SPUSA May Day Statement

Socialist Party May Day Statement

Socialism – An Idea Whose Time Has Come!
“Ideas,” someone once wrote, “move rapidly when their time comes.” As we gather to celebrate May Day, the continuing capitalist crisis makes socialism an idea ready to move rapidly. While the banks have received trillion dollar bailouts, working people still face mass unemployment, state and local budget cuts and deepening personal debt. Capitalist crisis has made the socialist vision of a world where human needs are put ahead of individual profits even more relevant. Our task on May Day is to convert socialism from a good idea into a movement to transform our society.

Capitalism Exposed
The recent economic crisis was more than a banking crisis or a housing price bubble. It was a demonstration that there is a fundamental problem at the center of capitalism. That problem lies in the nature of corporations themselves. Noam Chomsky once described corporations as “unaccountable private tyrannies.” There is no democracy inside of a corporation and, as a result, there is no democracy on our worksites. Corporations are undemocratic entities created only to make profits from exploiting the labor of workers.
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The undemocratic corporate model now also dominates American politics. A corrupting system of campaign donations and lobbying ensures that both Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of corporate America. When corporate profits declined, politicians began handing out trillions of dollars in public money to them. When these same corporations fired millions of workers, neither Democrat nor Republican attempted to stop them.

Socialist Solutions
Socialism offers an alternative to undemocratic profit-mad capitalism. By ensuring that people’s needs for housing, healthcare, education and employment are guaranteed, a socialist society will offer equality of opportunity. By bringing democracy to the economy through worker’s control of production, we will make sure that the place where most people spend their adult lives operates democratically. By organizing participatory budgeting, we will put people at the center of the system – fully empowered to make decisions concerning the future of the society they live in.
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The powerful necessity of socialist ideas can be seen most clearly with the issue of immigration. The capitalist state presents restrictions and police actions as the proper way to keep immigrants in line. Conversely, socialists support the rights of all workers regardless of their status. We support the creation of an unconditional amnesty program and seek to build solidarity amongst workers throughout the world. Where capitalism offers ICE raids and the Border police, we support human freedom and social solidarity

May Day- Our Day
May Day is our day. A day when trade unionists, anarchists and socialists gather to state clearly that another world is possible. This other world is a democratic participatory one, where resources are shared for the betterment of humanity. However, democratic socialism will not come about spontaneously – we must get organized. So, today we invoke the names of Eugene Debs, of Caesar Chavez, of Dr. Martin Luther King to call on all working people to join the struggle for socialism. Move rapidly, act boldly, we have a world to win!

Visit the SPUSA May Day 2010 Page

Massey Mine Tragedy: Capitalism vs. Labor

The death of 29 miners in the Massey Energy Company's Upper Big Branch mine last week was not an accident, it was the result of a deliberate attempt by a corporation to sacrifice mine safegy, and the lives of mine workers, to make a profit. It is the latest in a long history of capitalism sacrificing the safety and lives of workers for corporate profit.

Despite a supposedly tougher federal law that passed in 2006 after the Sago, W. Va. mine explosion killed a dozen miners, Massey and other companies have been able to use the law as a shield to avoid tougher enforcement measures by appealing safety citations — and overwhelming the weak Mine Safety and Health Administration with a backlog of appeals.
Even though Massey has faced proposed fines nearing $2 million since 2005 and been cited over 1,300 times, it’s paid only a fraction — one-sixth — of the proposed fines. All told, according to the United Mine Workers of America, nearly 50 people have been killed at Massey mines in the last 10 years. In March alone, it was cited over 50 times for violations, many directly related to ventilation violations that allowed the build-up of explosive methane gas that played a major role in the killing of the 29 miners.

Lesson from Mine Tragedy: Union Busting = Death

Massey CEO Don Blankenship Fought Regulators
As CEO, "he has fought with mine regulators, unions, residents of his town and even his personal maid.
His company regularly appeals fines for safety infractions. He has personally gone into mines to persuade workers to abandon union organizing efforts. Massey is fighting lawsuits that claim it contaminated groundwater in Blankenship’s town. A maid supplied by a company she claimed was a Massey unit was forced to fight all the way to West Virginia’s highest court to collect unemployment benefits."

Blankenship was also a Teabagger, speaking out at Tea Party protests against government regulations, global warming, etc. Like other corporate backers of the Tea Party movement, Blankenship sounded like a working class populist railing against "big" government and unions, but he was actually an enemy of labor and the American working class.

Here is the union-busting Massey CEO Don Blakenship speaking at a Tea Party celebration of "American Labor":



It is a perfect example of how corporations are using the TEA PARTY movement to protect their own profits and financial interests over the well-being of the American working class.

In These Times: Will Massey Corp. Ever Face Justice?

The Great Recession (Depression?)

The signs of what is ahead for the U.S. working class continue to spell big trouble. More people are out of work and unemployed for longer than any other recession since the Great Depression. Millions of jobs are permanently gone, creating a "new" working class poor population. The condition of American workers is the worse it has been since the Great Depression. That word keeps popping up--DEPRESSION.

NYT: The New Poor--Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

Fed Official Warns: Jobs will be Scarce--New Paradigm Shift

Socialists call this a class struggle!

The Economic Elite Vs. People of the USA

The Richest 1% Have Captured America's Wealth, What is it going to take to get it back?
The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis -- and it's gotten even worse.

Obama and the State of the Democrats