EDITOR—The panel discusses the delicate situation engulfing the EU and the United States, where the anti-immigrant issue has gathered considerable momentum, presenting difficult problems (and opportunities) for the reigning oligarchy. It’s noteworthy, says Dust James, that in both the US (capital/imperial core) and Europe (the periphery, where a “labor aristocracy” developed) the capitalists are drifting toward fascism. In America, where the economy continues to worsen for the working class, and the immigration issue (exploited mercilessly by Trump), adds fuel to the flames, such situation could easily drive some sort of fascistic movement forward, even if Trump himself may not be fully aware (or concerned) about the chaotic consequences of his careless opportunism. Mass immigration is an issue with no easy answers, notes Billy Bob; socialists could arguably defend or oppose either side of the equation. There is no doubt, however, that lowly paid Americans—including many Latinos—are fiercely hostile to “illegal immigration”, since any mass influx of undocumented workers will inexorably depress wages.
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GARLAND NIXON—A debate between a man who has little, if any, understanding of complex geopolitical issues and a brain dead warmonger who was never the sharpest knife in the drawer has exposed the irreversible decline of the US empire.
If we use a baseball metaphor, Donald Trump looked like a pitcher coming off injured reserve who had trouble getting his pitches over the plate. Trump had one pitch, immigration, and that pitch was placed lazily and haphazardly throughout the debate in a manner that made him appear unprepared and not overly focused on winning the game. In the context of that same metaphor, Joe Biden looked like a player that had been dragged into the dugout and beaten mercilessly about the head and neck with a 54-ounce Louisville slugger.
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ROGER D. HARRIS—This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.
Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.
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RAINER SHEA—The book makes it apparent that the solution isn’t to simply restore the original Marcyism, because Marcyism’s strategy was always flawed. As the book recounts, during the 80s the Marcyists would argue against capitalism by uniformly calling the capitalist state’s policies “racist.” Which they weren’t wrong about, but the effect this had was to reduce capitalism to race. It was a way of signaling that liberals could find a friend in the WWP, which evidently didn’t bring WWP to success. It couldn’t rebuild U.S. communism following its crippling by McCarthyism, and its next big defeat with the destruction of the Black Panther Party.
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EDITOR—Nima discusses with Jeff Brown how the tectonic plates of Eurasia are shifting, yielding a new world in which the US Empire, despite its desperate and highly aggressive efforts on all continents, cannot contain the rise of peer powers such as Russia, China, Iran, and of new alliances, such as BRICS, but this struggle to maintain Pax Americana, apparently at any cost, is also pushing the world to the literal brink of nuclear conflict. That’s why the new global security structure being built by Pres. Putin, with China’s backing, and which now includes North Korea as a critical partner, reinforced by the rapidly expanding BRICS, is so important as a deterrent to the dangerous adventurism of Washington in the Far East and other flashpoints across the world. This new anti-imperialist bloc is on the “right” side of history, opines Jeff. The world has suffered long enough, more than 3,000 years, the nonstop aggression, exploitation and abuses of “the West”, and will not tolerate such horrific system much longer. The anti-imperialist bloc will win.
