By Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main

A state secret comes into the open: how inflation targets the poor.

When I met Amparo Ramirez in March of 2020, our conversation was very much of the moment. The pandemic was in its early days and the fear factor was high, but Ramirez, who works in food service at the Los Angeles International Airport, was explaining that even if she felt ill, she would most likely report for her shift—and so would her colleagues.

by Sydney Pereira

This article was originally published at Prism.

Five years ago, the only full-service grocery store in the Walnut Hills neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, closed.

It was a blow to the neighborhood, which was home mostly to Black residents. Community activists, including Mona Jenkins, asked grocery chains to bring a new store to their area, but she says they weren’t interested.

Following the Amazon Labor Union’s huge win in Staten Island, they’re going for it again. Workers at another, smaller warehouse—called LDJ5—will begin voting on April 25, and Amazon is once again going hard with its union-busting campaign.

It is Friday. There is good news and bad news this week. The good news consists of Jan. 6’s attempted coup d’etat defendants taking a few steps closer to receiving their just deliverance; Donald Trump continues to fail both in business and in endorsements; and gas prices have begun to come back down from the stratosphere. The bad news is that the Democratic Party needs to message better and do more from the top down domestically.

News out of Mariupol suggests that many of the remaining Ukrainian fighters are restricted to the Azovstal metal refinery on the southeast of the city. That may make it seem that Russia has these Ukrainian forces backed into a single building, which they can simply level with the next round of artillery.

But that plant is actually an enormous expanse of connected refineries, factories, offices, and shipping facilities.

In the span of a few weeks, the tilt of the geopolitical world has shifted so quickly that perhaps Americans just haven’t had enough time to digest how fortunate they are Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. Doubtlessly the Ukrainians are aware, and those living in the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are as well because their very lives would have been entirely forfeit or at grave risk right now.

Whenever I think about former Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, I can’t help but picture him living in a little wren’s nest inside Donald Trump’s neck wattle, occasionally poking his head out to catch cascading donut sprinkles on his lolling lemur tongue as he fecklessly plots his enemies’ downfall from the safety of his Lilliputian villain’s lair.

The Biden administration has been working hard to make the Affordable Care Act, and health insurance in general, work better. They’ve lowered premium payments all the way down to zero for many people in Obamacare (a measure that needs to be passed again before the November election to avoid a bad October surprise of premium hike notifications).