Portside

Trump is giving ICE the tools, financial resources, and presidential backing to go after immigrant communities as never before. Among its most important and powerful supporters is the labor union that represents ICE’s agents.

Warning: What you are about to read is not about Russia, the 2016 election, or the latest person to depart from the White House in a storm of tweets. It’s the Beltway story hiding in plain sight with trillions of dollars in play and an economy to commandeer.

"The South is the most rapidly changing region in the nation and deserves courts that reflect the diversity of its present and future — not its past."

The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington's present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort.

I have had bursts of enthusiasm before when women marched for their rights, masses mobilized against war, and many stepped up to say no to police violence and mass incarceration, I was touched emotionally even more this time around, by several features of this new movement.

The US trade deficit is the result of a conscious globalization strategy by large multinational corporations. This strategy has greatly paid off for them. They have been able to use their mobility to secure lower wages, reduced regulations and lower taxes.

The new Opportunity Zone program created by last year's tax bill, it offers investors tax breaks in exchange for investing in high-poverty communities. Depending on how the funds operate, the program could end up serving as a tax subsidy for gentrification.

In this era of law-and-order politics,...we do not need more incarceration. It does not make people safer, it tears communities apart, and many people, including incarcerated people themselves, have argued that incarceration actually produces mental illness.

On this one there is no ambiguity. Trump’s naming John Bolton as National Security Adviser is a clear declaration that Washington will intensify its current wars and do its best to start new and bigger ones.

Reader Comments: Iraq War - 15 Years Later; Labor, Industrial Policy, Tariffs, Teachers(West Virginia, Florida, Arizona); Prisons; Iran War?; Readers Debate Churchill, Stalin; Capitalism and Racism; Puerto Rico; Resource-Social Movements; Announcements; Remembering Sharpeville; and more....