WHAT WE STAND FOR

Their Profits, Our Lives: A Socialist Program for Disaster Relief

• The U.S. averages one chemical accident every two days. Extreme weather displaced 3.4 million Americans in 2022, people across the country are seeing their communities turned into disaster zones from corporations’ ecological warfare.

• Make the polluters pay for the million-dollar cleanups – not working people! There needs to be strict accountability and oversight to protect the interests of communities and the environment.

• In the wake of disasters, corporations should immediately be responsible for relocation costs, health costs, and home remediation. When many residents need to relocate, the businesses responsible for the disasters should offer to buy people’s land at a rate well above pre-disaster market value.

• Take trucking and rail into democratic public ownership, end the regime of corporate greed, deregulation, cut corners, and understaffing that cause these preventable catastrophes!

Fight Inflation & Rebuild A Fighting Labor Movement

• Inflation and the rising cost of living is eating into our paychecks, and capitalist politicians have no solutions – we need a class struggle to turn the tide on this race to the bottom!

• As thousands of workers are winning union recognition for the first time, it is critical that unions fight to win strong contracts. We need unions that are armed with clear demands like contractual cost of living adjustments (COLA), and they have to be prepared to go on strike to win them.

• Union leaders across all unions should accept the average wage of a worker in their industry and should be accountable to their membership and the broader working class.

• An injury to one is an injury to all! Unions need to fight all manifestations of racism, sexism, queerphobia, and all forms of oppression.

Why I Joined Socialist Alternative

SHAYNA ANN HOWLETT, BAY AREA

I grew up in a “Vote Blue No Matter Who” household. Growing up in a conservative district, my family was deemed too far left for wearing Obama campaign t-shirts in public. I understood us to be as far left as it got.

• Building off the historic union victory at Amazon in New York and the ongoing Starbucks organizing drive, unions should stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars on electing Democratic Party politicians, and spend it instead on efforts to organize the unorganized.

• Unions should form consumer protection committees to monitor price increases. They should have the power to review corporate finances, especially when money is squandered on CEO pay and stock buybacks. Profits off basic goods should be heavily taxed and price-gouging companies should be brought under democratic public ownership.

Invest In Our Basic Needs

• Pass strong rent control. End economic evictions. Tax the rich and big business to fund permanently affordable, high-quality social housing.

• No pay cuts! We need a significant raise in the minimum wage and to tie raises to inflation.

• Capitalism failed to stop COVID-19, with the “post-pandemic” new normal consisting of total indifference to public health. We urgently need permanently free and accessible testing, paid sick leave, and to take Big Pharma into public ownership – vaccines should be for public health, not profit!

• Make the child tax credit permanent and fully fund high-quality, universal childcare. No cuts to food stamps!

• An immediate transition to Medicare for All. Take for-profit hospital chains and Big Pharma into public ownership and retool them to provide free, state-of-the-art healthcare to all.

• Fully fund public education! End school privatization. Give educators an immediate 25% raise and increase staffing. Cancel all student debt and make public college tuition-free.

End Racist Policing And Criminal (in)Justice

• The death of Tyre Nichols in January showed that there is still a fight to be waged against police violence, especially with Democratic city governments increasing police funding and promoting “law and order” policing. We need a new movement in the streets and mass organizations of struggle to fight for Black liberation!

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• Arrest and convict killer cops! Purge police forces of anyone with known ties to white supremacist groups or any cop who has committed violent or racist attacks.

• End the militarization of police. Ban the use of “crowd control” weapons. Disarm police on patrol.

• Put policing under the control of democratically-elected civilian boards with power over hiring and firing, reviewing budget priorities, and the power to subpoena.

In high school, I started learning about how colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are sewn into the fabric of our institutions. I also learned that these pillars of subjugation uphold capitalism. From there, I began to question the validity of a system hinged on dehumanizing people.

I supported Bernie in the 2016 election, but I was still too young to vote. When the nation elected Donald Trump, I blamed third party voters. I still believed democratic socialists in the Democratic Party could regulate capitalism and promote well-being. It wasn’t until I watched Joe Biden take the Democratic Party nomination that I understood the Democrats could not provide the progressive solutions I was seeking.

No To Imperialist Wars

• Socialist Alternative completely opposes Russian imperialism’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Ordinary Ukrainians who already suffer exploitation, oppression, corruption, and growing poverty conditions now face the horror of war and bloodshed.

• We oppose the aggressive imperialist agenda of NATO and the U.S. for whom Ukrainians are a pawn in the wider Cold War conflict with Chinese imperialism.

• De-escalating the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine requires the return of Russian troops to the barracks in Russia and the withdrawal of all NATO troops from Eastern Europe.

• Build a massive anti-war and anti-imperialist movement linking up workers and youth across borders! Sending increasingly destructive weapons to the conflict only serves to escalate & poses a greater risk of all-out war – only socialist internationalism can end war and destruction and win lasting peace and stability for the working masses around the world.

Mobilize Against Gender Oppression & Attacks On Bodily Autonomy

• The overturn of Roe v. Wade opened the door for vicious attacks on bodily autonomy across the country. We need a mass movement against the reactionary right on the scale of the 60s and 70s when Roe was first won.

• Free, safe, legal abortion. All contraception should be provided at no cost as part of a broad program for reproductive health!

• Fight back against the brutal anti-trans legislation in many states and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. Noncompliance with these bigoted laws should be organized by the labor movement among workers tasked with enforcing them.

• Fighting gender oppression means fighting for our rights to bodily autonomy,

I knew I needed to join the struggle for a better system. Since joining SA, I’ve joined in public meetings and protests in support of abortion rights, connected with community members in support of Amazon unionization efforts, and studied labor struggles in the United States and abroad. I’m eager to deepen my roots as a member of this international organization and build revolutionary politics. J reproductive justice including universal childcare, and Medicare for All including free reproductive and gender-affirming care.

For A Socialist Green New Deal

• We need a union jobs program to rapidly expand green infrastructure.

• Expand public transit and make it free.

• While taking climate change head-on, we also need to expand infrastructure to keep people safe from natural disasters and extreme weather as these become more frequent.

• Fossil fuels can’t coexist with a sustainable future – take the top 100 polluting companies into democratic public ownership while implementing a democratically planned, just transition to 100% green energy.!

A New Political Party For Working People

• The capitalist Democratic Party offers no solution to right-wing attacks against workers and marginalized people and has repeatedly failed to use their majorities to protect our rights.

• We need a new, working-class, multiracial left party that organizes and fights for workers’ interests and is committed to socialist policies to lead the fight against the right and point a way out of the horrors of capitalism.

The Whole System Is Guilty

• Capitalism produces pandemics, poverty, racism, transphobia, environmental destruction, and war. We need an international struggle against this failed system.

• Bring the top 500 companies and banks into democratic public ownership.

• We need a socialist world. This means a democratic socialist plan for the economy based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people and the planet.

BROWN, MADISON

On February 4, the United States Air Force shot down a Chinese-operated highaltitude balloon off the coast of South Carolina. This sparked off a major diplomatic incident between the U.S. and China. Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly canceled what would have been his first visit to Beijing since 2018. At a subsequent international security conference in Munich, Blinken had a tense confrontation with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Six businesses linked to the balloon were added to the U.S. Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security’s Entity List, a U.S. exports blacklist. Soon, a paranoid balloon panic broke out, with three more balloons being downed that turned out to have no relationship with China.

The Republicans got in on it as well. In spite of the balloon incident inflaming the U.S.-China New Cold War, Republicans attacked the Biden administration for not inflaming things enough. Thus we were treated to frothing-at-the-mouth warmongering, such as Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) tweeting “How can the Chinese Communist Party believe we’ll protect Taiwan if the Biden Admin doesn’t even have the stomach to deal with a balloon?”

As for the Chinese response, they initially tried to pass off the balloon as a civilian weather balloon. Mao Ning, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced the shooting down of the balloon as “an unacceptable and irresponsible action.” Later, China’s Defense Ministry said they “reserved the right to use necessary means to deal with similar situations.”

When the balloon incident broke out, the U.S. and China had been trying to calm down the New Cold War. This was the purpose of Blinken’s intended visit to Beijing. What is really telling about this incident is not that the Chinese were spying, but that it was enough to derail the attempt to reset the relationship a bit after so much escalation.

A Hypocritical Response

The fact that China is spying on the U.S. is hardly news. Of course China is spying on the U.S., and of course the U.S. is spying on China. Currently the Chinese government is claiming that the U.S. had spy balloons over Xinjiang. This is certainly believable and, even if it doesn’t turn out to be true, the U.S. has definitely used spy balloons against China and the Soviet Union in the past as