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.”

As we work toward a nuclear deal with Iran, the US government should abide by its commitment to nuclear disarmament in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is also time to fully compensate the victims of Agent Orange and fund a total cleanup of the areas in Vietnam that remain contaminated by the toxic chemical. Urge your congressional representative to cosponsor H.R. 2114, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015.

This year, State Senator Holly Mitchell, (D-Los Angeles), introduced Senate Bill 23, a repeal of the Maximum Family Grant rule, on the grounds that it has only driven poor women deeper into poverty, and done nothing to reduce the birth rate of women on welfare. That assertion has been supported by several studies, including one from the University of California, Berkeley and another from Cornell University.

Sue Bradford Edwards, local Missouri journalist, and Dr. Duchess Harris, Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, new book, Black Lives Matter, is a comprehensive guidebook introducing without emotionally overwhelming 6-12th graders who are learning about the movement, and its inheritance, for the first time to antiblackness violence in U.S. law and society. Surprisingly, the text also resonates with lower-division university students.

The Walking Dead spinoff Fear the Walking Dead is going to look at how different family units operate at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, and one of those families will feature a Salvadorian immigrant and his first-generation American daughter, examining the American dream in the Walking Dead world.

The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage.

Following the resignation August 20th of Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras and the announcement of snap parliamentary elections, 25 Syriza lawmakers who opposed the recent bailout deal formed a new Popular Unity Party and will challenge Tsipras and Syriza in September elections. Former Syriza Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis will head the new party. With its 25 members, the Popular Unity Party becomes the third largest party in the Greek parliament.

PPT's assertion that "public mass transit is part of the infrastructure of any healthy and metropolitan area" made sense not only to the labour movement, but also to significant elements in the business community, gaining support from Democrats, Republicans, independents and Greens, as well as socialists. A wedge was driven into the Republican administration itself, between the secretary of transportation and the extreme right-wing elements.

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.

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”.