Winter Editorial

As this issue goes to press, we find ourselves in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, a disaster made much worse by inept leadership and a criminally corrupt system. Many of us are in self quarantine, living on rice, beans, tinned fish and noodles. Many of us are suddenly unemployed with rent and bills due. Some remain at work and in danger; from grocery clerks and delivery drivers to police, military and front-line medical workers.

We understand why we as a nation are less able to deal with this crisis than any other modern country on earth. We do not have a public healthcare system. Many of us lack health care coverage. Even if we have it, deductables and copays aside, our corporatized medical approach treats symptoms rather than causes and relies on over-priced, often toxic medicines and expensive procedures. It is a commodified disease maintenance model designed to rake in profits.

As the coronavirus tears across the globe leaving medical systems overwhelmed, even in civilized countries that have them, and mass death in its wake, our country continues its economic terrorism against affected countries including Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, denying them food and medical equipment.

Congress has passed corporate bailouts of the usual suspects; banks, big oil, finance, airlines, ect. along with emergency crumbs in the way of checks to some.

Meanwhile, the only platform and leadership capable of saving the country, and I refer to Bernie Sanders's call for Medicare for All, relief from student debt, and a job-creating Green New Deal, appears to be defeated by corporate media efforts and by voters driven by fear and misinformation.

The poems in this issue speak of the work we love or hate and the jobs we feel trapped in -- that we have felt trapped in. They describe our disgust at the criminality of corporate rule and of the violence that permeates both public policy and mass culture. This includes violent misogyny promoted and rewarded by the entrenched patriarchy and the dangerous gun worship and violence of the extreme right.

Given the reality of this moment, we are either witnessing the economic and social collapse of civilization and the rise of brutal fascism inherent in disaster capitalism or the beginning of a new era of progressive fightback as so many find ourselves with no other realistic choice.

We have been dispossessed, exploited in new and more dangerous ways, deprived by circumstance of goods, shelter, and education. We who need public services are living in a world torn upside down.

It is increasingly obvious that we are in undeniable need of Medicare for All, a minimum income and the job-creation and climate sanity of a Green New Deal. The Jonestown rule of corporations and billionaires is being exposed by this pandemic and must be swept away.

Our journal can play an important role in building needed class conscious unity but we are struggling against the odds to get through these times. Donations and poetry submissions are down. We hope, with your help, to continue publishing the vital writing of our awakened working class. Only together can we get through this terrible time and out of it, construct a civilized future.