Portside

Congress is about to slash food stamp funding in the midst of a deep economic recession, when more people rely on food stamps than ever before. The only hope now to at least moderate the cuts is a band of House Democrats who have pledged to fight the food stamp cuts ferociously.

In my first substantive discussion with Edward Snowden, which took place via encrypted online chat, he told me he had only one fear -that the disclosures he was making, momentous though they were, would fail to trigger a worldwide debate because the public had already been taught to accept that they have no right to privacy in the digital age. Snowden, at least in that regard, can rest easy. The fallout from the Guardian's first week of revelations is intense.

Many in the labor movement recognize some of the problems that working people face, however there isn't enough urgency and there isn't a recognition that fundamental change is necessary. The opposition sees this as a tremendous moment to eliminate unions as a viable force for working people.

Angela Davis' lectures take the reader towards a serious reconsideration of ideology and the state apparatus and the deplorable question of oppression on the basis of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. The wholesale criminalisation of young black men cannot be permitted and the concept of rehabilitation has to find some ground. The Meaning of Freedom articulates a bold vision of the society we need to build and the path to get there.

Reader Comments - Dirty Wars and Jeremy Scahill,; Alice Walker's open letter to Alicia Keys; Syrian proxy war; False economic recovery; NSA spying; It's the Corporations; We Steal Secrets; Baseball and drugs; Spain and the International Brigades - today; Berlin demonstrations against Obama visit; Announcement - Milton Rogovin DVD now available on sale

Five years after Wall Street crashed the economy, not one banker has been prosecuted for the reckless and fraudulent practices that cost millions of Americans their jobs, threw our cities and schools into crisis, and left families and communities ravaged by a foreclosure crisis and epidemic of underwater mortgages.

Eyewitness to the still-unfolding history of ethnic cleansing and Occupation. Report from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. this land, together with Gaza, is referred to by the United Nations and other international bodies as the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or oPt - Palestinian land under Israeli Occupation. We met with students and faculty members from five different Palestinian universities, toured towns and refugee camps in the West Bank.

There is no conceivable benchmark—in our past, or in comparison to our international peers—by which one could sustain the argument that we are taxed too much, or “taxed enough already.”

The cost of low wages at Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) are at the center of a new report released last week by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Low wages are an issue across the economy, but Wal-Mart, as the country's largest private employer, has long faced closer scrutiny than other companies.

"This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures..."