Portside

Honesty may be poetry's best gift in the coming year, as these writers and others say what needs to be said about guns, anger, racism, family, and how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another.

Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera reminds Americans of a colonial and imperial past whose contours are still visible. Despite a stingy record for commutations and pardons, President Barack Obama could and should use his constitutional powers to commute Oscar’s punitive sentence and grant his immediate release.

Milwaukee's Turners -- founded by German refugees fleeing political repression and economic hard time in the late 1840's -- issued a statement denouncing racism and xenophobia in calls to exclude Muslim refugees from Wisconsin and called upon all Wisconsinites, including the vast majority of us who are of immigrant stock, to support humane and safe admission of our proportional share of refugees from Syria and other nations.

Patricia Highsmith published "The Price of Salt" in 1952 under the name "Claire Morgan," a pseudonym. Since then, the book has become a classic of lesbian literature. Filmmaker Todd Haynes has recently released "Carol," his film adaptation of the novel, to wide acclaim. John Copenhaver reconsiders the original novel, guiding us through this suspenseful tale.

New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio will sign an agreement on Wednesday with DC37, AFSCME to raise the minimum wage to $15. This will cover about 50,000 municipal workers including DC37.

The politics of The Hunger Games series aren’t as revolutionary as they’ve been hyped to be. Far from helping us reveal our most pressing contemporary problems, the liberal ideological message of The Hunger Games is that the major problems facing society today are state domination, dictatorships, and the restriction of individual liberties — in short, everything except for exploitation and capitalism.

Within the labor movement, we never want to share publicly critiques of work to be utilized by our class enemies—in this case, Walmart. I appreciated the energy and excitement among participants in the OUR Walmart campaign and observers who saw it as a potential labor renaissance. I didn't want to be perceived as an old crank pissing on a new parade that didn't fit my measure of what worker organizing should be. But my reticence has now been overridden.

During the 1860's, Chinese laborers were brought in to help construct the first U.S. trans-continental railroad between the Atlantic & the Pacific coasts. They worked long hours & were underpaid, and most of the time in extreme weather conditions. Many lost their lives in this historic epic, but their contributions were buried & their history untold.

These stories illustrate the powerful social forces and corporate interests shaping healthcare policy. And they continue to inspire a healthcare justice movement that says that Obamacare is not enough and that the time has come to finish the job and make healthcare a right for everyone in America.

The transformation of police practices in this country cannot happen without a national reckoning regarding the ways both white supremacy and misogyny have shaped and continue to influence law enforcement practices in the United States.