Portside

The expected anti-union Janus decision is bad news but unlikely to be a disaster for unions and may even be the wake-up call that they need. Janus is the Roman god of transitions, and this may be a big one for the labor movement.

Southern Foodways Alliance talks about the food and drink culture of the South and tells stories that hope to change people’s perceptions and understandings about the South.

At the end of the Smithsonian Channel’s Lost Tapes: Malcolm X, Ossie Davis delivers a stirring eulogy for Malcolm X, the fallen Muslim minister and human rights activist. “And we will know him then for what he was and is,” Davis intones, “a Prince – our own black shining Prince!”

In the fall of 2017, radical anti-abortion activists debuted the Red Rose Rescues, bent on disrupting what they see as a stale political movement. Their goal is to be able to stop individual abortions without violating federal law. And so far, they are getting away with it.

Black undocumented immigrants have been at the unfortunate intersection of the Trump Administration’s anti-black, Islamophobic and xenophobic agenda. The issues surrounding immigration do not only live within the Latinx, Muslim and Asian communities. We need to stop working in silos and change the narrative to be more inclusive, concentrating on ALL communities in need of our attention. Immigration is a black issue.

Becky Rafter could have been among the 67% of white women voters in Alabama who cast their lot with Roy Moore. She grew up all over the South, including an Alabama small town shaped by white flight. Reared in a household of modest means in rental housing, her parents budgeted every dollar. Their financial planning, aid, and scholarships allowed her to sometimes attend private school, with the added help of white privilege. Maybe it was growing up queer in the South or the dissonance of the segregated societies of her childhood.

In early February, the existence of a draft Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report came to light, which calls for long-term surveillance of Sunni Muslim immigrants.

An issue of this magnitude clearly isn’t down to a few shady companies.

Analyzing offender data on roughly 1.5 million US prisoners, researchers from the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that for one in four, drug treatment, community service, probation or a fine would have been a more effective sentence than incarceration. The study also concluded that another 14% of incarcerated individuals had already served an appropriate sentence. These people could be released within the next year “with little risk to public safety”.

Promises that a free lunch can be had by relying heavily on private investors for infrastructure should be viewed skeptically. Tax credits dangled to entice private financiers and developers to provide infrastructure provide no compelling efficiency gains and mostly just open up possibilities for corruption and crony capitalism.