Portside

100 Parkland students travelled 450 miles to the state capital while others at dozens of high schools walked out in support of #NeverAgain

The dramatic growth of YDSA chapters confirms that millennials don’t think capitalism is working for them.

It has become clear that Chicago activists have the ability to rally allies on campuses nationwide for what once would have been a parochial concern.

Internet activity of all visa applicants, visa holders and green card holders is now tracked.

Not so neutral; Kremlin gremlins; John Perry Barlow; Bye bye Bibi?; Hello, you must be going; Digitalizing indigenous stories

Why is the NRA so powerful? Hint: it's not just because it has boatloads of money.

Book Review: No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson. By Jeff Sparrow. Melbourne: Scribe (US: Cursor Marketing), 2018. 304pp, $19.95, paperback. Why, 42 years after the death of the multi-talented Robeson, is author Jeff Sparrow still “in search” of him? In part, no doubt, because in the United States, Robeson did not “disappear” so much as he was “disappeared” during the “red scare” of the 1950s. Banned from the public eye and ear in the United States, save to small groups of “red-diaper babies” and old-timers, he was also refused the right to renew his U.S.

The latest budget proposal calls for reducing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) outlays by $200 billion over the next decade and replacing about half of the aid delivered through this mainstay of the American safety net with what it’s calling “harvest boxes” of nonperishable items like pasta, canned meat and peanut butter. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue says this new approach would cut costs and give states, which administer the SNAP program, “flexibility.”

The namesake of the high school where 17 people were killed was a remarkable progressive activist—much like the students now demanding real gun control.

There is new interest in the slaughter and massacres that took place during the Vietnam War. This may in part be a response to the fact that last month (January 2018) marked the 50th anniversary of that war’s Tet offensive. In Vietnam many of the massacres (My Lai was by no means unique) were perpetrated by soldiers as well as their officers from the so-called “land of the free.” I use this descriptive term intentionally because one of the things that is often declared to be constitutionally “free” from rational regulation in the U.S. are guns.