2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign. As you may recall, the campaign was conceived by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It evolved into a movement to bring together a diverse amalgam of the poor – Whites, Blacks, Hispanics…
Archives: Voices
Pfizer Update: The Tax Coalition That Could
The good news just keeps coming. Yesterday we told you about new U.S. Treasury Department guidelines that would reduce the benefits and limit the number of companies that use the tax inversion loophole. These guidelines get at the tax-dodging strategies employed by Pfizer, which has been trying to dodge a…
Fact of the Week: Lower-Income Renters Spend Nearly Half of Income on Rent
Housing costs traditionally eat up a large portion of most Americans’ budgets. But for lower-income renters, rising housing costs mean even less money is left over to cover everything else. According to new research from the Pew Charitable Trusts, renters in the bottom third of the income spectrum spent close…
Sorry, Pfizer (not sorry!)
Back in February, we told you about a tax-dodging scheme that is all too common in this day and age: Pfizer, a U.S. pharmaceutical company and one of the world’s largest, wanted to avoid $35 billion in U.S. taxes on about $148 billion in profits the company maintains offshore. It…
A Response to the Heroin Epidemic
Editor’s Note: the following Letter to the Editor was authored by Don Mathis, a member of CHN’s board of directors and also a board member of Doctors for America. It was printed by the New York Times on March 31, 2016, in response to the Times’ front-page story on March 26,…
Tipped workers need a pay raise
How long has it been since you’ve had a raise? For some workers, it has been entirely too long. Today – Friday, April 1, 2016 – marks the 25th anniversary since the minimum wage for tipped workers has been increased. For 25 years now, the minimum wage for an estimated…
Flint and Beyond
This entry originally appeared in the Huffington Post on March 31, 2016. Lana, a single mother with three children, discovered that her one-year old twins tested positive for lead poisoning, and left her contaminated Holyoke, MA apartment, becoming homeless for three months. She got help from a local program, and…
They are forgotten: Hunger and Homelessness in South Dakota
Do poverty, hunger and homelessness exist when there is no one around to see? A tiny South Dakota town that probably 99.99 percent of Americans have never heard of is living testimony that the answer to that question is an emphatic yes. Located in the poorest county in America, the…
Supreme Court Reaffirms Collective Bargaining in Landmark Case
Below is a statement from the National Education Association in response to the Supreme Court’s 4-4 decision today in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case. CHN joined with more than 70 national civil rights and other organizations to file one of the “friends of the court” briefs mentioned in…
Hey Congress: Opioid Abuse is Still an Emergency
More Americans die every year from drug overdoses than they do in car crashes. That’s one of the reasons President Obama will be in Atlanta this afternoon speaking at the National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit, the largest national collaboration of local, state and federal agencies, business, academia, treatment…
Resources from Around the Coalition: Nutrition and Hunger, Federal Budget, March Madness, and More
Anti-hunger efforts. Federal budget proposal analyses. Pay gap bracket picks. CHN’s coalition members are producing great work on very important issues. This week, we continue our Resources from around the Coalition blog series, highlighting important resources you should be aware of. The Food Research and Action Center recently launched a new blog, FRAC Chat….
Fact of the Week: Wage Inequality Grew in 2015 – for the 35th Year in a Row
A new report confirms what many Americans feel every day: the wage gap between the top and everyone else continues to grow. The good news is that real hourly wages (or, in non-economist speak, wages adjusted for inflation) grew across the board in 2015. However, the folks at the Economic…