Marcellus Andrews

Marcellus Andrews is a former New America Senior Research Fellow.

As Congress is now preparing a second round of Katrina-related proposals, it's important to bring ideas to the table that will help families achieve economic stability. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the fact that many Americans live in abject poverty, without any assets to draw upon in bad times.

The asset-based ideas proposed by the President, including an urban homesteading act to encourage the ownership of land and homes and worker recovery savings accounts for job training and education offer a… more

BAIT AND SWITCH

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Metropolitan. 237 pp. $24

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch is a worthy companion to Nickel and Dimed, her engaging and infuriating 2001 expose of the hard lives of working-class Americans. The new book provides a victim's-eye view of the world of unemployed white-collar workers--people struggling, mostly in vain, to recoup the high wages and prestige they lost after being dismissed from the not-so-secure confines of corporate America. Bait and Switch… more

Large American cities are in a difficult economic bind, a bind that is especially tough on poor and working class Americans, who are disproportionately black and Latino. The most pressing problem for poor and working class Americans is that American cities are important nodes in a hyper-competitive global economy where highly educated, high income workers consistently beat their poorer counterparts in the marketplace and politics.

The high cost of living in big US cities is the free market's way of… more

You have to admire the Republican Party's nerve. There was George Bush in late January, surrounded by 22 black people, arguing for Social Security privatization on the grounds that the current system is unfair to blacks because we don't live long enough to collect much by way of benefits. A couple of days earlier, House Ways chair William Thomas, R-Calif., was suggesting that Social Security benefits might be adjusted so that people with short lifespans -- black people -- get… more

A holiday in honor of Martin Luther King is a painful and bitter thing in these times of war and growing inequality. For some, King is a symbol of the nation's painful yet ultimately successful struggle to end segregation as public policy. For others, including a growing number of black Americans, King is a failed prophet whose movement for justice and equality has lost to the political heirs of those who were indifferent to racial oppression or fought to hold… more

It is time for all good liberals and progressives to stop crying in their beer and raise a glass to Milton Friedman. That's right, Milton Friedman: Nobel laureate in economics, polemicist without peer among the academic scribblers, the real -- and only -- brains of the American right.

Why should we praise this guy? Because sly old Milton Friedman, unbeknownst to himself, perhaps, is about to make America safe for strong, self-confident liberalism.

How has Uncle Milton assured a liberal… more

The just concluded presidential election was all about Iraq, with the state of the economy lagging in importance while questions about poverty, economic inequality and racial justice languished in the shadows. As always, the concerns of black people were invisible to the parties and to white America. Black American voters were again caught in a vise between the vengeful white nationalist conservatism of the Republicans and an increasingly indifferent business liberalism of the Democrats.

But one gets the sense that… more