Unemployment for African Americans is projected to reach a 25-year high this year, according to a study released Thursday by an economic think tank, with the national rate soaring to 17.2 percent and the rates in five states exceeding 20 percent.

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez.

Check out this great new track from Washington DC rapper Head Roc and Godisheus.

Members of Congress have at least one reason to ring in the new year: They've given themselves a $4,700-a-year pay raise starting Thursday.

Developing nations accused the rich of meanness on Saturday at the end of U.N. climate talks that launched only a tiny fund to help poor countries cope with droughts, floods and rising seas.

Mariana Chilton, a children's-nutrition researcher at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said the number of children under 6 who sometimes are forced to go hungry has doubled in recent years to 8 percent of all youngsters.

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Banks, automotive companies and investment firms, all sinking under the weight of their own incompetence and greed, head to Washington, usually in private jets, to engage in the largest looting of the treasury in American history....As this pitiful march of folly rolls forward, children in Trenton and across America go to bed hungry.

What is most revealing about the financial meltdown and economic crisis, however, is that it illustrates that corporations — if left to their own worst instincts — will destroy themselves and the system that nurtures them. It is rare that this lesson is so graphically illustrated. It is one the world must quickly learn, if we are to avoid the most serious existential threat we have yet faced: climate change.

The U.S. environmental movement is failing – by any measure, the state of the earth has never been more dire. What’s needed, a leading environmentalist writes, is a new, inclusive green politics that challenges basic assumptions about consumerism and unlimited growth.

The current financial crisis presents an opportunity to scrap the failed policies of neoliberal economics and make America's economic policy both stronger and fairer. By rejecting band-aid solutions, taking decisive action to stop the bleeding, holding the culprits accountable, and reforming our financial system to address the root causes of the crisis, we would do future generations a great service.

The Wall Street crisis of 2008 was the inevitable culmination of decades of neoliberal economic policy, which views free markets and deregulation as the solution to every problem. Investigative journalist Naomi Klein explains how this dangerous ideology took hold throughout US academia and government, and why the Wall Street crisis should be for neoliberalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.

Proposals from Washington to fix the financial crisis fall far short of addressing the fundamental problems that led to the crisis. Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of "Globalization and Its Discontents" Joseph Stiglitz outlines an alternative bailout that would benefit the American people instead of the big corporations that made this mess.

What Drucker thought was more appropriate was a ratio around 25-to-1 (as he suggested in a 1977 article) or 20-to-1 (as he expressed in a 1984 essay and several times thereafter). Widen the pay gap much beyond that, Drucker asserted, and it makes it difficult to foster the kind of teamwork that most businesses require to succeed.

During the political party convention season that begins this week, you won't hear much disagreement on one issue: executive pay.

Holding one's breath while waiting for presidential candidates to address the gap between rich and poor is a sure way to asphyxiate.

The difference in death rates between highly educated and poorly educated people in the United States is very wide and growing wider, according to new research.

Inflation is walloping Americans with low and moderate incomes as the prices of staples have soared far faster than those of luxuries.

And the worst of it is that the Democrats, who should have been in a strong position -- does this administration have any credibility left on economic policy? -- appear to have caved in almost completely.

I was walking out of a grocery store recently when a homeless man approached me and said, "Excuse me sir, I'm trying to buy some food. Can you help me out?"

Anyone with $25 to spare and an Internet connection can now become an international microfinancier through Kiva, an organization that matches individual lenders with impoverished entrepreneurs in the developing world.

In April 2006, a federal judge upheld Indiana’s law on voter identification, the strictest in the nation, saying there was no evidence that it would prevent any voter from having his ballot counted.

Child malnutrition rates have increased sharply in Darfur, even though it is home to the world’s largest aid operation, according to a new United Nations report.

This year, Malawi, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world, is feeding its hungry neighbors.

Food banks around the country are reporting critical shortages that have forced them to ration supplies, distribute staples usually reserved for disaster relief and in some instances close.

"Race is what's killing us. Race is at the heart of the lack of new therapies, at the heart of the lack of care regarding prevention policies, and at the heart of the poor public health infrastructure," Fraser-Howze said.

Making good on a promise to trim the state budget, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated a $55-million program Friday that advocates say has helped thousands of mentally ill homeless people break the costly cycle of hospitalization, jails and street life.