Portside

Woody Guthrie lived in Fred Trump’s Beach Haven apartment complex for two years, and he was characteristically vocal and eloquent about the racist policies that governed there.

For the novelty fetishists, everything's new, new, new. Boston-based poet Jill McDonough shines a light on what's happening, what's coming. Only maybe not.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has reached millions of people for whom it was easier to engage politics through the prism of a presidential campaign. The underlying issue of our time, is how to remake the U.S. political and economic system into something that works for everybody in our country and does more to help than to harm the rest of the world. Bernie is doing everything he can to keep us focused on this big issue, always clear that it cannot be solved by him alone.

From Gaza's colorful neighborhood to its underground theater, resistance is an art. More than anyone else, artists must have hope and must create hope for the people. The aim of art is to deliver a message about societal improvement and evaluation. Music provides an escape from the pain of war, the injustice of occupation, and the isolation from living under the siege imposed by Israel, after Hamas wrested control of the coastal enclave. It's also how they fight back.

Last year was the second-warmest on record in the continental United States. December was a U.S. record-breaker for heat and also precipitation. 2015 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Give Earth a few million years and it'll do fine. If climate change does its worst, life, in some fashion, will undoubtedly survive and someday once again flourish, but the environment will cease to exist in any time span that is meaningful to us.

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.

The Haitian Revolution sowed fear in the hearts of Cuba's slaveholding class. In Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, historian Ada Ferrer undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the impact made by the Haitian Revolution on Cuba, then still a Spanish colony located only fifty miles from Haiti's western sea borders.

Were the mass 'We are Charlie' demonstrations in France in support of 'We are France,' in the best republican tradition or a shot against Muslim immigrants signifying that 'You are not?' Polymath Emmanuel Todd argues that the demonstrations, like much of Charlie Hebdo's satire, were not so much attacks on toxic religious ideology as broadly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, indicating that the vaunted French secularism has lost its solidaristic component, 'equality.'

Reader Comments: Sanders' Health for All Plan; Deportations; Flint's Water; Richard Levins - Presente!; Add Your Name - End All U.S. Support for the Government of Saudi Arabia; Your Action Needed - A Park for Pete Seeger; Action for Puerto Rico; Ursula K. Le Guin Rips Bundy Militia in 194 words; Making All of the World's Art Accessible to Anyone Online - Ansel Adams photography; and more...

Noting that conditions today are similar to those at the dawn of the Gilded Age characterized by disproportionate wealth and extreme corruption, retiring DC Metro Labor Council President Joslyn Williams added, "In that era, they were lobbing vicious attacks against workers with guns and batons. Today, they are armed with suits and maneuvers that undercut workers from Wall Street to the state house to U.S. Supreme Court."