Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults. It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times. The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and expectations of these industrious people through broad-based factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families. Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate--welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many American school children--are closely connected to the existence of working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose effective solutions that require simple changes to existing policies--solutions that are politically feasible and can be accomplished without new taxes.

Ellen Meiksins Wood is a leading contemporary political theorist who has been described as the founder, together with Robert Brenner, of Political Marxism,' a distinct version of historical materialism which has inspired a research program that spans a number of academic disciplines. Organized thematically, this Reader provides an overview of her original interpretations of capitalism, and many different topics.

No detailed description available for "Families against the City".

Drawing heavily on the reminiscences of the Brownsville boys themselves, and skillfully integrating these with material from newspapers, books, and commentary of the time, Sorin creates an original and compelling picture of the communal and individual vitality that allowed an unusual and heartening social achievement.

FOR SEVERAL decades German Labour was the pride and model of the international working-class movement. It led the nation out of the first World War and into the post-war period; it was the founder and...