Portside

Instead of falling to the Nazi party, Norway broke through to a social democracy. Their history shows us polarization is nothing to despair over.

The official guidelines, signed by DHS Secretary John Kelly, "expand raids and the definition of criminal aliens, while diminishing sanctuary areas and enlisting local law enforcement to execute federal immigration policy," The Hill reported.

“It doesn’t work for organizations to bigfoot strategy; it’s not the way organizing happens now,” said Kelley Robinson, the deputy national organizing director for Planned Parenthood, which is fighting the defunding of its health clinics. “There are bigger ideas coming out of the grass roots than the traditional organizations.”

The new law bans public employee unions in most cases from negotiating over issues such as health insurance, evaluation procedures, staff reduction and leaves of absence for political purposes. Police officers and firefighters are exempted from that portion of the law, a move that AFSCME argues in the lawsuit violates the Iowa Constitution by creating "favored" and "disfavored" groups of government workers.

A moment of stinging clarity is now upon us. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to set in motion the process of building a wall along the US-Mexico border, stripping federal funding from sanctuary cities, increasing the size of US Border Patrol forces and increasing deportations. In response, we must plunge even more urgently into the hard local work of building sanctuary.

Why we should not forget the role our endless wars over the last sixteen years have played in creating the refugee crisis we now so earnestly decry.

Instead of demonstrating outside of Planned Parenthood, Joyce Arthur, executive director of Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), suggests demonstrating outside a "crisis pregnancy center" -- one of the fake clinics run by ideologically extreme religious groups -- or at the office of a local anti-choice group. Also on her list are public areas like city hall.

Anti-war, immigrant rights and communities of color, environmental rights, LGBTQ and women's rights -- all and more are linked to real justice and peace.

During the Depression, a loose coalition of Progressives set out to remake the American diet. Milk was regarded as the perfect food. This tension between scientific advice and traditional preferences can be traced back to the Great Depression, suggest Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe in “A Square Meal.”

About 39,000 Minnesota workers suffer from wage theft each year, resulting in $11.9 million in wages owed, and that's only what goes reported. The union-backed Wage Theft Initiative proposes policy changes to give the state Department of Labor and Industry more enforcement tools and an increased budget.