Portside

“We see increasing numbers of these families in our legal aid services throughout the state,” the Western Center on Law and Poverty’s Jessica Bartholow told Capital & Main. “People’s lives are being ruined by these very high, 25 percent garnishments — the national maximum — being taken out of their check before they get it home to make sure their kids have shoes and backpacks, to make sure their kids can stay housed.”

“In the strawberries, one dies alone.”

If China had bombed thousands of U.S. factories over the past decade, America would respond. But the nation has done virtually nothing about thousands of factories closed by trade violations.

On one issue—and it’s the most fundamental issue—Rauner and Emanuel stand arm-in-arm. Both oppose the kind of progressive revenue solutions that would target the millionaire class to which they belong and which they represent—the kind of solutions that offer the only realistic path out of the fiscal crisis in which the state and city are mired.

Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment, but Donald Trump and other candidates are keeping alive the idea that some Americans should not have equal rights at birth.

Whether he wins or loses, Sanders is already helpfully tapping into rank-and-file discontent about who gets to decide what in our unions. While other big union endorsements of Clinton may soon be announced, the Labor Day buzz—at the grassroots, in early primary states—is largely about Bernie.

If dark matter is the most abundant form of mass, and has gravity, where are all the dark matter structures?

On August 11th, delegates at the 2015 International Council Meeting of Amnesty International voted to back the decriminalization of the sex industry, one of the more controversial decisions in its 54 years history. But, Amnesty's policy goes far beyond decriminalizing the women but also decriminalizes the perpetrators, says Janice G. Raymond the former co-director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), explaining her opposition to Amnesty’s decision.

The greatest threat to the European “way of life” is not migration. It is that Europeans will swallow the lie that some human lives matter less than others. The behavior of the British and European elite towards migrants is not simple inhumanity. It is strategic inhumanity, weaponized inhumanity designed to convince populations fracturing under hammer-blows of austerity and economic chaos, that there is an “us” that must be protected from “them”.

President Obama’s approval for Shell Oil drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea has undermined his recent push to protect the environment and provoked an angry reaction from environmentalists. The August 17th decision comes two weeks after the release of the United States' most aggressive attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the Clean Power Plan, and just days after Obama announced he will visit Alaska later this month to highlight the impacts of climate change.