While reading the below article I remembered something. Back in 1980 and
1984 I was involved in petitioning to get the SWP presidential ticket on
the ballot in West Virginia. When we filed the petitions we also had to
register electors. It was just a formality and no big deal was made of
it. I am not even sure that I was aware of who the electors were at the
time, but if I was I completely forgot about it. I imagine that the
electors were the comrades who actually filed the petitions. That is, I
imagine that when they were asked for names and addresses of electors
they probably just gave their own names. I don't really know though. I
am not going to Google this again right now, but I remember back when I
first got Internet access and was learning how to use search engines I
Googled around looking for what was available about the SWP in West
Virginia. I found some web site that just stated the names of the SWP
electors back then. I don't remember whose web site it was, but it was
probably some state government web site. So I can say that no special
effort was made to keep the names of electors a secret back then, at
least not in West Virginia.
Join fight to defend political rights in Washington state
https://themilitant.com/2020/11/07/join-fight-to-defend-political-rights-in-washington-state/
BY BETSEY STONE
Vol. 84/No. 45
November 16, 2020
SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy at Naches, Wash., Nov. 2
commemoration of worker David Cruz, who died of COVID. Trabajadores
Unidos por la Justicia union is fighting for safety at packinghouses.
Defending political rights of SWP is also defense of union rights.
MILITANT/HENRY DENNISON
SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy at Naches, Wash., Nov. 2
commemoration of worker David Cruz, who died of COVID. Trabajadores
Unidos por la Justicia union is fighting for safety at packinghouses.
Defending political rights of SWP is also defense of union rights.
AS WE GO TO PRESS the Socialist Workers Party received notice from its
attorneys in Seattle that the first round in the fight to prevent the
state from disclosing the names and addresses of its presidential
electors has been won. The secretary of state’s office now says it will
not release any information unless a new, unambiguous request to do so
is filed. State officials continue to assert, however, that if they get
such a request they will hand the information over unless the party gets
a court order. The Militant will continue to fight to win support
against this threat to political rights.
SEATTLE — The Socialist Workers Party held a special meeting here Oct.
30 to build support for an important fight for political rights that is
unfolding in Washington state. Featured speakers were SWP candidate for
president Alyson Kennedy and SWP National Campaign Director John Studer.
On Oct. 19 the secretary of state’s office informed the party that the
names and addresses of the 2020 SWP presidential electors would be
released publicly, unless the campaign got a court order barring them
from doing so.
“The questions involved here are important for all working people,”
said Seattle SWP leader Mary Martin, who chaired the meeting. “We have
sought legal counsel to block this release and have launched a political
fight against it.” The campaign has retained representation by Barnard
Iglitzin and Lavitt, a well-known labor law firm in Seattle.
“There is a long, documented history of disruption, spying and acts of
violence against the Socialist Workers Party’s campaigners and our
offices,” Martin said. In 1984 the SWP headquarters in Seattle was
firebombed. This year, threats to kill its candidates and their
supporters have been made and a threat to burn down the party
headquarters and kill everyone in it was left on the campaign office phone.
Making the electors’ personal information public would open them up to
harassment and worse, from cops, bosses, rightists or middle-class
radicals who increasingly seek to shut down those who they disagree with.
This important political rights fight was also discussed at Militant
Labor Forums across the country, launching a national campaign to get
statements of support for the Washington state fight and to rapidly
raise the $20,000 needed for legal and other expenses. Over 30 people at
the Seattle meeting contributed $2,891. Together with collections at the
other forums $20,420 has been raised so far.
Martin described the multiyear political battle it took for the SWP to
win exemption from having to turn over the names and personal
information of campaign contributors to the Washington State Public
Disclosure Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission,
despite extensive evidence of both government and private harassment.
‘Threat to First Amendment rights’
Michael Krinsky, senior attorney in the constitutional rights law firm
that has represented the SWP for many decades, wrote in a statement:
“The threat to First Amendment freedoms from the threatened disclosures
is real, both to persons wishing to associate with the SWP and, by the
precedent it would set, to many others wishing to associate with causes
and organizations that may be the target of governmental or private
hostility.”
Alyson Kennedy described the positive response the Socialist Workers
Party campaign has received while she and running mate Malcolm Jarrett
have campaigned in some 90 cities and towns, marching in protests,
walking union picket lines and talking with workers on their doorsteps
and at Walmart parking lots. (See Kennedy’s talk on front page.)
‘Utmost importance to workers’
Studer noted that not just the rights of the party were involved but
political freedoms conquered by working people in blood.
Seattle forum Oct. 30 on political rights fight in Washington. From
left, John Studer, SWP national campaign director; Alyson Kennedy,
presidential candidate; Mary Martin, Seattle SWP.
MILITANT/BARRY FATLAND
Seattle forum Oct. 30 on political rights fight in Washington. From
left, John Studer, SWP national campaign director; Alyson Kennedy,
presidential candidate; Mary Martin, Seattle SWP.
“The communists — a small minority — must fight to be heard,” Socialist
Workers Party National Secretary James P. Cannon wrote in the Militant
in 1931. “Democratic rights are of the utmost importance to the workers
in their struggle for organization.”
Studer reviewed the proud history of the party in defending free speech,
political rights and victims of government and boss attacks. “It’s part
and parcel of who we are, a party of workers, participating in the
struggles of the working class and advancing a course toward ending
capitalist exploitation,” he said. “That’s why the wrath of the ruling
class comes down on us, going back to the founding of the communist
movement in this country.”
He described how Cannon — as a leader of the Communist Party before
being expelled by followers of Joseph Stalin who overturned the
Bolsheviks’ revolutionary course — was instrumental in forming the
International Labor Defense in 1925.
He met with Big Bill Haywood, a former Industrial Workers of the World
leader, who had moved to Moscow after being convicted in a frame-up
trial in Chicago and sentenced to 20 years in prison. “We worked out the
plan and conception of the International Labor Defense as a nonpartisan
body which would defend any member of the working class movement,
regardless of his opinion or affiliation, if he came under persecution
by capitalist law,” Cannon wrote in The First Ten Years of American
Communism.
The attorney for Haywood and over 100 other IWW members in the Chicago
trial was George Vanderveer, Studer said. Vanderveer was the founder of
the law firm that is representing the SWP in Seattle today.
SWP members helped build and lead the Teamsters union in Minneapolis and
across the Midwest in the 1930s, Studer said. For this, and for leading
labor opposition to U.S. entry into the second imperialist world war, 18
Teamsters and SWP leaders were indicted and imprisoned in the 1940s.
In the 1960s and ’70s deep changes in social consciousness affected the
working class as the fight against Jim Crow segregation, the war in
Vietnam and for the development of the modern women’s liberation spread,
he said. This created an opportunity for the party to launch a political
campaign and court suit that helped expose decades of FBI spying and
disruption against the party, the labor movement, and the fight for
Black rights. “FBI spies amassed 10 million pages of files on the SWP
alone,” Studer said.
The party won the lawsuit, dealing a blow to the U.S. rulers’ political
police. They also won an additional court ruling that barred the FBI and
other government agencies from having access to the names and files they
had accumulated illegally.
In response to the spreading radicalization among working people,
liberals at that time sought to clean up the image of the capitalist
parties as rife with corruption and big-business control, by promoting
“campaign finance reform.” The cornerstone of this attack on political
rights was disclosure laws mandating the public release of names and
addresses of those giving funds to political candidates, saying this
would provide more “transparency.”
It was a fraud. It papered over the class reality that fundamental
economic, political and military power is in the hands of the
capitalists and that the ruling rich could always find ways around the
laws, while working-class parties would have to submit to onerous red
tape and face exposure of the names and addresses of their members and
supporters.
This issue had arisen during the fight against Jim Crow segregation in
the South in the 1950s, Studer said. The segregationist government in
Alabama passed a law requiring the NAACP to turn over the names and
addresses of all its members, which would have opened them to racist
retaliation. The NAACP launched a campaign against the law and
successfully got it overturned in federal court.
SWP wins fight against ‘disclosure’
Using this precedent, and the evidence exposed by the party’s lawsuit
against FBI spying, the SWP won an exemption from turning over the
names, addresses and workplaces of campaign contributors and its
vendors, beginning in 1974, Studer said. The SWP was the only party ever
to win exemption by the Federal Election Commission. But in 2017, the
FEC voted to end the party’s exemption, claiming these attacks were
mostly a thing of the past.
“The fight in Washington state is an important contribution to winning
political space for the working class to debate, organize and fight,”
Studer said. “It helps expose all the disclosure laws for what they are,
an attack on the political rights of working people. It also helps lay
the groundwork for a fight to win back the exemption from the federal
disclosure law that the SWP lost three years ago.”
More statements of support are coming in. Call to Action on Puerto Rico
in New York condemned the decision of the Washington state government to
release the names and addresses of the SWP electors. “Defenders of
Puerto Rico’s inalienable right to national sovereignty and independence
know only too well how the government uses personal information to
harass, intimidate and even threaten the lives of social justice
activists,” they wrote Oct. 31.
Send statements to swpseattle@xxxxxxxxx.
Whoever’s in the White House, workers need to fight for jobs
The following statement is based on the talk given by Alyson Kennedy,
SWP candidate for president, in Seattle Oct. 30. Her running mate was
Malcolm Jarrett. As we go to press, the results of the presidential
election are not settled.…
‘First Amendment freedoms threatened by disclosures’
The threatened disclosure of the names and addresses of Socialist
Workers Party Presidential electors ignores a fundamental constitutional
principle: as the Supreme Court stated in its great decision of the
1950s protecting civil rights organizations in the South, “inviolability of…
Front Page Articles
Join fight to defend political rights in Washington state
Whoever’s in the White House, workers need to fight for jobs
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SWP campaign to win readers expands reach of the ‘Militant’
Capitalist for-profit health industry no better prepared for ‘2nd wave’
of virus
Feature Articles
Defending the Cuban Revolution, strengthening US working people
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Thousands in Belarus keep fighting to topple regime
After new Islamist attacks, Paris responds with repression
‘First Amendment freedoms threatened by disclosures’
Oberlin College aims to crush small store owner
Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive Sept. 26-Nov. 24 (Week 5)
Fall Campaign to sell Militant subscriptions and books Sept. 26 - Nov.
24 (week five)
On the Picket Line
Dominion strike continues, as workers win solidarity
Laid off NY Remington workers fight for severance, vacation pay
Quebec cement truck drivers fight for equal wages
25, 50 and 75 years ago
Corrections
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--
___
Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely
to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of
wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in
which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases
and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a
refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has
good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of
science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is
just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected
by-what, religion? No, by good science.”
― Sam Harris
