Portside

In the rush to find targets and mobilize outrage, assigning too much culpability to private prisons runs the risk of ignoring bigger forces. Private prison operators are bit players in a broader drama directed by state actors. Elected officials, "tough on crime" advocates and corporate interests have used mass incarceration to advance a political agenda of criminalizing the poor and dismantliing the social safety net of the working class.

Bernie Sanders showed his outrage about inequality at the Democratic Debate, and more and more Americans are understanding his message. Indignation is likely to grow with new data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, which reveals the wealthy elite's continuing disdain for the poor, for the middle class, and for people all around the world.

Democratic socialist, longtime political activist and past Massachusetts state legislator, Tom Gallagher has written a stunningly clear and concise book about American politics. It is self-published and he calls it a “pamphlet” in the tradition of George Orwell, “It is written because there is something that one wants to say now, and because one believes that there is no other way of getting a hearing”(1).

Poultry worker average about $11 an hour, or between $20,000 and $25,000 a year. For every dollar spent on a chicken product, a worker sees just two cents. That kind of pay qualifies a poultry worker with two children for food stamps and free school lunches. And they still might not see all of their promised pay. They often working more than 40 hours a week — they’re required to stay at most plants until all chickens are processed — but rarely get overtime pay.

Forty-two percent of all U.S. workers make less than $15 per hour. This is shocking but even more shocking is that more than half of African American workers make less than $15 an hour, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP). If one delves even deeper you discover that Black women are even more ensnared in this low-wage trap, as Linda Burnham, Research Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), points out.

There’s a paradox to all this. Despite his ideological kinship with the anti-government crowd, Paul Ryan is the embodiment of the troika of money, power, and politics that corrupts and controls the capital, the very thing the tea partiers detest.

An interesting article from The Wall Street Journal describing the current crisis of parliamentary democracy in Portugal in which the left coalition was not allowed to form a government, but the pro Eurozone forces will not be able to govern.

The concept, “deep state,” describes the hidden policy-making process. It suggests that power to make critical decisions resides not in the superstructure of the political process; the place were competitive games are played for all to see, but in powerful institutions embedded in society that can make decisions without requiring popular approval. Real Alternatives is a Crisis Pregnancy Center opposing women's reproductive rights receiving millions of dollars of funding.

Fighting for $14 phone calls; Soaking prisoners' families; Internet have-nots; Bye-bye Quirky; What trolls get away with