https://themilitant.com/2018/12/01/big-response-to-win-in-fight-for-ex-prisoners-right-to-vote/
Big response to win in fight for ex-prisoners’ right to vote
By Maggie Trowe
Vol. 82/No. 46
December 10, 2018
SWP member Seth Galinsky shows Ligia Rivera the Militant at the day care
center she runs out of her home in the Bronx, Nov. 11. Many Uber drivers
leave their children with her during the crazy hours that they work, she
said. She bought a Militant subscription, as well as Malcolm X, Black
Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record.
Militant
SWP member Seth Galinsky shows Ligia Rivera the Militant at the day care
center she runs out of her home in the Bronx, Nov. 11. Many Uber drivers
leave their children with her during the crazy hours that they work, she
said. She bought a Militant subscription, as well as Malcolm X, Black
Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record.
As the Socialist Workers Party’s eight-week drive to win 1,400 readers
of the Militant, sell 1,400 copies of books by party leaders and raise
$100,000 for the SWP Party-Building Fund enters its final week, branches
of the SWP across the U.S. are on a stepped-up footing to reach the goals.
The SWP’s sister parties, Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New
Zealand and the U.K., are part of the effort.
“We’re organizing door-to-door teams every day between now and Dec. 4
both here and in the region,” Alex Huinil, party branch organizer in
Albany, New York, said Nov. 27. “We get a great response to the
Militant’s coverage of the Florida victory extending the right to vote
to tens of thousands of ex-prisoners.”
“We’re building on gains made in our recently concluded SWP election
campaign here. When we campaign confidently and boldly, it attracts
workers to the party.
“We’re making an effort to introduce our books along with the Militant
early in the discussions. We sold 13 books in the past week at workers’
doors and on the job.”
The final-week plan of SWP members in Los Angeles includes going door to
door in communities near the Mexican border to discuss why the labor
movement needs to fight for amnesty for the millions of undocumented
workers living in the U.S. They are also traveling to Ventura County to
talk to working people affected by a raging forest fire there.
“The only way workers can defend ourselves effectively is when we face
the bosses and their government united and organized,” Gerardo Sánchez,
a member of the SWP in Dallas, told Cristina Retana, when he knocked on
her door in Fort Worth, Texas. He showed her pictures of workers
responding to factory raids by the rulers’ immigration cops in Is
Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.
“It’s true. They keep us divided to attack us,” Retana said. The SWP
fights for the labor movement to demand amnesty for all those in the
U.S. without papers, Sánchez explained.
After reading the back covers of the books that Sánchez showed her, she
got Waters’ book, as well as The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record and
Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? by SWP National Secretary Jack
Barnes, along with a subscription to the Militant.
“In northern New Jersey we’re behind on our quotas, but we have a
detailed day-by-day plan to complete the drive,” SWP organizer Dave
Prince told the Militant Nov. 27. The drive overall is behind schedule.
As we go to press, 1,061 subscriptions and 713 campaign books have been
sold, and $68,312 has been received for the fund.
Knocking on doors in a trailer park in Marietta, Georgia, Nov. 25, Susan
LaMont, SWP organizer in Atlanta, and Sam Manuel met Shanae Swan and her
husband Roy, who works for an apartment maintenance company. Shanae used
to work in the Walmart deli in Dalton, where she grew up.
“I had to quit after two months, because they were asking me to work 60
hours a week,” she said. When LaMont and Manuel showed her the Militant
article on the Florida victory for ex-felons, Shanae and Roy both said
this was good for all workers.
Looking over the Militant, including the article on the hotel workers’
strikes in San Francisco and Hawaii, Shanae decided to subscribe. “I’d
like to try the Militant because it’s interesting to learn about
different outlooks and what other people, like the hotel workers, are
doing,” she said.
Rachele Fruit, who ran as the 2018 SWP candidate for governor of
Georgia, reports she sold five campaign books along with four
subscriptions on a door-to-door team in Douglasville.
One of the books was “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US
‘Justice’ System”: The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US
Working Class. This book — which has interviews with five Cuban
revolutionaries who served up to 16 years in U.S. prisons on frame-up
charges for their activity in defense of the Cuban Revolution — helps
describe both the conditions faced by workers behind bars and the
example of the Cuban Revolution for workers in the U.S.
‘Finally, we won something real’
Steve Warshell, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate in
Florida in the last election, talked with airport worker Ed Laporte, 40,
and his sister at their doorstep in Miami Gardens, Florida, Nov. 18.
Laporte’s brother is serving a 10-year prison sentence for burglary. He
said the passage of Amendment 4 was “about time. Finally people have won
something real.”
“We need to build on this victory and fight for the right to a trial by
a jury of one’s peers,” Warshell said. “It’s reached the point where the
police don’t have to prove anything,” Laporte said, agreeing. “They just
threaten and people feel they have to accept a prison sentence.”
“My brother never had a trial,” Laporte said. “He didn’t really know
what he was accused of doing until after he’d been in the Broward County
jail for weeks and his lawyer told him the proposed ‘deal’ from the
prosecutor. He was afraid they would carry out their threat to accuse
him of murder if he didn’t agree.”
“My supporters and I are involved in the ongoing fight for the right of
workers behind bars to read my party’s paper, the Militant, in Florida
prisons,” Warshell said. Laporte and his sister decided to subscribe.
Dan Fein met Christine Kelley when he knocked on her door campaigning in
Blue Island, Illinois, Nov. 25. He told her about how workers on strike
against Marriott Hotel bosses in several cities have the slogan, “One
job should be enough!”
“I work three jobs!” Kelley told him. “Full time at a child care center,
part time in a restaurant, and I sing in a band. We certainly need
unions where I work. I like what you stand for, like amnesty for the
undocumented workers,” she said. Fein showed her Are They Rich Because
They’re Smart? which Kelley decided to buy along with a subscription.
“Hold on!” Deborah Collins, a retired medical assistant, told SWP
members after they’d talked about working-class politics and the party
at her doorstep in an apartment building in New York Nov. 23. She went
inside to get money to make a contribution to the SWP Party-Building
Fund. She said she was particularly interested in the Militant’s
coverage of a recent victory by Walmart cashiers in their fight for the
right to sit while at work.
“The people who write these rules sitting at their desk, wouldn’t
survive standing all day, every day,” she said, handing over her
donation. “I know, I worked on my feet my entire life.”
Subscriptions and information on book sales received by Dec. 4 will
count toward the drive, as will fund contributions received by Dec. 11.
If you’d like to join SWP members as they broaden their reach, either in
the final week of the drive or as they keep knocking on doors afterward,
contact the nearest party branch listed in the directory.
Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive (Week 7)
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Join workers in struggle, break with bosses’ parties
•Workers seek road forward out of crisis of capitalism
•SF, Hawaii hotel strikers: ‘One job should be enough!’
•Big response to win in fight for ex-prisoners’ right to vote
•California Camp Fire catastrophe caused by dog-eat-dog capitalism
•‘UK out now!’ Brexit is best terrain for the workers to fight
Feature Articles •Join May Day brigade, learn about Cuban Revolution
Also In This Issue •U.S. rulers push back against Beijing’s expanding
challenge
•‘Yellow vests’ in France protest against ‘president of the rich’
•Protests hit widespread gov’t corruption, misrule in Haiti
•Fall Campaign to sell Militant subscriptions and books (Week 7)
•Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive (Week 7)
On the Picket Line •Bus drivers in New Zealand beat back lockout, pay
raise agreed to
•Lorain, Ohio, nurses fight bosses attack on health benefits
Books of the Month •‘Socialism is next inevitable stage of social evolution’
25, 50 and 75 years ago
Letters
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J.K. Rowling
“ I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing
in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist! ”
― J.K. Rowling