EDITOR—The fall of Fascism, subsequent nationalizations, the entrance of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) into government, the rise of workers’ commissions, the mobilization of urban and rural protest, and land occupations held the world in thrall, if only for a short time. In the end, the corporatist bureaucratic state apparatus and its economic partners emerged renewed, chastened, and not unscathed. Chilcote singles out the durability and continuity of the state apparatus as a major factor in the prevailing hegemonic bloc and blames the fractiousness of the Left for failing to replace it. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the attempts to create a counter-hegemonic bloc paved the way for democratic, pluralistic politics in Portugal.
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RAINER SHEA—This damage won’t be enough to defeat China, nor the empire’s other next big opponent Iran; the coming war maneuvers will certainly backfire on the imperialists, like how it backfired when they picked a fight with Russia. The danger is in how many lives the hegemon may take during its collapse. There’s no doubt that the anti-imperialist united front will be able to subdue the hegemon, but in their desperate attempts to survive, the aggressors hope to bring a catastrophe larger than World War II. They’re already in place to take hundreds of thousands of more lives in Palestine, though Hamas has ensured that the plan for settling Gaza won’t be fulfilled.
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MAIN EDITORS—Profs Michael Hudson and Richard D Wolff, both among the most original and articulate critics of globalism (aka Neoliberalism, Free Marketism, etc.), offer an incisive view of Western civilisation in its global imperial phase as the US Empire and its satellites struggle to keep the system’s hegemony afloat in the midst of incurable structural issues, and an indefensible foreign policy grounded in reckless chaos creation.
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AJAMU BARAKA—With all of the crimes that have occurred in human history, especially over the last five hundred years of European colonial/capitalist hegemony, nothing compares to the vicious assault on the concentration camp called Gaza. Not because of its scale or even viciousness, it should be remembered that the assault on Libya during the Obama administration resulted in estimates of up to 50,000 deaths in just over seven months. But of course, images of that attack were carefully curated and disseminated by the mainstream press to support the narrative of the NATO mission as a mission to save the Libyan people.
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EDITOR—New York Congressional candidate Jose Vega is at it again, interrupting the rich and powerful at high-end, elite symposia to drop truth on the panelists and attendees alike. This time Jose stood up to tell Paul Krugman and his fellow CUNY panelists that their high-minded discussion of our ostensibly booming economy ignores the very real economic pain being experienced by a large swath of the public. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss how necessary Jose Vega’s disruptive events are to confronting establishment narratives.
