Portside

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

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

This poet and this book have just won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award based at Claremont Graduate University. The prize is given to a mid-career poet, and is one of the top literary prizes given in the United States. It is a significant testament to the power of Smith's work. This review shows wide-ranging and powerful art that Patricia Smith practices.

I believe in reaching out. I believe in standing my ground too. We must strive to see things from the perspective of others. We must also be true to our beliefs, our promises. I believe that we should look after one another and be the helping hand when someone falls. I believe in the unity of our nation in all its colours and the unity of all our people. I believe in our freedom.

Congress must decide whether to rescue these funds with low-cost loans, force them to cut benefit payments or let the funds go bankrupt and wipe out retirees’ entire pensions.

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.

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.”

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.

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