Summer Editorial

As we complete 28 years of publishing, the corporate ruling class is going all out to impose the kind of brutal dictatorship on us that it has forced on other nations for decades. From Los Angeles and D.C. to Chicago, Memphis and likely coming to a city near you, the National Guard, combined with Trump's ICE goons are invading our streets and workplaces. They are brutally kidnapping and sometimes killing whomever they can racially profile. In some cases, as with the arrest of William Gimenez, a day laborer suing an off-duty cop working for Home Depot for violent assault, they are then targeted by ICE.

These ongoing assaults were just accelerated by the killing of a right-wing podcaster building a career on bigoted hyper-nationalism, suppression of free speech, and support of violence. Trump has been threatening as, so-called "extreme left, anyone opposing his monstrous corruption, his bigoted actions, or standing in support of climate sanity, worker's rights, peace, reproductive freedom, civil rights or public healthcare, since before his Madison Square rally tirade.

Working-class and democratic movements know from our own long experience that acts of violent direct action only serve the interests of the forces of hate, racism, intolerance, corporate interests and reaction. This killing by a young man, unable to discern reality from computer games, now provides Trump an excuse, a Horst Wessel moment; someone they can declare a holy martyr and use to justify the kind of brutal, bloody oppression we see in police-state dictatorships.

The poets in this issue focus on the oppressive reality of mindless labor and the dictatorship of bad managers and bosses we are all familiar with in the workplace. We have poems about the struggle of living in poverty amid price-gouging, the added costs of groceries, raised rents, and the decimation of safety-net programs on which lives depend. We are now a people under active assault by a criminal regime embodying record corruption and asserting vengeful, reactionary corporate dictatorship -- fascism unleashed.

Our summer issue focuses on the inseparability of war and climate destruction -- from the U.S. genocide of Palestinians to our recent attacks on Venezuela, and to the fires that have devastated California. Wars are instigated against countries whose governments and resources the U.S. does not control. The continuing use of threats, false libels, and extortion as foreign policy are driving the rest of the world away from us and strengthening new blocs like BRICS and the Global South. The US reaction is to foment war for short-term gains and, under Trump, to defund climate policy, alternative energy, health programs and to criminalize dissent -- even as our continued existence depends on global cooperation on issues of climate and health.

This collection also focuses on our struggle for the necessary fightback from the workplace to national politics and the necessity of building a movement capable of defeating this fascist regime and the corporate empowerment at its root. Anyone paying attention to recent events is frightened of the coming onslaught. Know that we are the majority and that Americans will continue to resist. The threat we face must serve to unite and strengthen us in our struggle for a legitimate democracy and working class empowerment.