Portside

From Raleigh to Los Angeles, communities on the frontlines are building the movement infrastructure for a coordinated fightback.

The Trump administration’s first moves on immigration enforcement represent an unprecedented hard-line position, envisioning thousands of new agents, enlisting local police as immigration enforcers, making virtually anyone a priority for deportation, bypassing immigration courts, and, of course, ordering the construction of the infamous wall along the Mexican border. And then there is the president’s own rhetoric equating immigrants with criminals.

What follows is written in concert with the project initiated by the National Council of Elders on April 4, 2017: Time to Break Silence. Groups around the country will stage public readings of Martin Luther King’s Beyond Vietnam speech on its 50th anniversary. In confronting the deeply rooted racism, militarism and materialism of the United States, Dr. King described the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

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.

Japanese unions worked together to protest, lobby and organize and keep Uber out of Tokyo. They know Uber will continue to fight, so the battle is not over, but this example shows that unions can challenge the company and win.

The Affordable Care Act never really solved the healthcare crisis. It treated healthcare as a commodity allocated through market forces rather than as a public good and failed to address the profiteering at the core of our healthcare system, forcing it to use a series of confusing and convoluted mechanisms to expand heath insurance coverage and regulate health insurance providers.

With rural issues in the spotlight following the election, Iowa's poet laureate, Mary Swander, speaks about her work with farmers, the concerns of her neighbors in this political moment, and the role of art in challenging times.

The millions of service members who live on military bases around the world experience a kind of economic and social security that is foreign to most of America’s middle class. In the military, clothing, food, shelter, and medical care are guaranteed. And although it offers less choice about what to wear or where to live than the private sector, there’s a baseline of care for service members that doesn’t exist in the civilian world.

It may be something of a stretch to claim, as Malcolm Harris does, that "anarchists get the artists and tacticians, Marxists get the theorists and politicians." Yet this remains an insightful review. It surveys the history of anarchism and its relationship to Marxism as it considers how adherents of these historic modes of thought might find themselves acting in this political year.

That palpable feeling of separation helped inspire his latest work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, “Untitled America: First Movement.” The piece is the first of a three-part modern dance series that will explore the impact of prison on families.