U.S. GDP was about two-and-a-half times that of its nearest competitor, China—you know, the country that’s building new cities everywhere and a bullet train system to ferry citizens among them. But to listen to the political discourse that currently dominates the airwaves, the U.S. is facing financial collapse, if not now then in another decade, and it cannot afford another dollar for many collective goods, whether an improved mass transportation system or health care for senior citizens.
As a number of commentators have observed, the political crisis over the debt ceiling is a distraction from graver and more urgent problems: especially the stagnation of the economy, which is not generating enough jobs to make much of a dent in the unemployment rate or to give young workers solid footing for the beginning of their career climbs. The Great Recession, supposedly over, is threatening to turn into a Japanese-style stagnation that could endure for a decade or more.
The state of the U.S. economy is bound up with the plight of the American middle class, as Robert Reich has acutely observed. That plight has been developing for decades, a lot longer than the debt problem, which dates back just a decade, to George W. Bush’s entry into the White House. The economic gains since the 1970s have been concentrated at the top of the income distribution, in the top few percent, and little has trickled down into the middle class. One widely cited statistic has it that the top 1 percent now take home about a quarter of the national income, up from just 9 percent in 1976; the distribution of wealth is even more unequal. (By the standard statistical measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, the U.S. is now considerably more unequal than any other economically developed country and more resembles a developing nation like Nicaragua.)
![]( "Man at eulogy for the Middle Class, Santa Fe, New Mexico © </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") Loading the Debt Problem onto the Backs of the Middle Class
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