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Another
Stolen Election?
Time
for Serious Resistance!
by
Carl Dix Black people have had to fight fiercely for
every gain. From slave revolts down thru people being
killed just for trying to register to vote, every step of the
way has been marked by struggle to force the authorities to
grant basic rights. Now today the right to vote is being
snatched back from many Black and Latino people.
Am I exaggerating? Not one bit.
Earlier this year, Florida's Secretary of State issued a list of
47,000 "felons" who would be ineligible to vote.
Most of them were Black. Florida was forced to make the
list public, and it was found to contain 1000's of errors,
including having 100's of people who were listed as being
convicted in the future. This is on top of the 94,000
people, again mostly Black, who were stricken from the voting
rolls by a similarly error filled list in 2000, most of whom
have not still not been put back on the voting lists!
Ohio is using an old state law about the kind
of paper voter registrations must be on to invalidate newly
registered Black voters. The Republican Party has lined up
thousands of "poll watchers," who are really political
thugs, to challenge Latinos and Blacks to present proof that
they are citizens or that they live in the precinct they're
voting in on election day. This is another rerun of 2000
when some "poll watchers" wore shirts that falsely
implied they were federal police to intimidate people from even
trying to vote. Additionally, corporations tied to the
Republicans have made electronic voting machines that leave no
way to check the accuracy of their count that will be used in
states across the country.
All this is on top of the way the criminal
injustice system works to criminalize Black and Latino people.
Youth of color are routinely jacked up by the cops, beaten down
and arrested for nothing more than being the wrong color or
having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is
part of the reason why half of the 2 million people in jail in
the US are Black.
Bush and company are out to disenfranchise
millions of Black and other minority voters. THIS POINTS
TO THE PROSPECT OF A STOLEN ELECTION IN 2004.
This is what the Republicans did in 2000, and
the Democrats let them get away with it. They didn't build
a fight to stop it and stood in the way of others who wanted to
fight it. Things must be different this time. There
must be massive resistance to any and all attempts by Bush and
company to steal the presidency again!
Much is at stake. Bush and company have
set the country on a dangerous course--a "War On
Terror" (WOT), which is really a power move aimed at
keeping the US the dominant imperialist power in the world.
It includes the illegitimate, immoral and illegal occupation of
Iraq, an intensifying repressive clamp down in the US and the
promise of more wars and more repression for generations to
come. The attempts to steal the election thru thuggery and
manipulating the vote count are an extension of the fascist
direction they have the country on. Many, many people are
agonizing over what can and must be done to stop all this.
As a revolutionary communist, I have to say
that voting Bush out isn't going to reverse this direction.
Kerry and the Democrats provide no answer to this. The
terms on which this election is being fought out don't include
should the US occupy Iraq or not, or should the repressive laws
and policies be reversed. Instead the terms for this
election come down to who would be the better commander in chief
for the WOT! People who want to vote against the
occupation, can't do that. People who want to vote against
the USA PATRIOT Act in this election can't do that either.
That's why I say the will of the people cannot and will not be
exercised in this election.
We can't rely on the Democrats to lead the
fight to stop Bush and his crew from stealing this election.
We have to take the initiative into our hands and rely on
ourselves to win this fight. The Republican Party will
have its 1000's of poll watching thugs at voting sites
nationwide. They must be met by 1000's of determined
people in the streets declaring that they will not sit by while
Bush steals another election. There must be massive
resistance to this and to the whole agenda Bush and company have
set in motion.
And we need to go beyond resistance.
It's going to take revolution, millions of people rising up to
overthrow this imperialist ruling class and going on to build a
whole new societies in place of this one to solve all the
problems this system forces countless millions in the US and
millions more worldwide to endure once and for all. There
is leadership that exists to lead the masses in doing just that.
Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party,
has analyzed the accomplishments and shortcomings of previous
revolutionary societies and developed a vision of how to make
revolution and how to involve the masses of people in building a
new society after seizing power.
A society that is no longer dominated by a
rich capitalist class, where whites no longer lord it over
people of color and men no longer dominate women. Avakian
is addressing all the questions that would confront us in
preparing for and making revolution here in the belly of the
beast, as we used to put it in the 1960'S. (Interested
readers can find writings by Avakian at www.bobavakian.net.)
The ballot box has never been where the
direction of the country has been decided. Nor has it been
where issues of major concern for the people have been decided.
But it is intolerable that Bush and company are trying to steal
this election. It is a reflection of how serious things
are in the US that they can't even allow the election to go down
without the group in power trying to rig the result. This
can't be allowed to happen. It must be met with determined
resistance.
--CARL DIX, National Spokesperson,
Revolutionary Communist Party
To can contact Carl, e-mail him at: comradecarl@hotmail.com
or call (866) 841-9139 x2670 |
