“No other building of any type better expresses the zeitgeist,” writes Joseph Frey of the new Soldier Field in Dialogue magazine (September/October). “Chicago’s new football stadium is the ultimate setting for the…corporate gladiatorial contests that are professional football.”
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The welfare-reform wave. Participation in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program continued to decline during 2002 and early 2003. The real-life undertow. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities writes in a September 4 report (“Falling TANF Caseloads Amidst Rising Poverty Should Be a Cause of Concern”) that child poverty rose during 2002. Unemployment among single mothers rose from 6.9 to 9 percent between 2000 and 2002. And the number of families with incomes less than half the official poverty line ($7,135 in 2001 for a family of three) increased by about 400,000 between 2000 and 2001.
In a sentence. From Christian Parenti, writing in the September 8 In These Times: “According to the [Baghdad] city morgue, there were 470 fatal shootings in July, up from 10 the year before.”
