Portside

If you were to parachute into Kern County about 40 miles west of Bakersfield, you might doubt California’s status as a national leader on climate.

As California stands at the height of the worst housing crisis the state has ever seen, hundreds of tenants across multiple cities are taking matters into their own hands by confronting corporate landlords to demand a freeze on rent increases. The tenants and organizations leading this are part of a new, broad-based coalition, Housing Now!, to fight for the repeal of the statewide restrictions on rent control - established by the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act.

Is Healthy California economically viable? According to research I conducted with three colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the answer is yes.

A legislative analysis had estimated the cost of the proposed system to be $400 billion annually, but a study released by the nurses Wednesday estimates the yearly cost would be $331 billion as of 2017. The estimate was made by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in a study partly financed by the nurses association.

Adelanto, a town of 32,000, is home to three prisons. This was not a coincidence. With a history of agriculture, excessive water use, the Great Depression, cheap vacant land filled with a military base which closed in the 1990s, Adelanto turned to prisons. During the 1980s, under increasingly stringent drug laws and harsh sentencing policies, demand for new prisons had grown. So had the belief that prisons could nourish economic development in rural communities.

Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), a coauthor of the bill, said a detailed financial study would be completed in May, before the bill is heard in the Appropriations Committee.

America’s mega-state is now clearly its leftmost, too—and on social insurance, climate change, and immigrant rights, it has more capacity and desire to defeat Republican reaction than any other institution.

America's mega-state is now clearly its leftmost, too--and on social insurance, climate change, and immigrant rights, it has more capacity and desire to defeat Republican reaction than any other institution.

Almost from the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the White House in 2015, California, along with the rest of the country, has experienced an uptick of reported hate and bias incidents. As Capital & Main’s new series reveals, most of these attacks have been directed at immigrants and people of color. But this is hardly new – the Golden State has a long history of violence and discrimination against nonwhites and the foreign born.

The State of California's elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump's Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump's sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.