Portside

Inauguration Day demonstrators potentially face decades in prison on charges they say are all ‘Trumped’ up. The arrests and subsequent indictments appear to correspond to the Trump Era pattern of a shock-and-awe gambit followed by a lot of confusion and disarray. Advocates are concerned President Trump’s ‘law and order’ message, combined with his contempt for dissent, could mean an intensified police and prosecutorial response to demonstrations.

Jackie Robinson, writing in 1972: I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world. Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame running backin 2016 said he stands '100 percent' behind Colin Kaepernick. Further, Kaepernick 'made all the sense in the world' in explaining his position. This is part of a long tradition of athletes, especially African American athletes combining sport and protest. (* ESPN)

Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning exhibit something of Eugene Debs' understanding that dissent is not disloyalty. Drawing on the courage of - yes - Warren Harding, and while offering clemency would not be politically easy, it would in time [to] burnish Barack Obama's dubious civil liberties legacy.

Impatient hedge-fund billionaires do not attempt to conceal their contempt for the rest of us. They are used to making money—fast. Witness what they have done to large segments of the overall economy. Education does not thrive in those conditions, because there is no standard of perfection in any schoolhouse that can survive brutal suppression of uniformity imposed by clumsy testing. A successful school not only makes room for dissent. It constantly nourishes it.