http://themilitant.com/2016/8011/801101.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 11 March 21, 2016
(lead article)
Socialist Workers Party: ‘Back workers struggles!’
Militant photos: Top, Ellen Brickley, inset, Laura Anderson
“If you walk out, I’ll be on your picket line,” Socialist Workers Party
vice-presidential candidate Osborne Hart told New Jersey Transit rail
workers at March 5 action. Above, Hart at rally with NJ Transit worker
David Blanding, right, and campaign supporter Craig Honts, center.
Inset, Alyson Kennedy, SWP candidate for president, speaks at March 2
rally in Chicago defending right to choose abortion.
BY NAOMI CRAINE
“The Socialist Workers Party supports your fight,” Osborne Hart, SWP
candidate for U.S. vice president, told rail workers he joined in
Woodbridge, New Jersey, to rally against New Jersey Transit’s concession
demands March 5. Unions involved have set a strike deadline of March 13.
“If you walk out, I’ll be on the picket line and urge other workers to
do the same.”
Hart and Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy
put the struggles of working people worldwide, from Syria to Ukraine to
Puerto Rico, at the heart of their campaign. The worldwide crisis of
capitalist production and trade — and the attacks on workers and farmers
that it produces — along with the increasing breakup of the “world
order” Washington and its imperialist allies imposed after World War II,
affect every struggle by working people.
Millions of workers and others in the U.S. are fed up with all the
bourgeois politicians and are looking for answers to the grinding
effects of years of capitalist crisis. They have responded to Donald
Trump, who has strengthened his position as Republican front runner — to
the horror of party leaders and liberal commentators alike. Trump
extended his lead, winning contests in Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii
March 8.
Similar sentiments account for the support for Bernie Sanders in the
Democratic primaries, who came back from more than 20 percent behind to
win the Michigan primary.
“I’m for anybody but Hillary [Clinton],” rail worker David Blanding told
Hart as he took copies of campaign flyers at the New Jersey rally.
“Working people need to break with all of the capitalist politicians and
parties,” Hart said, “and rely on our own strength and organization. We
need to build and strengthen our unions, use union power, and build a
labor party based on the unions to mobilize against the economic, social
and political attacks of the bosses, and organize along the road toward
overturning this dictatorship of capital.”
Blanding took extra copies of the campaign literature, and got a
subscription to the Militant.
Fight for right to choose abortion
Hart and SWP supporters were among the more than 1,000 defenders of
women’s right to choose abortion who rallied in front of the U.S.
Supreme Court March 2. SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy took
part in a sister rally in Chicago.
“Since abortion was legalized in 1973, why isn’t it considered a human
right 43 years later?” Cecilia Ellis, a student from Ohio University,
asked Hart.
“That’s a great question,” he responded. “This wasn’t a gift from the
Supreme Court. The judges acted, on behalf of the capitalist rulers, to
try to cut short a rising movement for women’s rights. They granted the
right to abortion, but ensured the fight would continue by basing it on
medical criteria, which changes, rather than the basic equal rights of
women guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
“The defense of this right today is in the hands of the working class,
not the Supreme Court and ‘pro-choice’ politicians,” Hart said. “That’s
why the Socialist Workers Party calls for a nationwide campaign of
public action to defend it. That’s how to advance the fight for equal
protection for women.”
“I just got back from a trip to Cuba, where I was part of a team at the
Havana book fair,” Hart told Gabrielle Lasoncy from Philadelphia. “The
involvement of women in the revolution, and their participation in mass
campaigns like the literacy drive after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed
Batista dictatorship there, transformed women’s place in Cuba and women
themselves. As part of this, they made abortion a woman’s choice.”
Shake-up of capitalist parties
Signs of a new capitalist downturn are growing, including a contraction
in manufacturing in China, the U.S., the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
Central banks in Japan, Sweden and the European Union have turned to
negative interest rate schemes to try to “stimulate” the economy,
without success. The bosses won’t invest in expanding production if they
can’t make a profit from it.
“The Republican Party Is Shattering,” headlined a column by Peggy
Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, in the March 3 Wall
Street Journal. The Trump campaign shows “the top of the party and the
bottom have split,” she warned. “Party leaders and thinkers should take
note: It’s easier for a base to hire or develop a flashy new
establishment than it is for an establishment to find itself a new base.”
“Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” former presidential candidate
Republican Mitt Romney, declared in a March 3 speech. “He’s playing
members of the American public for suckers.” It didn’t work. If anything
Romney’s speech solidified Trump’s support.
Interviewed on MSNBC March 4, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who dropped
out of the Democratic race before the primaries, said he couldn’t
support Clinton, but wouldn’t rule out voting for Trump. The reason
Trump gets support is not racism, Webb said, but that many see him “as
the only one who has the courage to say, ‘We’ve got to clean out the
stables of the American governmental system right now.’”
“If you’re voting for Hillary Clinton you’re going to get the same
thing,” he said. “Do you want the same thing?”
Clinton’s campaign faces other problems that could derail it. The
Justice Department announced March 2 it has granted immunity to a former
State Department staffer who worked on Clinton’s private email server to
cooperate in a criminal investigation into whether she mishandled
classified information during her tenure as secretary of state. The
administration has assigned more than 100 FBI agents to the investigation.
Polls show Bernie Sanders, whose “outsider” campaign mirrors that of
Trump, would fare better than Clinton in a November election against
either Trump or his closest rival Ted Cruz.
SWP files for Senate in California
Eleanor García, an aerospace worker and Socialist Workers Party
candidate for U.S. Senate in California, filed nomination petitions
March 9 to get on the ballot for an all-party June primary there.
“We are joining struggles big or small, whether labor battles to
organize or win a contract, fights to beat back attempts by the bosses
to make workers pay for their crisis, actions by women demanding
abortion rights, and protests against the killing of cattle rancher
Robert Finicum by Oregon State police and the FBI,” García said in a
press release announcing her filing.
“Today, campaign supporters are joining a rally here in Los Angeles that
is part of protests worldwide calling for the release of Nadia
Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot who was kidnapped and imprisoned by
authorities in Russia. And we will be at a rally of El Super workers
fighting for union recognition.”
Several of García’s co-workers at Triumph Vought Aerostructures, where
she’s employed as a structural mechanic, signed her petitions. “At break
time I talked to a group of co-workers,” she said. “A sealer from
Tennessee signed, saying I’m going to vote for you. He said it’s just so
different for a worker to run for office. Some weren’t so excited and
hid behind their cellphones. Another told me he wants to go campaigning
with me.”
Arlene Rubinstein in Washington and Bernie Senter in Los Angeles
contributed to this article.
Related articles:
Solidarity with working people of Syria
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