While Miro Weinberger added Gov. Peter Shumlin to his growing list of prominent Democratic endorsers last week in the race for Burlington mayor, Kurt Wright provided a deeper look at the unusual political alliance he is creating, and identified some players in a possible City Hall team…

Last week Wright added lawyer Sandra Baird, a former Green Party candidate, as a backer and prospective member of his transition team, and called opponent Wanda Hines a likely pick for a key role in his administration…

The Republican has acknowledged the potential political edge provided by Hines’ presence in the race, but says that he sincerely respects her work and has known her for years. Her candidacy is apt to attract more Progressive and independent voters than Republicans or Democrats, and a three-way race makes it easier for someone to win with little more than 40 percent of the vote.

In his 2009 race, Wright received 32 percent. In 1981 Bernie Sanders won with just over 40 percent and a 10-vote margin…

Burlington’s Progressive Party, which has chosen not to run a candidate for the first time since 1991, could also endorse. Steering Committee members, plus invited progressives notables, were slated to meet privately with the candidates this weekend. Public backing for Wright is unlikely, but Weinberger is also a long-shot given statements by Party officials. Not taking an official position is the most likely option.

Wright pledges to create a “tri-partisan administration.”

In response to a rigged political system, New York City FSP Organizer Stephen Durham and feminist immigrant rights advocate Christina López are running a national write-in campaign.

Inroducing the FSP candidates:

Stephen Durham for president

Stephen Durham brings abundant experience and a generous heart to the electoral arena. Dedicated to changing conditions at their root, he is a lifelong radical in the best sense of the word.

In the 1970s and ’80s Durham, now 64, was the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) organizer in Los Angeles; he has since guided the New York City branch.

From the party’s storefront in Central Harlem, it’s a short subway ride to the international heart of capitalism. Durham has ridden that train many a time to confront the corrupt financial elite — in recent months, often to march with Occupy Wall Street and conduct teach-ins on economics.

Durham was radicalized as a student and campus worker at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), where he participated in the movement against the Vietnam War and became a conscientious objector. He also stood shoulder to shoulder with students of color in the historic battle for Third World Studies at UCB.

As a pioneering queer activist, he took part in the first national lesbian and gay conference in 1969. A consistent advocate of women’s rights and supporter of female leadership, Durham fights to keep feminist issues up front in all the movements.

Durham became a union militant while working as a waiter in California and then New York City. He provided rank-and-file leadership in the 1985 NYC Hotel Trades Council strike by 16,000 workers, predominantly people of color, women, and immigrants.

Durham’s long involvement in Latin America began during high school as an exchange student to Brazil during the military dictatorship. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, he has traveled in Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, building bonds and joint work with other leftists and revolutionaries.

Running for New York State Assembly in 1998, Durham campaigned door to door in the largely Latino and African American 71st District. His campaign was endorsed by Puerto Rican activist Father Luis Barrios, longtime Harlem radical Yuri Kochiyama, former state Assemblywoman Marie Runyon, and Haitian immigrant rights advocate Ray LaForest, among others.

A thinker as well as a doer, Durham has written on topics from the AIDS crisis to the Cuban Revolution, from freeing Lynne Stewart to the environmental disaster of hydraulic fracking.

Now Durham brings his global perspective and decades of valuable political experience to a working-class campaign for president.

Christina López for vice president

Christina López is a dynamic, eloquent Chicana from the barrio in Phoenix, whose working-class family has roots in the Southwest that predate U.S. borders.

She has been an organizer since her youth. As a member of the Chicano student group MEChA, she worked against a racist English-only law in Arizona.

After moving to Seattle, López was drawn to the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) by its emphasis on fighting for racial liberation as an essential component of building class solidarity. She has spread this message and challenged racism through extensive work defending immigrant rights, affirmative action, and freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Her deep involvement in the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006 and 2007 included opposing the profoundly flawed “guest worker” bill. She has spearheaded protests against police brutality and worked with Somali women to protest FBI raids.

In jobs ranging from production at Revlon Cosmetics to county court clerk and library associate, López has been a member of several unions including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

Recently her activism in the Occupy movement has extended from Philadelphia to Seattle, where she helped pass a “cop-free zone” resolution at the general assembly.

Today, at 43, López is Seattle Radical Women (RW) president. She has been key to building RW’s Sisters Organize for Survival campaign, which has fought state budget cuts and layoffs of public workers for the past three years. Radical Women is affiliated with FSP on the basis of a shared socialist feminist program.

López battles for reproductive rights as a passionate feminist of color and led RW’s collaboration with Black feminists in Jackson, Miss., to defend the last abortion clinic in the state. She has pinpointed the special impact of war on women and children and the need for the anti-war movement to prioritize this issue.

She is the author of the forthcoming RW position paper “Estamos en la Lucha: Immigrant Women Light the Fires of Resistance,” which focuses on the impact of U.S. immigration policies on women and children and highlights the central role of immigrant women in this country and internationally.

Her passion for racial justice helps her guide the National Comrades of Color Caucus, a joint caucus of the FSP and RW.

As candidate for vice president, López will be a fierce partisan of the downtrodden.

Press release:

Freedom Socialist Party launches presidential write-in campaign centered on bold working-class solutions

This election year, the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) is running New Yorker Stephen Durham for U.S. president and Seattleite Christina López for vice president in an energetic national write-in campaign.
Says Durham, 64, “The FSP ticket is a chance for people to vote not only against something, but for something. The campaign is thrilled to be giving people a way to send a strong protest message, find new kindred souls, and strengthen our organizing together for the future we want.”

Over the past three years, charges Durham, “The Democratic and Republican parties have done nothing but cooperate in forcing workers and the poor to pay the costs of the Great Recession caused by the banks and Wall Street. President Obama may play to the crowd by criticizing the ‘bad apple’ corporations, as he did in his State of the Union address. But the facts show that the program of corporate coddling, which creates austerity for the masses, is completely bipartisan.”

Vice presidential candidate López, 43, explains the campaign’s goals: “We are encouraging people to register a protest against both the unjust economic system and the rigged electoral process that keeps it in place. And we want to generate discussion and action around solutions for people’s immediate survival and for changing the system for good. We know it can be done! But it means creating a grass-roots, multiracial move- ment – one that prioritizes the issues of people who are hurting most, for example immigrants, single mothers and their children, and Black teens trying to enter a dismal job market. We have great momentum from last year’s spirit of rebellion to build on.”

The FSP campaign platform calls for taxing corporate wealth, ending all U.S. military involvement abroad, and creating full employment through a massive public jobs program and reducing the standard workweek to 30 hours with no cut in pay. The campaign also stands for bringing back and expanding social services, restoring civil liberties, and a host of other measures designed to eliminate poverty and discrimination and raise workers’ standard of living.

Durham and López are respected activists with a wealth of experience gained fighting for reforms like these while popularizing socialist ideas and the need for radical change. Durham, organizer of FSP’s New York City branch based in Harlem, is a gay rights pioneer with a strong union back- ground. A student and analyst of international affairs, he has traveled extensively in Latin America. López is an immigrant rights champion and the organizer for Seattle Radical Women. As organizer, she has helped lead a feminist campaign of women and men against budget cuts in Washington state for the last three years.

According to campaign manager Doug Barnes, the socialist feminist FSP is taking the unconventional route of a write-in campaign because corporate funding of the two major parties and restrictive ballot access laws stack the deck against minor parties so severely. These hurdles, he notes, are compounded by mainstream media dismissal of alternative candidates, resulting in presidential debates that almost entirely avoid topics like the social costs of war or increasing repression against political dissenters.

In one state, California, where the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) electoral alliance already has ballot status, Durham will compete to be PFP’s presidential candidate.

The Durham/López campaign launches this week with a candidate Web video, position statements, Facebook at www.facebook.com/VoteSocialism2012, Twitter @VoteSocialism, and featured articles in the Freedom Socialist newspaper. With the help of volunteers, the FSP will be spreading the news and ideas of the campaign widely. The Freedom Socialist 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee is planning for college and other speaking engagements, Skype presentations, fundraisers, and more activities around the country.

Freedom Socialist 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee
4710 University Way NE, Ste. 100
Seattle, WA 98105
206-985-4621
VoteSocialism@gmail.com

by Stewart Alexander, 2012 Socialist Party USA Presidential Candidate

The phrase that came to mind immediately upon hearing President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is “too little, too late.” After spending the last few years coddling the banks and the richest 1%, Obama has the nerve to now call for “economic fairness.” To him, this means tweaking payroll taxes and making a rhetorical call to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. For working people in America real fairness means the right to a job, a guarantee of healthcare for all and an end to the Military Industrial Complex. Obama won’t deliver this. That’s why I am running for President against him.

Job creation has been and will continue to be the most obvious way that Obama has sold out working people throughout America. These decisions were made early on in his administration when he made the conscious decision to pour billions of dollars into the Banks that had funded his campaign instead of using those funds to create an emergency employment program to put people back to work. The result is that Americans have experienced nearly three consecutive years of more than 9% unemployment and nearly double that when those workers who given up looking for jobs are counted. This has meant real human suffering for millions of people.

Although Obama has hailed the recent decline in these same unemployment rates, a closer look at the numbers reveal the hollowness of his claims. Economist Doug Henwood has paged through the Unemployment report and discovered that much of the reduction is due to the effects of holiday seasonal employment and, in particular, a shift to online purchasing for Christmas gifts. Of the 200,000 jobs created in December, some 42,000, or over 1/5, came from the hiring of extra couriers and messengers. Bars, restaurants and healthcare companies picked up the bulk of the rest of the new hires. Hardly the manner in which we want to grow the economy.

The jobs program that the Alexander/Mendoza 2012 campaign is proposing calls for the creation of a Full Employment economy. We have a three-pronged approach. First, we want to create an Emergency Jobs Program that will put millions of workers back to work immediately in fields like environmental cleanup, infrastructure creation and maintenance, and education. Second, we support proposals to publicly fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector. This will serve to not only put people back to work, but to re-build the manufacturing capacity of our country. Finally, we want to fund job training programs that lead to job sharing or job splitting, where workers will work less yet retain the same amount of pay and benefits.

A serious restructuring of the tax code that allows us to take back the wealth created by our work and accumulated by the 1% is key to funding our job creation plan. We want more than Obama’s proposed payroll tax cut. We deserve more than just reversing Bush’s economically suicidal tax breaks for the rich. We need a radical restructuring of the way in which we think about wealth. The great riches of this society need to be put to use to help us all – to make life better for the 99% and create new opportunities for work, relaxation and community.

This is why we propose creating a progressive tax structure where the rich pay far more than the average working person. In a democratic socialist society neither Obama nor Romney would be allowed to pay an effective tax rate of 26% and 17% respectively. Corporate taxation, financial gains taxes and personal income taxes will be modernized – all loopholes will be closed and the rich will pay a steep tax on their income. This is what economic fairness looks like to a socialist.

If Obama’s proposals for “Economic Fairness” are hard to believe, his attempt to present his Presidency as one of peace is simply a farce. The hands of the Obama administration are dripping with blood. He has approved a brutal Drone war on the people of Pakistan that has resulted in massive civilian casualties. He has accelerated the war in Afghanistan, which has increased casualties among soldiers and terrorized the civilian population driving them into the political arms of the Taliban. And Obama has continued to take an aggressive political stance on Iran thereby moving the country closer to another war.

All this, plus a clear continuation of the Bush era security state policies. Obama’s approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) annihilates centuries of civil rights protections. The President now has the right to indefinitely jail any citizen in the America without having to work within the protections of habeas corpus. Added to the NDAA is the fact that, as I write this, Bradley Manning is rotting in a jail cell. Manning is Obama’s prisoner – a moral testament to the President’s commitment to continue the job of restricting civil liberties.

My campaign is staunchly anti-militarist. This means that I commit to bringing the troops home now through the elimination of all foreign occupations and the closing of all foreign military bases and I aim to dismantle the Military Industrial Complex. My campaign calls for an immediate 50% reduction in military spending. We think that democratic socialism offers the best hope for the creation of a world based on peace and solidarity. Eliminating the security state will move us a long way in that direction. America should be a model for civil liberties not a test case for how many rights can be restricted.

I am writing this also to encourage voters to take a serious look at my campaign. They will find that socialist politics are clearly distinct from the politics of the 1% peddled by politicians such as Obama, Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Under their leadership, the State of the Union is neutered – reduced to an exercise in cheerleading for the politicians that have faithfully towed the line for their corporate benefactors. The proposals of the Alexander/Mendoza campaign are made in the interest of the 99%. We think Americans deserve a clear choice come November. We will be working hard to make that possible. Join us in making a demand for jobs, peace and freedom in 2012!

Those who want to build the strongest electoral challenge to the two parties of the 1% need to act urgently. Socialists, left Greens, trade unionists, community groups, and other activists that want to fight back: We all need to organize public debates early this year. We need public debates with strong voices for independent electoral politics against the agenda of the 1%. We should initiate local community forums across the country inviting “left” Democratic Party supporters to debate with activists about independent working-class politics.

While the Republicans are having their primaries, we need to boldly call for discussion and debates on the left about strategies for the elections. Coalitions need to be rapidly built to run independent candidates that really represent the movement against corporate domination.

Already an “Occupation Party” has been formed by activists in Ohio. This is a clear sign that many in the Occupy movement are thinking along these lines. Likewise, a “Justice Party” has been formed by former Salt Lake City Mayor, Rocky Anderson, who is running for President on its ticket. Jill Stein is also running for President on the Green Party ticket.

At this stage, it is too early to say which of these candidates will get the biggest echo from ordinary working people or if a stronger, unforeseen candidate will emerge. But it’s clear that the vacuum exists across the country, and we need candidates at the local, state, congressional and presidential levels to build the left, the labor movement and the overall struggle against corporate domination.

Photo credits: ABC News (sign); Philly Workers Voice (protest); Joey Lawrence (homeless)

Everywhere you look people are marching in the streets, conducting general strikes, defying cops, occupying banks, joining each other’s protests. One thing is pretty obvious. They have had it with capitalism and its exclusive club in the top 1 percent.

If ever there were a time when a third party, anti-capitalist movement could catch fire, this is it. With a presidential election right around the corner and the “99 percenters” occupying city squares across the country, now would be a fine time for a united left electoral slate on a socialist feminist, anti-racist, anti-war, pro-immigrant rights program.

Just one problem. In the Grand Democracy of the “1 percent,” getting on the ballot is damn near impossible, as is getting attention from news media and hence the public.

But that’s to be expected in this plutocracy. It’s just one more hurdle to be overcome if working and poor people want to reclaim our country.

The “greatest democracy on earth?” Did you know that it requires 675,000 petition signatures for an independent or minor party candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states — 26 times the number required by a Democratic presidential candidate? Or that 36 percent of the four to five million felons who have been stripped of their voting rights are African Americans?

A new study from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University reports that a “deluge of restrictive voting laws … have swept the country in recent years.” Nineteen new laws and two executive actions are in place, and at least 42 bills are still pending in Congress — all related to the 2012 elections.

Massive corporate financing of campaigns, combined with dirty tricks, media censorship and systemic racism, has marginalized a great many of the 99 percent right out of their own electoral process. That’s why U.S. voter turn-out is one of the lowest in the industrialized world.

These vast roadblocks to getting a progressive, radical party on the ballot are a sign of twin-party fear, not voter hostility to political alternatives.

Fear of breaking with Obama. Clearly there is a great deal of worry among the rulers that given an option, any option, voters might choose something besides the Democrats and Republicans who have brought the country to the edge of the abyss.

U.S. foreign policy is still based on extending warfare, joblessness is approaching Great Depression levels, environmental safety efforts are minimal, and over a million immigrants — the highest in history — have been deported since Obama took office. His healthcare measures favor privatized insurance instead of universal coverage, and his Super Committee is meeting around the clock to diminish Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Rather than defend 75 years of working-class reforms being bombarded by the right wing, Obama and his party have jumped on the deficit bandwagon and demand more “spending cuts.”

With this record, you’d think anyone who cares about social justice would break with Obama and the Democrats. But prominent liberals such as Ralph Nader, Cornel West, Chris Hedges and others are urging progressive Democrats to challenge Obama in the primaries, but only the primaries. In an open letter, they claim that a slate of six Democratic candidates would promote “robust and exciting discussion and debate during the primary season while posing little risk to the president.”

They say this will force Obama to move his campaign to the left so he can recover the progressive electorate who stood by him last time. It amounts to a backhanded endorsement of the president. By all that is rational, he deserves no such endorsement.

A socialist alternative. Despite the roadblocks, the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) would not be worth its name if it did not step forward in the 2012 election in one way or another. We’ve put out a call for a united left electoral slate and are waiting to hear back from a number of socialist parties. But we won’t wait long.

We believe that working-class voters deserve candidates who will fight for their interests. Win or lose, FSP candidates highlight issues and solutions that never are discussed otherwise and present a cogent, left-wing alternative to the Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens who all support capitalism in one form or another.

The FSP has run candidates a number of times for city and statewide positions but never for president. The party’s campaigns were always paid for by working people. They were powered by unionists, grassroots organizations, and people of color, feminist, sexual minority and immigrant communities. On a number of occasions, we fought court battles to get ballot status and protect donor privacy. In the late ’90s, the party ran in five different cities at the same time, and in two Seattle city council contests, it won 18 percent of the votes.

We have also consistently supported socialist electoral slates over the years, but so far, it’s been impossible to persuade other socialist groups to combine for an electoral campaign.

This year, FSP is working with the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) in California to explore the possibility of a joint slate. PFP and other groups will host a founding conference of the National Organizing Committee for an independent Left electoral slate December 9-11 in San Francisco. For more information go to www.noc2012.org .

This we pledge. One way or another, the Freedom Socialist Party will be part of mounting an authentic presidential campaign this year, even if we have to do it as a write-in effort.

We have no delusions that the rulers of this armed-to-the-teeth empire are likely to tolerate an end to capitalism via the ballot box. But the first step toward a new social order starts with thinking outside the capitalist house of horrors and its magic-mirror voting booths where a single party, run by Big Capital, appears as though it is two.

In this context, no socialist election effort is worthless. Instead it exposes false choices, offers creative alternatives in place of hackneyed excuses, and helps to build a movement capable of engaging in effective revolutionary action.

Send feedback to Monica Hill at fsnews@mindspring.com.

See the original article here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

After the caucuses, Vermont Progressive Party Chairwoman Martha Abbott explained why her party was still looking for a candidate. Without a Progressive in the race, she saw a choice “between a working-class Trojan horse Republican or a well meaning, untested Democrat who has not shown that he understands working class issues.”

Former Progressive Mayor Peter Clavelle is expected to endorse Weinberger, the Democrat, in a press conference on Friday.

Meanwhile, Community and Economic Development Office staffer Wanda Hines has entered the race as an independent. Although Hines, who previously ran the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf, won’t publicly confirm her plans until Friday, a poster is being circulated by the Committee to Elect Wanda Hines with the slogan, “Your choice, your community.”

The article goes on to detail why Hines cannot be endorsed by the Progressive Party and who is most likely to receive the party’s endorsement or nomination.

Washington, with the help of the capitalist media, has consistently portrayed Kim Jong Il’s tenure as dictatorial and oppressive—even insinuating that the massive outpouring of sorrow over Kim Jong Il’s death is orchestrated and proof of a bizarre, brainwashed citizenry. This accusation is highly offensive. It is paternalistic, and ignores traditional mourning rituals deeply rooted in Korean culture.

By delegitimizing and demonizing the North Korean government, U.S. imperialism is hoping to make the idea of military intervention against North Korea palatable to the people of the United States. This is precisely the strategy used to gather popular support for the invasion of Iraq and military intervention in Libya.

This perspective is not surprising to those familiar with the history of the PSL.

Unfortunately wikipedia and politics1 are both blacked out today as part of the protest against internet censorship/SOPA, so I’ll have to add additional background on that later.

Watching Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift confront the question “Are most political reporters simply insiders?” is a discomfiting experience. Her struggle to defend the indefensible unavoidably inspires compassion for her uneasy predicament. But the case she makes so proves the point that any sympathy engendered morphs quickly into cynicism.

The political reporter appeared on a Dec. 29, 2011, panel discussion on Al Jazeera, subtitled the question du jour. Joining her were Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson, of whose candidacy Clift knew nothing. Al Jazeera devoted a third of the half-hour program’s opinions to the former Salt Lake City mayor. Clift apparently had never heard of him.

“I think Rocky Anderson is running probably to get his issues out there, more than from an expectation that he might necessarily win,” she awkwardly speculated aloud, unsure about the Justice Party’s name, no less.

Clift, who also contributes to The Daily Beast, defended the media’s treatment of third parties, which independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2008 called a “blackout” and “political bigotry.” To the contrary, she asserted, the media love the drama third parties bring.

“The last thing the press corps wants is a Romney-Obama race,” she said in an edition of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story: U.S. 2012. “Think of that, for all those many months.”

Clift acknowledged the anger the American people feel toward their government and their yearning for more choices and parties. And she said the media has responded, sort of. They have covered speculative third-party bids by Donald Trump and Ron Paul and will be doing more.

“There are two sort-of-third-party entities,” she added, “Americans Elect, which is going to have an Internet convention and choose a ticket, and No Labels, which is trying to get away from Republican and Democrat. They’re not actually going to mount a ticket.”

Clift mentioned neither Jill Stein nor Kent Mesplay, declared 2012 Green Party candidates. Her defense for ignoring alternative parties:

“Hundreds of people file to run for president. You have to have some sort of screen.”

Rocky Anderson, who recently compared Obama’s lack of prosecution of the Bush administration for war crimes to Ford’s pardon of Nixon in announcing his acceptance of the nomination of the newly formed Justice Party. In the Al-Jazeera article, Anderson says among other things

In addition to that, the Democrats seem to have no more regard for the rule of law as the Republicans … After President Obama took office, one of the first things he said about accountability under the law, particularly for war criminals, was that we should simply look forward and not look backwards … It’s really appalling that anybody in our government would suggest that those who commit these egregious crimes simply be exempt from the application of the law.

Under the Obama administration, not one person responsible for the massive financial fraud leading to the economic disaster from which we’re still suffering … has been subject to criminal prosecution. No one has spent one day in jail for those massive financial crimes.

Lee Wrights, one of several candidates seeking the presidential nomination of the 40-year-old Libertarian Party (H/T to Lee Wrights for the link to the Al Jazeera article).

Among other things, Wrights says in the Al Jazeera article

[If elected president, I would] declare peace – not only with the world, but with ourselves. Americans have got in this mindset of war. Everything’s a war. Our political rhetoric is rife with war. We need peace. Everybody wants to be prosperous. There’s one way to be prosperous – and that’s to be at peace with everyone.

America needs to stop being the nosy neighbour in the crowd, poking our nose into everyone else’s business and trying to tell them what to do, and making enemies because of that … If somebody is coming to America and attacking us, then yeah, we need to go to war and defend ourselves. We need to stop making war for any other reason.

[If elected,] I’d be raising unemployment, particularly in the Washington DC area – because I plan to put a lot of bureaucrats out of work ….

Next is Jill Stein, leading contender for the nomination of the 20 year old Green Party, who is planning on a people’s state of the union response on January 25, the day after Obama’s State of the Union speech on January 24.

Part of Stein’s pitch at Al Jazeera:

The Green New Deal is basically an emergency programme of jobs creation. It is modelled on the New Deal that helped get us out of the Great Depression in the 1930s … Specifically, it would be creating jobs in small businesses and cooperatives at the local level in key areas of the green economy … clean manufacturing, local organic agricultures, public transportation, and sustainable, clean renewable energy. That simultaneously goes a long way to solve the issues of national security and would begin to make wars for oil obsolete.

Lastly, Al Jazeera’s Sam Bollier gets to Jack Fellure, presidential nominee of the Prohibition Party, which was founded in 1869.

A sampling from Fellure:

The biggest problem facing America is the morals. The morals of this country [are] shot. And I’m not just talking about getting drunk and shacking up – I’m talking about conviction, standards, honesty, integrity, righteousness – the whole schmear.

Our country started off with … Christian foundations, Biblical foundations, and we’re so far away from them now we’re not even close. Schools had prayer and Bible readings … When we took that out in 1962 – the Supreme Court said: ‘You can’t do that anymore’ – then our country started down the tubes.

In addition to pitching their ideas, the candidates also discuss the challenges of ballot access, lack of finances and media disinterest for alternative party candidates in the US political system.

Back at the Anderson campaign kickoff, they’re collecting the 2000 signatures they’d need to be on the 2012 ballot. It’s a tall order, but supporters say grassroots is the only way to real change.

“I believe everybody in the country knows that money in politics, and the corruption that’s going on, is a common occurrence and they’re sick of it,” said Steve Szykula,an Anderson supporter. “They’re sick of it and they want and need someone to represent them.”

Richard Winger says they need 2,000 valid signatures by February 15th. Parties already on the ballot in Utah are the Libertarian Party, Constitution Party, and Americans Elect.

Recently the Pew Center for research published a poll in which they found that 49 percent of young people in the U.S. have a favorable view of socialism, while only 43 percent reported viewing it unfavorably. The report also revealed that African Americans have a favorable view of socialism at a rate of 55 percent to 36 percent.

This news seems to have taken some in the capitalist media by surprise—but should it? Our experiences and our conditions shape our consciousness. And in our relatively short lifetimes, the experiences of my generation have certainly run contrary to the myth that the capitalist free market is a force for “peace,” “freedom” and “prosperity.”

In the last 10 years, we have seen endless wars that were premised on lies and driven by profit. Weapons contractors, financiers, oil executives and the politicians and generals who sit on the boards of these major corporations have literally made a killing through record profits from the death and destruction that they have been allowed to wreak abroad.

Millions of people across the country, the majority of them young, have marched against these wars and if we lived in a true democracy, if the decision to pursue these wars had ever been brought before the people, there is no doubt that our brothers and sisters in uniform would already be home.

The cost of these wars is rarely discussed in the mainstream media, but we feel it every day when we look for government services that we need and find that they have been cut for lack of funds.

Many of us are surprised to find ourselves in need of government assistance at all. We all grew up hearing that if we studied hard and worked hard we would succeed. So those of us who could went to college despite rising education costs, shouldering crippling loans for the promise of a good job and a foundation for a good life. After graduating, we found that the market had no intention of keeping that promise.

Employment opportunities are declining, unemployment in this country is officially at 8.6 percent but in reality far higher. And there are fewer jobs today than there were two years ago. It is not just the unemployed who are suffering. Many of us are underemployed—meaning we work but we do not earn enough to survive. Many of us take temporary work or work part time, taking jobs with no benefits or internships with no pay, because the “job creators” have eliminated decent-paying positions knowing that they can squeeze more labor and more profit from the “standing army of the unemployed.”

Our wages are going down while the cost of living goes up. The explosive growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement forced the mainstream media to acknowledge this truth. Young people have been sold out by this system, and we are becoming more and more willing to fight back. We want peace, we want equality, we want jobs, and we want the wealth that our labor creates to be used to provide the things that our people need. We want socialism.

Obama cannot resolve the crisis of capitalism

Many people thought that the election of an African American president would result in better lives for African Americans in the U.S. But Obama’s election coincided with a crisis of capitalism that no capitalist leader, not even Obama, can resolve. The official unemployment rate for Black youth is at 41.3 percent. (americanprogress.org, July 2011)

Predatory lending and the housing crisis led to high rates of foreclosure for many families in the U.S., but the rates for African Americans were astronomical. Home ownership has always been important in our community, because it is something that has historically been denied to us by legal and extralegal means. While the segregationist laws that kept home ownership out of our reach for so long have been overturned, the laws of the free market allow the banks to kick us out of the homes that we have purchased.

Historically, economic and social gains made by African Americans were never a natural by-product of the free market but always the result of a struggle that forced reforms and government intervention in the market. We have struggled for centuries to bring ourselves closer to equality. There will never be full equality under capitalism, a system that must keep workers divided, that must keep some super exploited in order to drive everyone’s wages down so the capitalists can profit.

Conservatives are afraid that ‘capitalism’ has become a dirty word

They are right to be afraid, though it is certainly not just an issue of semantics. We have seen the devastation wrought by capitalism, and we are no longer accepting that this is the way it has to be. This past year, we have also seen our sisters and brothers in Tunisia and in Egypt fight and win. In the Occupy movement and beyond, we are developing strategies and tactics for our struggle right here. It is a new year and we will fight for a new system. One that offers us true equality, decent-paying jobs, education, housing, health care, all those things our class needs and deserves. Join us in the fight for socialism.

The PFP was founded in 1967, and is devoted to “socialism, democracy, ecology, feminism and racial equality.”  Though the party organization is almost exclusively in California, it is currently attempting to permanently expand nationally.  Its nomination is coveted because the party has qualified for ballot access in California, due to its performance in previous elections.

Of the candidates:

Rocky Anderson announced his presidential run and the creation of the Justice Party last month. Thus far, the party has achieved ballot access in Mississippi, but was unable to meet the January 2 deadline to appear on the California ballot. He just recently decided to seek the PFP nomination.

Peta Lindsay won the PSL nomination in November, and is only 27 years old, which may cause ballot access problems in states that require candidates to be constitutionally eligible to serve.  However, courts in California have recently ruled that candidates cannot be barred from the ballot because of eligibility. The PSL nominee normally seeks the PFP nomination as did Gloria La Riva in 2008.

Stewart Alexander, who was the running mate of 2008 SPUSA presidential nominee Brian Moore, who unsuccessfully sought the PFP nomination that year, won the SPUSA’s presidential nomination in October.  He was the PFP nominee for California Lieutenant governor in 2006, but lost the party’s primary for governor in  2010.

Stephen Durham is the nominee of the FSP,  a socialist feminist party. Not much can be found on Durham, though he is the author of this letter, which was published on IPR in 2009.

The nominee for the PFP will be chosen after the primary at the party’s national convention.

In 2008, consumer advocate Ralph Nader won the primary and was later chosen as the party’s presidential nominee at the national convention, defeating both La Riva and Moore as well as Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney. Afterwards, he was able to collect enough signatures for the party to appear on the ballot in Iowa in addition to California.  The Nader ticket won 108,381 votes (0.8%) in California, and 8,014 votes (0.52%) in Iowa.

The Michael Cavlan for US Senate campaign has just released their first campaign commercial. The commercial is available on youtube. No plans for broadcast TV ad buys were mentioned.

Cavlan is running for US Senate 2012 in Minnesota on the Minnesota Open Progressive ticket. His opponent will be Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat. The Minnesota GOP have not decided yet who they will run. At last report the Minnesota Independence Party, who are Minnesota’s third major party will not run anyone for Senate in the 2012 election.

The campaign also has a facebook page.

Cavlan is a frequent commenter here at IPR.

From the Socialist Party Socialism 2010 Conference: Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan speaking about the co-option of the early 21st century US peace movement by the Democratic Party.

Sheehan ran for Congress as an independent in 2008 against Nancy Pelosi (In a seven-way race, Sheehan came in second with 46,118 votes (16.14%) to Pelosi’s 71.56%), and later switched her registration to the Peace and Freedom Party, which is the only ballot-qualified socialist party in California. She agreed to run as the Socialist Party USA’s vice-presidential nominee for the 2012 elections, but the party’s national convention voted on October 15th, 2011, to block her candidacy, because she isn’t a member of the party.

H/T Punk Patriot.

Students of California, arise, you have nothing to lose but a crushing debt!

The corporate state of California, ever ready to seize its ideological and commercial hour during a recession, has a chokehold on California’s public universities. With its tax-coddled plutocracy and a nod to further corporatization, the state government has taken the lid off tuition increases big time.

Students of the University of California at Berkeley may pay a proposed $23,000 in tuition by the 2015-2016 school year, up from $11,160 this year (2011) that in turn is up from $2,716 in the academic year 2001-2002. In short, tuition for resident undergraduates has more than quadrupled in ten years.

Before and right after World War II the idea of a public university included a then-called “educational fee” close to zero, from city college of New York to UC Berkeley.

Old timers now look back at those days as economic life-savers toward a degree and a productive life for them and the American economy.

No more. Those gates of opportunity are crumbling at an accelerating pace.

Ralph Nader has run for President numerous times as a third party candidate, most recently as an Independent in 2008.

Barack Obama’s rhetoric certainly has a populist tone to it these days, but words are cheap.  At the same time that he invoked Teddy Roosevelt, Obama sought to undermine Social Security, one of the fundamental social safety net programs in this country.  Ron Paul and the newly Libertarian Gary Johnson, on the other hand, provide adequate solutions to some of the symptoms of this greater problem.  Both are opposed to the race-driven drug war and the military-industrial complex and the empire which sustains it.  They are even opposed to our modern “crony capitalism,” and in my eyes they are certainly better choices than any of the offerings of the major parties, yet their libertarian ideologies encourage corporate greed and power in some nasty ways.  Actual solutions, or at least the first steps toward actual solutions, to our systematic socioeconomic inequality are present in the campaigns of the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Justice Party’s Rocky Anderson.  Stein’s campaign is centered on the idea of a “Green New Deal,” providing employment and a fair, democratic redistribution of wealth while jump-starting American environmental efforts.  Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City, recently formed the Justice Party and the central theme of his candidacy is, in his words, “to change the system and get the corrupting influence of corporate and other concentrated wealth out of our electoral system and out of our system of governance.”

Teddy Roosevelt, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Rocky Anderson either are now, or once were, third party Presidential candidates.

“We have been talking with Rocky for months, and exploring how we could potentially work together, in the long run, in the short run, etc. I think Rocky is interested in creating a new party. He is newly emerged from the Democratic Party, and what you learn when you work in third party politics is that you don’t create these parties overnight. It takes a lot of work to create and maintain a party, and it’s hard to do that and run for office, and I think Rocky is testing the waters right now and we’ll see how the conversation progresses, but there is a very friendly and collaborative dialogue going on between us at this point.”

Someone has already set up a facebook group in order to encourage collaboration between the two campaigns.

The party also seems to have launched a website, which can be found here. Additionally, you can find the “Prospectus and Action Plan” here, it lists a variety of goals, future structure of the party, the dates for their national convention, and a list of members on the steering committee (listed below). The acting chairman is Paul Zeitz.

Justice Party Steering Committee (JP-SC)

Ross “Rocky” Anderson
Lenny Brody
Tizzy Giordano
Drew Goldsmith
Martha Hambry
Mo Hasan
Samuel Jordan
Aaron Lyles
Nancy Marcus Newman
Michael McGee
Jerry Peloquin
Jeffery Williams, Archivist
Linda Yahr, Treasurer (acting)
Paul Zeitz, Chair (acting)