Portside

Of the 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States, about half are parents, and at least 1 in 5 has a child support obligation. For most, the debt will keep piling up throughout their imprisonment: By law or by practice, child support agencies in much of the country consider incarceration a form of “voluntary impoverishment.” Parents like Harris, the logic goes, have only themselves to blame for not earning a living.

As hundreds marched from Chicago Police headquarters at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue to McCormick Place where the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police was being held, several groups locked their arms together with pipes and managed to shut down area intersections, along with one group that did the same inside.

These may be banner days for African American poetry and poets. For example, this year the Pulitzer Prize for poetry went to Digest, by black poet Gregory Pardlo, of Brooklyn. Yet the book trade remains overwhelmingly white. Pardlo is one of a growing number of poets and writers of color who are now challenging racial inequality in publishing, as Angela Chen reports. Along with Chen's article are links to reviews of Pardlo's prize-winning volume.

What’s tragic about the Benghazi hearings is that they displace the serious inquiries that we desperately need about the direction of our foreign policy. President Obama pledged to bring the war on terror to an end, remove troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and operate a lawful foreign policy. He has retreated on all these goals. We need a thoughtful reassessment of national security priorities and a critical review of the militarization of our foreign policy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.