The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 4, No. 1 (January 2008)
Editorial
We would like first to express our best wishes to all of you for the New Year and also convey once more our thanks for your support, thanks to which the Journal is now thriving, as it is shown by the growing number of subscribers to it and also the astonishing expansion of visitors to its site which more than quadrupled since 2006. According to the latest web server statistics, the total number of visits (which takes into account visits lasting for more than ten minutes rather than just accesses to the Journal) has reached for 2007 a quarter of a million!
This issue was a bit delayed because of the work involved in preparing the transcript of Barry Seidman’s recent interview with Takis Fotopoulos for the US radio program Equal Time for Freethought. The issue is divided into three sections. The first section, which is entitled “Democracy Today”, includes, apart from the important interview mentioned above, a very interesting article on the run up to the US Presidential elections by John Sargis in which he exposes the myths of change promoted by the campaigns of the two main contenders for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
The second section opens an important dialogue between the well known Left writer Sharon Beder and Takis Fotopoulos on a crucial issue for the Left, i.e. whether what we face today is just a corporate assault on Democracy and markets (the view supported by the reformist Left) or whether instead what we face is a systemic change, which is the outcome of the dynamics of the system of market economy/ representative ‘democracy’ and its articulation with social struggle (the view suggested by the ID approach).
Finally, the third section entitled “Credit Crisis and Poverty” consists of two topical articles by Takis Fotopoulos and John Sargis, one dealing with the current credit crisis, which just a week ago showed how easily it can develop into a serious economic crisis in the form of a deep recession, as well as an article showing how the ideologues of neo-liberal globalization have embarked on a huge effort to convince the public, through the use of various statistical and terminological devices, that poverty has been phased out within the process of globalization and that what we call poverty today is, in fact, a "healthy" inequality created by a dynamic process!
The Editorial Committee
January 2008