Capitalist economic crisis:
Working people face rising gas and food prices, increases in medical payments and utility rates, and rising rents. Meanwhile real wages decline and unemployment grows. The debt slavery that is a permanent fact of life for working farmers is becoming more and more burdensome for working-class families too—from home mortgages and credit cards to car financing and college loans. Job injuries mount.
The source of these problems is capitalism, and the employers’ attempt to shore up declining profit rates by squeezing more and more from our labor.
To combat mounting prices and joblessness, the Socialist Workers campaign demands regular cost-of-living increases in all wages and benefits, as well as federal legislation to shorten the workweek, with no cut in take-home pay, to spread available work to all. My campaign demands that Washington increase the federal minimum wage and put millions to work at union-scale wages through a massive program to build homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and public transportation. We call for an emergency halt to farm and home foreclosures.
Washington’s wars:
The Socialist Workers campaign demands immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and coalition troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else they are stationed. Threats against Iran must cease. Normalize relations with Cuba and North Korea. End all sanctions and threats against them.
In the guise of “fighting terrorism,” the Democrats and Republicans back measures curbing the rights of working people to organize and act in our own defense. Repeal the Patriot Act; end government wiretapping, spying, harassment, and “anti-terrorism” trials; defend the rights of the accused and convicted; abolish the death penalty.
Union power:
My campaign joins efforts to organize unions and use union power to defend working people in face of the relentless attack on our wages and working conditions by the bosses and their government.
In the last three years, hundreds of thousands of workers have mobilized in cities and towns across the U.S. to defend immigrants’ rights. U.S.- and foreign-born workers have mobilized in solidarity with fellow workers rounded up in factory raids and then jailed and deported.
Workers need to emulate struggles such as these in order to fight for dignity on the job, more livable wages, and health and safety protection. The unions must organize all the unorganized. Fighting for immediate and unconditional legalization of all undocumented workers is a matter of life or death for our unions today.
Defending the lives and livelihoods of working people cannot be achieved by union solidarity alone. The working class needs our own political party. We need a labor party, based on a fighting union movement, to contest against the Democrats, Republicans, and other capitalist parties, and to mobilize us in the millions in our own defense. We fight to build a revolutionary movement that will bring to power a workers and farmers government that can abolish capitalism, reorganize society in the interests of the vast majority, and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism.
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