presidential candidate Peter Camejo talks to workers at unemployment offices and factory gates he immediately identifies himself as a socialist. Otherwise, people think he is another Democratic or Republican party politician and they often walk away in disgust.
over one million pieces of literature on the socialist program have been distributed.
The interest in the socialist campaign has been refleeted in coverage in the mass media. Peter Camejo and SWP vice-presidential candidate Willie Mae Reid have been interviewed by major daily newspapers and television stations throughout the country.
"Watergate"-the multiple violations of democratic rights by the government-is a central issue in American political life. The capitalists have been unable to bury the past and stop the flow of revelations about their methods of government. And it has been the suit launched by the SWP and YSA against government spying harassment that has been a prime source of the continuing disclosures. F.B.I.
The combined approach of suing the government while running in the elections has been particularly effective. On the one hand, the suit has won massive publicity for the election campaign. At the same time, the fact that the FBI is directing its attacks on constitutional rights against the campaign of a presidential candidate has made the suit more timely increased its impact.
When the U.S. Justice announced September that ordered an end to the FBI's thirty-eight year "investigation" of the SWP, the party was in a position to demand in the name of its presidential candidate the immediate removal of all FBI informers operating within the SWP, and the release of all files on them.
*This is an outrageous situation," Camejo told reporters. "Here we are less than two months from the presidential elections, and the government is operating a ring of informers and dirty-trick artists inside the campaign committees of one of the candidates. This must be stopped and stopped right now!"
The feeling of outrage expressed by Camejo is widespread in the United States today, and it has been deepened by the disclosures forced out of the FBI by the Trotskyists' law suit. In fact, the context of the 1976 presidential election has been set by two overriding factors-the continuing revelations about the U.S. governments violations of democratic rights, and the impact of the world economic crisis of 1974-75.
Together, these two factors have resulted in a third-a crisis of confidence in the institutions of American bourgeois democracy, and in particular a massive loss of confidence in the Democratic and Republican parties.
For more than a century the reins of power in the United States have been handed back and forth between capitalist parties. -There is not a single mass-circulation newspaper or magazine claiming to speak in the interests of the working class, let alone representing the workers or the oppressed nationalities in the United States. Times described, in the September 13 issue, the continuing decline in voter turnout as "a turning away from politics."
In fact, the behavior of American voters is a clear indication of the disgust and cynicism with which they view the Democratic and Republican parties. recent study put it, "The American people in increasing numbers have been giving a 'no vote' to their leaders and institutions."
Conducted by the Peter D. Hart Research Associates, that roughly 70 million qualified votersamount of nearly half the voting age population-will choose not to vote November 2. The most common reason for not voting-given by 68 percent of the nonvoters surveyed-was that "candidates say one thing and then do another."
As one study estimated can Led Press dispatch, women face the United States.)
An campaigns among on the Seattle City Council.
and insists representative of "the new campaign.
make abortions this spring.
budget-the Carter's election strategy is to AFT 3220 ARL C THA STRIKE REDUCE SWP Vice Presidential candidate, WILLIE MAE REID talks to striking car workers.
Stalinists Cross Wires on U.S. Election There was no report on how Gus Hall the presidential candidate of the Ameri Communist party, reacted, but according to a September 29 AssociatSoviet Communist party Chief Leonid Brezhnev has declared his neutrality in the American Nothing illustrates this better than the reaction in the Black community to the SWP presidential and local campaigns. Black newspapers with a total circulation of more than 1.3 million have published articles on the SWP campaign. (There are roughly eight million Black households in example of the impact of SWP schools Blacks was the 26 percent of the vote won by Pat Bethard last November in her campaign for a seat decade.
Bethard's campaign was centered in Seattle's Black community, and the SWP opened up a storefront headquarters and later established a branch there as a result of this Increasingly, the SWP is being seen as the party that is on the front lines fighting for the rights of Blacks wherever they are under attack. This led to the decision of Local Division 26 of the Amalgamated Transit Union to endorse the campaign of Steve Beumer for the Detroit school board Local 26 represents 1,400 Detroit bus operators, nearly 90 percent of whom are Black. The local voted unanimously April to support Beumer, a militant in the union, because he was the only candidate defending the desegregation of the Detroit COKOITIONS presidential race Perhaps Hall was still recovering from the declaration of French Communist party leader Georges Marchais. On August 16, Marchais told an interviewer, "If I were an American, I would vote for Carter."
school system and the busing plan needed to carry it out.
Supporters Camejo-Reid ticket were also among the leaders of a floor fight at the convention of the 450,000member American Federation of Teachers this August. The fight to put the union on record in support of busing to desegregate became the main issue at the convention. It was the first serious challenge to the union's racist leadership in a The changing situation within the tradeunion movement was also demonstrated by the success of SWP candidates in San Francisco in winning union endorsement last fall. Three SWP candidates for the city Board of Supervisors were endorsed by a chapter of Social Services Union Local 535. A vote for endorsement in Painters Local 4 ended in a tie vote.
Interest Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, the largest oppressed nationalities in States after Blacks, have also shown rising interest in the socialist campaign. The Camejo-Reid ticket has had particular impact in the Chicano movement.
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Since the SWP candidates began cam- paigning in the beginning of 1975, well
UAW ON STRIKE