Protest FBI Attacks on Free Speech! 1/25 in Hartford and New Haven

A CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS IN DEFENSE OF THE 9 NEWLY SUBPOENAED ACTIVISTS TO APPEAR BEFORE A GRAND JURY!

CALL OFF THE GRAND JURY!

END THE ISSUANCE OF SUBPOENAS AND GRAND JURY INVESTIGATIONS OF ANTI-WAR ACTIVISTS!

NO FBI/DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE INTIMIDATION OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT!

DEFEND FREE SPEECH!


Regional Demos:

Tuesday, Jan 25th - 5:00pm
Demonstrate at the Hartford Federal Building!
450 Main St. Hartford, CT

Tuesday, Jan 25th - 5:00pm
Demonstrate at the New Haven FBI Building!
600 State St. New Haven, CT

In September 2010 the FBI carried out a series of raids of the homes of fourteen anti-war activists. They issued subpoenas to them to appear before a grand jury investigating their ties to “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” a charge the FBI suggests is justified because some of them were engaged in international solidarity work in Palestine and Colombia. They seized computers, videos, cell phones, financial records, and drawings made by their children. These activists were guilty of no crime, but were instead the victims of the governments attempt to harass and silence the anti-war movement.

Demonstrations against the raids and the grand jury proceedings were organized by activists in over sixty cities around the country, alongside a spirited national call-in campaign.

The subpoenas to appear before grand juries were served to the fourteen activists but were later withdrawn when all fourteen asserted their 5th Amendment rights and refused to appear in court.

In November, however, three Twin Cities anti-war and international solidarity activists. Tracy Molm, Anh Pham, and Sarah Martin, who were amongst the 24 activists originally served subpoenas, received word from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that that their subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have been reactivated.

And the dragnet against the anti-war and international solidarity movement is widening, with even more activists facing state department harassment and grand jury repression.

Just last month 9 Palestine solidarity activists and Palestinian-American community organizers were served subpoenas to appear before a Chicago grand jury on January 25th .

We in CT stand opposed to this assault on our free speech and right to organize without harassment against US military intervention abroad. Our demonstrations in over sixty cities in the wake of the FBI raids was a powerful response to government repression of the anti-war movement. This time we have to show the government that was not a one time response but the beginning of a vigorous campaign by the movement to defend our own. We must respond and grow this response dramatically as our very right to function politically in opposition to US wars is at stake.

We join the national call for a day of action to stop the FBI and Grand Jury repression on January 25th by demonstrating at the Federal Building in Hartford and the FBI office in New Haven.


We demand:
**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists!
**Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists!

**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell
phones, papers, documents, etc.

In Solidarity,

CT United for Peace Organizing Committee
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism/CT
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Socialist Party of Connecticut (SPUSA)

2011: Calling Time on Capitalism

2011: Calling Time on Capitalism

First appeared in the Guardian: Comment is Free America
by Richard Wolff.
Published on January 1, 2011

Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough!
Workers' protest at the New Fabris factory, France, 2009
An employee of the New Fabris factory, in Chatellerault, central France, walks next to a fire in front of the plant, in 2009, after 366 laid-off workers occupied the factory and threatened to blow it up unless they receive a bigger pay-off. 'We want a bonus' is written on the wall in the background. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images


The end of 2010 brought renewed Washington rhetoric, media hype and academic me-too declarations about the US economy "recovering". We've heard them before since the crisis hit in 2007. They always proved wrong.

But recovery noises are useful for some. Republicans claim that government should do less since recovery is underway (of course, for them, government action is always counterproductive). Likewise, Republicans and many centrist Democrats claim that income redistribution policies are no longer needed because recovery means growth, which means everyone gets a bigger piece of an expanding economic pie. Recovery hype also helps the Obama administration to claim that its policies succeeded.

Yet, this is more fantasy than reality. After all, the nearly 20% of the US labour force that became unemployed or underemployed in 2009 remains so as we enter 2011. No recovery there. Worse still, a quarter of those who found work since the crisis began only got temp jobs without benefits. Second, foreclosure actions by banks – including those who got most of the government's bailouts – continue to eject millions from their homes. No recovery there, either (except for the bigger banks).

Third, consider why the Federal Reserve decided last month to create another $600bn of new money, and why Congress and the president agreed in December on an additional fiscal stimulus (extending Bush's tax cuts, reducing social security withholding for 2011, etc). They took those steps because all the previous bailouts, monetary easing, tax cuts and government fiscal stimulus expenditures had failed to end this crisis. Those immune to hype recognise that more of the same policies that failed before might do so again.

More importantly, the recovery noise distracts from a more basic failure of our economic system: its fundamental instability. Recurring "downturns" – which neither private nor government actions have ever managed to prevent – impose massive costs on society. They plunge millions of effective, productive workers into unemployment and resulting personal, family and community disasters. Governments tap the collective purses of their nations chiefly to rescue just those private capitalists who were major contributors to the crisis and whose wealth insulates them from the crisis' worst effects.

Then, governments turn on their people to impose austerities (cutbacks in social programmes, social security, etc) needed to restore government budgets busted by that rescue's huge costs. Like someone convicted of murdering his parents who demands leniency as an orphan, corporate America demands conservative government and austerity on the grounds of excessive budget deficits. Mainstream media and politicians take those corporate demands seriously, reminding us who controls whom.

The last half-century suggests a very different analysis of the crisis and a correspondingly different response for 2011. Since the early 1970s, workers' wage increases came to an end, their benefits and job security shrank and government supports for average people came under conservative attack. These increasing burdens were justified as absolutely necessary to enable more investment and, therefore, greater economic growth. A bigger economic pie would then provide more for everyone including workers.

In fact, growth in the US and Europe steadily slowed over those years (see graph below by University of Rome Professor Pasquale Tridico):

Average growth of GDP per capita in US and Europe, 1961-2009. Source: Eurostat

Average growth of GDP per capita in US and Europe, 1961-2009. Source: Eurostat

While workers' conditions deteriorated, capitalist surpluses and profits soared and stock markets boomed. Income and wealth were redistributed from poor and middle to the rich. But the promised results never materialised: neither more investment, nor greater economic growth. As the graph shows, growth actually slowed and then the whole system imploded into a catastrophic crisis.

Today's recovery noises accompany government actions that will repeat in 2011 more of the bailouts, monetary easing and fiscal stimuli that have proved insufficient since 2007. None of those actions dare to question, let alone address, how capitalism redistributed income and wealth in the decades leading to the crisis or how that redistribution contributed to the crisis.

The recovery being planned and hyped aims at a return to the US economy before it crashed. However, that capitalism was like a train hurtling toward the stone wall of crisis. To return to a pre-crisis capitalism risks resuming our places on a similar train heading for a similar crash.

Republican and Democratic politicians alike dare not link this crisis to an economic system that has never stopped producing those "downturns" that regularly cost so many millions of jobs, wasted resources, lost outputs and injured lives. For them, the economic system is beyond questioning. They bow before the unspoken taboo: never criticise the system upon which your careers depend.

Thus, this crisis and its burdens will continue until capitalists see sufficiently attractive opportunities for profit to resume investing and hiring people in the US as well as elsewhere. The freedoms of US capitalists to gain immense government supports as needed, and yet to invest only when, where and how they can maximise their private profits are paramount: the first obligations of government. The freedoms from want and insecurity for the US people remain a distant second priority – until mass political action changes that.

In good times, as in bad, capitalism is a system that places a small minority of people with one set of goals (profits, disproportionally high incomes, dominant political power, etc) in the positions to receive and distribute enormous wealth. Those people include the boards of directors that gather the net revenues of business into their hands and decide, together with the major shareholders in those businesses, how to distribute that wealth. Not surprisingly, they use it to achieve their goals and to make sure government secures their positions.

No Keynesian monetary or fiscal policies address, let alone change, how that system works and who uses its wealth to what ends. No reforms or regulations passed or even proposed under Obama would do that either. To avoid the instability of capitalism and its huge social costs requires changing the system. That remains the basic issue for a new year and a new generation. Will they break today's version of a dangerous old taboo: never question the existing system?

Article first appeared in The Guardian, guardian.co.uk, Comment is Free America, Saturday 1 January 2011

Socialist Party of CT Denounces Obama Tax Plan as "Class Warfare from Above"

For Immediate Release: 12/14/2010

Socialist Party of CT Denounces Obama Tax Plan as "Class Warfare from Above"

Amidst the worst recession since the Great Depression, with persistent "official" unemployment rates of 10% and real unemployment rates closer to 20%, the Democratic President has again shown the true colors of our "democracy;" cash rules. Plain and simple, the two-party corporately owned political system will do nothing to help the working class majority of America; the dying middle class which is daily joining the ranks of the impoverished. Record breaking inequality, unheardof rates of home foreclosures, record profits and bonuses, massive federal debt, widespread unemployment, 50 million without healthcare and the best they can come up with is a tax break for the top 1% of our population? This in addition to astronomical military budgets and endless wars abroad. We find this sickening and will continue to stand tall offering a real alternative; democratic socialism. Only when real democracy is in place will the real interests of the vast majority of Americans , those who must work for a living, be realized.

The Socialist Party stands for a fundamental transformation of the economy, focusing on production for need not profit. So-called fair trade is meaningless as long as the world economy is dominated by a few massive corporations.

1. We demand the immediate withdrawal of the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and oppose the creation of a widened Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

2. We call for worker and community ownership and control of corporations within the framework of a decentralized and democratically determined economic plan.

3. We call for a minimum wage of $15 per hour, indexed to the cost of living.

4. We call for a full employment policy. We support the provision of a livable guaranteed annual income.

5. We call for all financial and insurance institutions to be socially owned and operated by a democratically-controlled national banking authority, which should include credit unions, mutual insurance cooperatives, and cooperative state banks. In the meantime, we call for re-regulation of the banking and insurance industries.

6. We call for a steeply graduated income tax and a steeply graduated estate tax, and a maximum income of no more than ten times the minimum. We oppose regressive taxes such as payroll tax, sales tax, and property taxes.

7. We call for the restoration of the capital gains tax and luxury tax on a progressive, graduated scale.

8. We call for compensation to communities-- and compensation, re-training, and other support service for workers-- affected by plant and military base closings as stop-gap measures until we reach our goal of creating a socialist society totally separate from the global capitalist economy.

9. We oppose the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization as instruments of capitalist oppression throughout the world.

10. We demand cancellation of Third World debt.

11. We call for a National Pension Authority to hold the assets of private pension funds, and a levy against corporate assets for any pension fund deficits.

12. We call for increased and expanded welfare assistance and increased and expanded unemployment compensation at 100% of a worker's previous income or the minimum wage, whichever is higher, for the full period of unemployment or re-training, whichever is longer.

13. We support a program of massive federal investment in both urban and rural areas for infrastructure reconstruction and economic development.

14. We support tax benefits for renters equal to those for homeowners.

15. We call for the elimination of subsidies and tax breaks that benefit corporations and all other forms of corporate welfare.


Direct all correspondence to Todd Vachon, Chairperson, Socialist Party of CT- todd@votevachon.com