Portside

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Bharara was in part the inspiration for the Rhoades character who holds the same job in the Showtime drama “Billions.” Paul Giamatti plays the oh-so-intense federal prosecutor in the much-praised series, which is now in its second season and was renewed earlier this week for season three.

It’s easy to feel comfortable in a space that magically cleans itself.

Trump’s three executive orders on policing, the large number of state legislatures dominated by Republicans, the pro-policing and pro-business attitude of the current administration, and the constant and growing spontaneous demonstrations protesting Trump all combine to produce an atmosphere in which many powerful interests have a stake in suppressing mass dissent.