Overview

The Abramsky Report, .....grew out of social justice reporting and political columns that I have been writing for a number of national publications over the past several years. If you have been reading my work in the Nation, the Sacramento Bee, the New Yorker Online, Capital & Main, and many other venues, you’ll know that what really gets my journalistic juices flowing are stories about social justice. For decades now, I have written on economic inequality; on housing and hunger; on the criminal justice system; on police brutality; on access to healthcare, and all the other issues that, cumulatively, make this a country that over the past few decades has come to hugely benefit the haves and hugely penalize the have-nots. The United States is a country of dreams and of dreamers. It is, in many ways, an absolutely marvelous, extraordinary, place. And it’s one that generations of immigrants have come to because it gave them the opportunity to reinvent themselves. That ability to climb the ladder, and to become one of the “haves” has, historically, helped shape this land. Yet, in recent years, that ladder for many Americans has become ever-steeper, and the possibility of reinvention has shrunken. America is, today, less socially mobile as a country than was the case a few decades ago; and the penalties of poverty have, in consequence, grown starker. In recent years, as the Trump administration has ramped up attacks on one vulnerable group after the next – DACA recipients, holders of Temporary Protected Status, Muslims, refugees, asylum seekers, the LGBTQ+ community, food stamp recipients, those who use Medicaid and so on – my reporting has honed in on these attacks. What are their implications for us a community? For America’s role and reputation on the global stage? For our future as a democracy and as a functioning constitutional republic? What are