Thank you everyone for being here today. I am so honored and extremely humbled to have been selected by my comrades to be your vice-presidential candidate in the upcoming 2012 elections. I will begin by saying I will not let you down my comrades and fellow workers, this struggle means to much to so many and in so many of our cases the only real future for so many people we love.
The struggle that I am talking about, the fight between the ruling class, the Bosses, the ones who legally own virtually all of the wealth of society and the working class, the 99% of people who produce the wealth and make this country function is not a fight that our party takes on from the outside looking in. Our party is born from the working class, all of our members grew up fighting in the class struggle individually, maybe growing up as a woman, growing up black, growing up on minimum wage, living homeless being straddled with debt and school loans etc etc But now we fight all those issues like a raised fist in the air, collectively, unified and strong.
And since we don’t see ourselves as separate from the working class you will never hear us ask “what can our party do for the poor and working people of this country?” An absurd question if you think about it! But you will hear countless politicians repeat this question in different way in the coming election year. “What can we do for the poor and working people of this country?” the democrats and republicans will ask rhetorically, fronting like they really give a damn outside of their own narrow interests.
But not our party, that is not our perspective in the PSL. As workers we think that the real should be “What can we the working class do for ourselves?” You see we view the world through fundamentally different lenses. We understand that never before in history has the gears and functioning of society been placed so squarely in the hands of our people the working people. And so we do not see ourselves as powerless but as powerful! We see the working class as the world’s biggest philanthropists -- giving of ourselves day in and day out to build the cities, raise the crops and advance the technologies that increase the wealth of society.
What can the working class do for itself? We can organize ourselves, we can harmonize, we can unite and act in concert and in doing so we could run our own government. The good working people of this country and of the world we could elect honest men and women to office. Those men and women of our communities could make just constitutions, enact just laws and repeal vicious ones. By acting together we could shut down wall street and take hold of the biggest banks and the wealth they’ve stolen from our people. And that is what our electoral campaign is about we want to say for real “yes we can! Together we are invincible!”
You know, growing up undocumented my parents always told me to never let anybody try and intimidate me, put me down or make me feel unworthy because of my legal status. You are just as good and important as anybody else and those concerned words from my mom and dad always stuck with me then and still to this day.
I know and my family knows that immigrant workers have been scapegoated as part of a racist campaign to blame immigrants for the problems of unemployment and the other social woes that effect the workers.
But it’s not immigrant workers who are the problem. It is the plutocrats, the oligarchs, the capitalists, the 1 percent.
Now that the occupy movement has spread around the country under the slogan “the banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” even liberal commentators are emboldened to speak out and expose the intense class polarization that is allowing a tiny few to become ever richer while the masses of people become ever poorer.
Yesterday the economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times a piece called “Oligarchy, American Style”. Krugman is a liberal and not a socialist, he is a critic of the worst abuses of capitalism but asserts that the problem is not the capitalist system but pro-business policies promoted by the Republicans and, in his view, too frequently embraced by President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership.
It’s significant that this article – again, titled “Oligarchy, American Style” – appeared today in the New York Times. He uses the growing occupy movement as a frame of reference.
The facts speak for themselves. Currently U.S banks, to quote the NYT, are completely “awash with cash”, a record 8.9 trillion dollars to be exact in money the banks are basically just sitting on instead of investing in our communities, cities very much like Chicago or where I’m from NYC who are desperate to save our social services and school budgets. In NYC food prices have sky rocketed and the latest reports from the Food Pantries who feed the hungry paint a stark picture of what life is like for the majority of the residents of NYC. In the richest city, in the richest country in the world approximately 1.3 million people — mainly women, children, seniors, and the working poor — rely on soup kitchens and food pantries.
Approximately 3 million New Yorkers in a city of 8 million people currently experience difficulty affording food for themselves and their families.
One out of every three NYC residents who have a job experienced difficulty affording needed food in 2010.
If we were to take all of the families with kids in NYC, a full 76% of them would report as having trouble affording basic food stuff during sometime last year a 38% increasing since 2003. That’s more than 3 out of every 4 families in one of the richest cities on the planet.
And these stats can be replicated across the country NY is not unique by far.
But where is all this wealth going then if it is not going to us the 99%? The U.S Congressional Budget Office report quoted by Krugman shows that “essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans.” But in fact the Times reports it is the top .1% the richest thousandth of Americans who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005. In contrast, these days workers with a college degree are actually LESS likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a HIGH SCHOOL degree were in 1979.
Comrades and friends the current situation we find ourselves in is completely incompatible with democracy.
Can anyone seriously deny that our political system isn’t fully based on the power of the dollar?
Power in this country is not elected, it is purchased. No one can vote on where the banks invest, on how industry will use the resources of the planet or whether to give everyone a job, these are decisions that are decided in boardrooms over coffee and donuts by the 1% or even more correctly .1% Our party and this campaign does not expect change to come from the electoral process but rather be made on the streets.
Fully understanding this, our Party still refuses to throw our hands up ever four years and abandon our class in the face of a rigged election system. Instead, we intend to crash the party figuratively, and at times literally, and make sure that our needs are heard, that the hungry can say they represent me, that the persecuted the hard working and the disillusioned can say “hey there is another way!” Who will call for the end of ALL U.S military bases? Who will call for the abolition of insurance companies and quality healthcare for everybody? Who will hold high the needs of our communities if not us ourselves?!
This campaign is not a long list of promises, this campaign is not looking for a nicer and more just Capitalism, this campaign is about exposing the need to shake the bosses off our backs. We respectfully ask everyone who is hear in this coming year to judge us, hold us to what we say we are about, ask us why? And how come? Look at where we choose to fight, look at who we will choose to stand alongside of. And if you like what you see then join us sisters and brothers in making this campaign a success. As Malcolm X said “the future belongs to those who prepare for it” let us prepare.
I invite each and every one of you to join us in the struggle.
