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This work is a reexamination of the historic economic rights debate in light of two major changes in American public policy. The first change considers the effect of the debate by the passing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The second policy change considers how the debate should include the effects of the economic bailout brought about by the TARP program. These changes are explained first, as government interventions made in response to widespread suffering and medical cost bankruptcies due to the United States' healthcare system having no guaranteed right to healthcare. The second change focuses on the necessity of a national economic bailout conducted in response to a "Great Recession," as an historic proof that government must intervene when severe economic downturns threaten to collapse the national economy. These interventions support the passage of economic rights and show how the opposition to the passage of economic rights have been based on faulty moral argumentation and reasoning. The essay concludes with a continued call for the passage of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aging people in prison and post-prison release pose significant yet surmountable challenges in satisfying age-specific educational, training, employment, financial and civic participation rights. This descriptive study of 677 older prisoners, aged 50+, in a statewide prison system provides a historical analysis of past and current individual and social structural level factors that influence the prisoners' economic and employment prospects after being released from prison. Results highlight the diversity within this population based on socio-demographics, work histories, family obligations, health status, and legal histories that influence the level of support experienced post incarceration. These findings suggest the need for comprehensive services that provide prison and post-prison release education, vocational training, and housing and job placement for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated older adults. Strategies for providing culturally responsive tools and resources to support education, training, and employment of formerly incarcerated older adults are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes the historical non-relation between cultural studies and economic rights discourse, tracing it to ideal typical distinctions between economy and culture in early cultural studies; Karl Marx's influence on Left thought generally via his critique of bourgeois rights; and Foucauldian governmentalist treatments of rights as neoliberal technologies of control and treatments of economy as having no agency of its own but rather as an effect of governmentality. It then introduces a case-study conjunctural history of American economic rights as a history of present American citizenship and politics in order to demonstrate the historically contingent articulations of individual freedom, government, and economic relations, which are not easily explained by the Marxist or Foucauldian vocabularies. The conjunctural history provides cultural studies research with a new perspective for attention to radical democracy and critiques of neoliberal capitalist policies without surrendering the utility of rights to (neo)liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept and the discontinuous historical usage of the term 'economic rights' in American political discourse from the perspective of democratic political freedom. It views the idea and ideology of 'economic rights' as a discursive marker pointing to historically contingent relations between government, national economy and individual freedom. It focuses on the only two American presidential articulations of an Economic Bill of Rights and their conjunctures: one by Franklin Roosevelt and another by Ronald Reagan. These two articulations represent two opposing political traditions of economic rights in the United States: the neo-liberal laissez-faire free market tradition and the liberal welfare-state tradition. Both of these liberal traditions are haunted by an older democratic-republican discourse of economic rights, from which they continue to draw normative and affective energy without ever confronting its guiding premises. Contemporary popular discourses about the economic crisis demonstrate the continuation of deeply entrenched though historically outdated understandings of the promise and possibilities of individual freedom and autonomy within the folds of a society completely transformed by capitalist modernity. Present considerations of this history reveal possible resources for political struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas on how to make the fruits of capitalism more braodly enjoyed are not new. A rich body of thought exists advocating a redefinition of socioeconomic mechanisms to this end within the context of private property. This article traces the evolution of this thinking within the United States from before the American Revolution to the present. The culmination of this intellectual tradition is the universal stock ownership plan (USOP). The means of, and prospects for, experimenting with such an initiative are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]