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! 

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Help put Democratic Socialism on the ballot this Fall. Please make a generous donation to the Alexander/Mendoza campaign.

Every other month, we will be holding a party of sorts on the first Saturday where people can get together and have some drinks, shoot the breeze, talk ideas, laugh and get rad. You don’t have to be a member of the Socialist Party to join the fun. Come on out, meet some cool people – who knows what will happen?

When: Saturday, February 4th

Location: The Socialist Party / Peace & Freedom Office, 2617 Hauser Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016

Time: 7pm

Facebook event page: www.facebook.com/events/289596761088755/

http://www.socialistparty-usa.org/

http://www.stewartalexanderforpresident2012.org/

by Arthur Delaney

The Socialist Party USA is more than a little skeptical of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s claim Sunday that President Barack Obama belongs in their ranks.

“The notion that Barack Obama is a socialist ranks among the greatest fairy tales in American society — right up there with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the idea that if you work hard enough your children will live a better life than you,” Socialist Party spokeswoman Lynn Lomibao said in an email. “Socialists know what Obama is: another corporate funded politician placed in the White House to protect the wealth and status of the 1 percent.”

Perry made his claim during the Sunday morning Republican presidential debate, when asked if he considered Obama opposed to the “founding ideals” of the United States.

“I make a very proud statement and a fact that we have a president that’s a socialist.” Perry said. “I don’t think our founding fathers wanted America to be a socialist country. So I disagree with that premise that somehow or another that President Obama reflects our founding fathers.”

Perry went on to say that states could do a better job delivering education, health care and environmental regulation than the federal government. Obama’s signature policy accomplishment in his first term is a sweeping federal health care reform law that will in 2014 require uninsured Americans to buy health coverage from private insurance companies.

The Socialist Party, which The New York Times reported last year has 1,000 members, doesn’t see much socialism coming from the Obama administration.

“When Americans needed a solution to mass unemployment, Obama gave away billions in cash to bail out the banks,” Lomibao wrote. “When Americans needed a single-payer healthcare system, Obama promoted a pro-health insurance healthcare ‘reform’ package that forced millions into junk healthcare plans subsidized by public funds. And when American workers asked for the right to join a union without employer harassment through the Employee Free Choice Act, Obama showed who he really answers to by betraying the promises he made to working people during his campaign.”

The Socialist Party’s presidential ticket consists of perennial candidate Stewart Alexander and former Marine Alex Mendoza.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/socialist-party-obama-perry_n_1196414.html

An open letter to friends and comrades in OWS and the democratic left

January 6, 2012

By Scott Tucker

Amiri Baraka recently wrote a political article titled “Fake Radicals, Real Republicans.” The title alone should tip off readers that he recommends critical support for the Obama campaign in 2012. Baraka argues for a form of political pragmatism, making the best of the worst in another big election year. The test of pragmatism is whether it does work in fact, or not. Indeed, Baraka has previously argued: “The Occupies are Obama’s troops if he could mobilize them.”

If Obama truly wanted to do so, he has not yet made an explicit public endorsement of the Occupy movement. Quite the contrary. Obama has only made the usual vague nods toward classless populism. And to be quite clear, if Obama wanted any kind of working relationship with popular rebellion in the streets, he might appoint Amiri Baraka to his inner circle rather than Timothy Geithner. Obama, however, serves at the discretion of the ruling class, and not in the service of our political fantasies.

In his most recent article, Baraka wrote, “Politics is not the easy release of one’s emotions, which in the narrowest mind, eliminates the desired target, it is, as Karenga once said, ‘the gaining, maintaining and use of power.’ As limited as one may think that definition is, it applies in this case.”

Baraka then says that Nader’s independent campaign put Bush in the White House, and then gives us lessons from Lenin and the period before the 1917 Russian Revolution.

These are old arguments. If they are new to others, that’s fine. But the present political case is quite different than Baraka’s political argument would suggest. Because a living movement of popular rebellion has already broken out of the old formalist arguments on the left.

If we buy the argument that Nader pushed the country to the right, then we buy the propaganda of all the busy appratchiks and propagandists of the Democratic Party. No, on the contrary. This country was pushed to the right by the right. And not only by the “ideological” far right, the Republicans, but also by the “pragmatic” right, the Democrats. Either we take democracy seriously or we don’t. The electoral system was already rigged and broken when certain candidates, including Nader, gave voters of conscience a choice.

Did Nader serve the Green Party well? Ah, that’s a distinct and separate subject. What matters here can be stated briefly. Nader served Nader’s own message pretty well, but Nader was not interested in building the base of the Green Party. I hope Greens (and everyone else on the democratic left) learned that lesson. But I do not blame Nader for the fact that Gore ran a lousy campaign, that he could not win his own home state of Tennessee, and that he abided by a “gentleman’s agreement” not to condemn the Supreme Court when it decided to stop the recount of votes in Florida. If we are rehashing the history of disastrous elections, let’s take care to pin down the facts and recall the timeline. Let’s ground our political arguments in all the brute facts of the past no one can change, and still fight for our present ideals in much less than ideal circumstances.

As for Lenin and the lessons of revolutions early in the twentieth century, Baraka’s reading of Lenin is curious. I know the works of Marx and Lenin, and I much prefer Marx to Lenin. But I am only a Marxist in the sense that every politically informed person should read Marx. I know why I am not and never have been a Leninist. I am a democratic socialist and a member of the Socialist Party of the United States. I am also a member of the Green Party.

The subject of “dual power,” which Baraka raises in explicitly Leninist terms, is a truly interesting subject for debate. But the political terms of the past would need a radical translation into the year we just lived through, 2011— a year of popular struggles for democracy round the globe– and the year in which we now face forward. Memory is the ground of any workable political theory, for memory sums up the past and still orients us toward the future.

Everyone knows our economic system is broken. The beauty and power of the Occupy Wall Street movement, however, is that so many people already know that our political and electoral system is also broken. The electoral system works well enough to secure the resentful consent of a dwindling minority of the governed. Otherwise Congress has become the front office of the ruling class. The Occupy Wall Street movement, however, explicitly seeks to deny the consent of the governed to the bipartisan corporate state.

If we are serious about dual power, then we are serious about building popular power against the corporate parties that keep each other in business and in government. This is the practical present meaning of dual power in this country in the year 2012. The General Assemblies in all the big cities reached a fairly astounding consensus that they would not have the power of a new movement hijacked by professional politicians from any party whatsoever.

Does that translate into straightforward anarchism, as Baraka suggests? No one denies that anarchist ideas are in the popular mix of the Occupy movement. But let’s be honest here. The Ron Paul acolytes are in that mix, too. The Leninist and sectarian parties tried jumping in front of the parade with their own banners, since each such group and party is convinced it has the program that deserves a leading place. With amazing grace, the General Assemblies went on with independent work and power.

Are there openings for conversation between the Occupy movement and the (small d) democratic left? Of course. But members of the Green and Socialist parties (for example) are likelier to step up to common responsibilities in the Occupy movement, rather than demand attention first for our own party programs. As people get to know us, all kinds of political conversations occur. Then, like Venn diagrams, circles converge. Those interested in electoral reform and in truly democratic parties will have their own learning curve if they are deciding to vote against “our two party system.” Again, that is how dual power is evolving today.

Who needs all the “dialectical” lessons of Lenin if we are going to vote by rote for the Democrats anyway? The notion that Baraka, or the Communist Party, or a group of Trotskyists will turn Congress into “a tribune of the people” is perfect nonsense. Yet that was precisely the intent of Lenin (in his most democratic and expansive phase) when he made his own argument for dual power in openly revolutionary situations. If we do approach such a situation in the next years ahead, the lessons of Lenin would still serve us no better than keeping our own eyes open to reality and our own feet on the ground.

“Pragmatism” is precisely the political program which locks the corporate parties into an ever narrowing downward spiral into the political abyss. Obama campaigned on promises of “hope and change”, and ended 2011 by signing away habeas corpus in the National Defense Authorization Act. In this situation, “progressive” members of the Democratic Party must make up their own minds to rebel openly against their party leaders if they hope to reform their chosen party. Frankly, their hopes (and illusions) should not be our first concern. We have other work to do, and urgently.

Do we choose to reform electoral politics or do we choose to form a parallel social movement built from below and with horizontal accountability? Yes, in some situations we must truly decide issues one way or the other. But we would be reckless to make such an exclusive choice as democratic socialists. Choosing either the first option or the second means we undermine practical dual power in our present reality. Dual power for us means both the power in the streets and the contingent power to push for democracy even on election days. Not Either / Or, but both.

Not one cent and not one vote for the parties of war and empire.

Work and vote for peace, democracy and socialism.