Fall Editorial

As I write this, Los Angeles is inundated with snow, Australia is on fire, much of the country is flooded, and the weather on the mid-Atlantic coast is unseasonable and erratic.

Over the past few months we have witnessed the continued burning of the Amazon rainforest, another bloody US sponsored coup in Bolivia, and massive uprisings in cities around the world in protest of impoverishing neo-liberal economics, injustice and utter corruption. We are seeing the uprising of the youth-driven movement demanding action, "right here, right now" to address the growing climate catastrophe.

In our own failing empire, misery pools to wealth and divisive, disempowering citizen division is propagated by the elites. The president has been impeached on narrowly limited charges of international extortion for personal gain. Such lethal extortion is and has been basic to our foreign policy for decades with devastating economic sanctions, embargoes and interventions continuing against countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Bolivia. This is the price paid by countries that dare to claim public ownership of their resources. It serves to ensure control of those resources by US corporations. Trump is guilty of far worse crimes like profiteering off of his position, unthinkable human rights abuses and crimes against public health and life on earth in exacerbating climate destruction.

This season is the lead-up to an election year where a chance for real change exists and is growing. The oligarchy and their media are pulling out all the stops to convince us that a return to corporate centrism is our best and only possibility. The steady advance in the polls by Bernie Sanders and his growing support belie that narrative. Partisan Press is a not-for-profit publisher, thus we make no political endorsements. We understand that there is no other choice for us as working class stiffs than to support Sanders, a person of consistent integrity pushed to the fore by a broad working class coalition around an agenda that is a life and death necessity for many of us and for the future of civilization and for life on earth.

This has been a bleak year for most of us, as the poems in this issue attest. The wealthiest continue to make record gains at our expense. Corporate landlords gobble up property like flies on carrion as rents rise, homeless encampments grow and the homeless, like other refugees, are criminalized. The poems in this issue speak of the mind-deadening monotony of meaningless unproductive jobs and the struggle to survive beyond them. They describe the insane criminality of a destructive economy built on brutality, bubbles and bullshit, the desperate burnout of Trump's relentless dystopic reign, and toll the constant bombardment of bad and outright false news takes on our weary psyches.

Though hope without action is a delusional grasping at straws, there is reason to see the next year as one of desperate struggle with the real possibility of progress in spite of what corporate media shills tell us. Can we roll back the monstrosity of corrupt fascist reaction, even against the odds? We must!

We are the collective voice of an awakened class and of the struggle for a civilization worthy of the name. We are a record of the times and the reality beneath the official narrative. We feel this is important and we hope you do as well. There is no other journal like this. This issue opens our season of asking for the support that sustains this magazine. We hope you will support it so we can continue to publish poetry that matters. We thank you in advance for your words and your support.