In late May, Ben Carson, our Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who thinks the Egyptian pyramids were giant silos, went on Sirius XM radio to discuss how Trump’s plans to slash benefits like food stamps would actually help the poor. There he expressed the controversial idea that “poverty to a large extent is…

There are more than 43 million mothers in the United States. This is how we treat them.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump quietly signed a bill allowing states to withhold federal family planning funds from organizations that provide abortion services.

Jane called the police, and not everyone does that. The cops didn’t scare her, but her husband did.

As the White House was preparing to implement deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month, Mustafa Ali, head of the Office on Environmental Justice, resigned. A week later, his motivation for departing became clear, when President Trump released a hardline budget draft that called for slashing…

In a statement directed to Donald Trump on Wednesday night, Senator Bernie Sanders said the candidate had “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media.”

Diapers are political. An obvious and absolute necessity for the first few years of a child’s life, diapers should be both accessible and affordable, but for poor families across America, they are neither. Now, the White House is looking to address the problem. Last week at SXSW, President Obama introduced a new White…

Last month, New York Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal introduced a bill to end the state’s sales tax on tampons and other menstruation products. The tax, Rosenthal said, is “a regressive tax on women and their bodies.” If the bill passed, New York state would become only the 11th state that currently doesn’t tax tampon…

“Nearly one-third of U.S. heads of households ages 55 and older have no pension or retirement savings and a median annual income of about $19,000. A growing proportion of the nation’s elderly are like Westfall: too poor to retire and too young to die.” The Los…

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families plunged into its current wave of trouble in December 2013, when a five-year-old named Jeremiah Oliver disappeared, and his disappearance went unreported for months, despite his family being under investigation from child services. In the spring of 2014, his body…

Mary Carney, a Marshfield, Wisconsin School Board member, member of the Central Wisconsin Tea Party and Very Frightened Person, will attempt today to do right by her child, her faith, and the Statue of Liberty by wresting Jim Henson’s For Every Child, a Better World out of the hands of vulnerable kindergarteners.

Two years ago, I was hired as a campaign coordinator for a community initiative in South L.A. I got the job because I’d been an organizer for labor unions, and I was eager and thrilled. I’d be coordinating The Belong Campaign, part of a nonprofit funded by government entities as well as large foundations. My cubicle…

The New York Times ran a deeply reported story yesterday on the short, unhappy life and violent death of Tyrelle D. Shaw, a bow tie designer who called himself “Mr. Talented” and who was wanted in a series of violent attacks against Asian women. On his blog, Shaw said he would “hit over a million Asian Women in the…

CBS has a show lined up for the summer called The Briefcase. In it, a “lucky” poor family is given—BINGO—a briefcase with $101,000 in it and told they can keep it all or give some or all of it away to a “needier” family. Then, their agonizing struggle is filmed for our gross-o-tainment! But bear with me: I bet this…