Portside

"It's really hard for me to feed my two kids and struggle day to day,Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 when I've worked for McDonald's for ten years?" (Nancy Salgado addressing McDonald's USA President Jeff Stratton's speech at the Union League Club of Chicago.)

The privatization of social services has in the past resulted in some spectacular failures.

The middle class, once the backbone of a strong American society, has been broken, beaten down, pushed further and further toward poverty levels. Here are five well-documented ways that this has happened.

A slight majority of people still spend at least one year of their adult life in poverty, and for some demographic groups, almost everyone experiences poverty at some point.

In this 50th anniversary year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, we must recommit to the “unfinished march.” This includes constant vigilance to sustain the march’s clear, but still vulnerable, victories. But just as important as sustaining the civil rights goals achieved, we must confront the goals still unmet.

Bertolt Brecht on whistle-blowers, those who oppose their own governments immoral activities; Reader Comments on NSA Spying; Civil Liberties Suit; Edward Snowden; Angela Davis; Undercounting the Poor; Syria; The Rosenberg Case ; Paleo Diet; Announcements - Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Manifesto and Petition in Support of the Monument to the International Brigades in Madrid - Help by signing.

According to the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the effects of poverty are the most important obstacle to the health and well being of young people. To try to remedy that, the American Pediatric Association Task Force on Childhood Poverty is beginning a long-term effort to address the problem by looking for solutions that will be effective, sustained and “protected from retrenchment."

Poorer nations lose three times more money to havens a year than they get in aid. The G8 has the chance to change this.