California's socialist and feminist political party urges you to:

For Election Day in California, here's one last reminder on Peace & Freedom Party's stands on national and local candidates plus ballot propositions.

Click here to download a printable PDF document.

Thank you for voting progressive and voting socialist in Election 2020!

“Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for.”­ – Leslie Feinberg

 Cassie Devereaux supports:

  • Police oversight – an end to Vallejo’s reign of police terror.
  • Comprehensive rent control keeping people in their homes and communities.
  • Access to medical care/mental health services for low-income residents and people now houseless.
  • Universal housing – end houselessness altogether.
  • Student loan forgiveness and postsecondary education access for all.
  • No cages, no deportations, no compliance with ICE: NOT HERE. NOT ANYWHERE.

Look around. Ours is a society with more empty homes than houseless. We produce enough food to feed the world, but people starve while we destroy 40% of our bounty. Profits for pharmaceutical companies are prioritized before healthcare and lifesaving medicine for all. We sacrifice human lives to easily prevented diseases in order to enrich CEOs. Theirs is the class that has wielded the mechanisms of power to ravage our hemi­sphere for over a century through war, sanctions, propping up dictators – all for Wall Street.

When those suffering from this violent legacy come for sanctuary, we round them up, separate their families, and cage them. As we argue whether to use the term “con­centration camps”, prisoners are dying. We gut education funding and spend the mon­ey building prisons and militarizing police rather than addressing the poverty from which crime springs. The parasites at the top cultivate ignorance, fueling dangerous conspira­cy theories while ignoring science. Giant corporations, which plunder our planet, are steer­ing the world into climate catastrophe. And while rainforests burn, corporations conduct internal studies analyzing ways to cash in on the devastation looming on the horizon.

José Cortés is running for the 50th Congressional District in 2020. He was raised in the district and has been a political organizer since 2016 when the rising violence of the Trump campaign and an unjust police shooting in his hometown compelled him to take to the streets and organize.

He has since participated in campaigns all over San Diego fighting for rent control, the closure of the for-profit concentration camps, and an end to the criminalization of the homeless and poor.

José is a proud Chicano socialist committed to ending the destructive US wars abroad and shuttering the military bases in occupied countries. He has helped organize for national liberation in Barrio Logan alongside Chicano Park defenders, stood in solidarity with the struggle for socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and supports the right of self-determination for the people of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and all former and current US colonies.

With Bernie Sanders in the running for the Democratic Party nomination for U.S. president, many leftists and socialists – particularly those in the so-called “battleground” or “purple” states – are stumped. For the socialist, choosing in Election 2020 may not be easy when presented with a choice of Sanders (hampered though he may be by Party baggage), the state’s ballot-qualified candidate and perhaps even an ecosocialist Green Party candidate.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a nationwide socialist organization with presence in 28 states and the District of Columbia. PSL is particularly strong in California, and their members comprise and important part of the Peace and Freedom Party. Earlier this month, PSL/PFP member Richard Becker released the following statement, run in its entirety, on behalf of the party regarding the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The Democratic Party establishment and the major capitalist-owned media have been waging a low-intensity war against the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign for the past year and it is not working too well. Now these attacks are escalating. If Sanders continues to succeed, the floodgate of scurrilous and demonizing assaults will open, just as happened to Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.

For the past 12 months, almost all of the ruling class centers of power have been arguing that Sanders is a socialist and thus “too left”; that his medical reforms “are too expensive” and will break the bank; that he “can’t beat Trump”; or, in the aftermath of his heart attack, that he is not “healthy enough,” which goes along well with the mantra that he is “too old.”  At the last debate, CNN and Elizabeth Warren conspired to set up Sanders as “sexist,” yet another argument to add to the list. These attacks on Sanders have not worked.

What’s the real reason the ruling class is so alarmed? 
What has become crystal clear is that the Democratic Party establishment and its echo chambers in the “free press” clearly would favor four more years of Donald Trump over Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist, in the White House. One must take a moment and ask, “Why is this?” By European standards Bernie Sanders would be an acceptable center-left politician. He would not be perceived as a danger to the existing social order. What is the U.S. ruling class so afraid of? Why is the Democratic establishment trying to destroy the Sanders campaign?

Leonard Peltier’s story is virtually a textbook illustration of everything that is wrong with the criminal justice and incarceration systems in the United States. Leonard is a political prisoner currently serving his 44th year in prison for a murder he did not commit.

As Peace & Freedom Party believes in overhauling the current criminal system and elimination of current practices of mass incarceration, Leonard has previously agreed to run for political office under the PFP banner, and he is seeking the PFP nomination for US vice-president in Election 2020.

Leonard Peltier, a 74-year-old indigenous man, part Anishinabe, part Lakota and Dakota, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa (English misnomer for the Anishinabe) Nation, has served 43 years in prison for the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 which he did not commit. He is a political prisoner who was convicted as part of the FBI’s Cointelpro action to destroy the American Indian Movement (AIM).

•••••

After the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, a corrupt tribal chairman named Dick Wilson created a period of political violence on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Wilson was trying to get the US government into mining uranium in the Badlands for its nuclear programs. As more traditional members of the Lakota nation were firmly against this destruction of the environment, Wilson hired groups of vigilantes called Guardians Of the Oglala Nation (or GOONs), who in turn initiated what became known as the Reign of Terror on the reservation.

Demonstrations in more than 200 cities in the US and Canada took place on Saturday as part of a global “No War On Iran” mobilization. Folks came out in support of the anti-war cause throughout California, and naturally Peace and Freedom Party members were there.

The January 25th No War On Iran rally and march in San Francisco was organized by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), and was endorsed by some 30 organizations including PFP and the People’s Alliance.

Among those at the well-attended rally in San Francisco was Peace and Freedom Party candidate for California state assembly in district 14, Cassandra Devereaux (pictured in first two images below), as well as PFP central committee members Richard Becker, Dave Campbell, Marsha Feinland, Tova Fry and Tom Lacey.

Peace and Freedom Party members recently traveled to McFarland, a small farming town south of Fresno, to express solidarity with Maribel Ramirez, an immigrant farmworker from Mexico who led her community to reject a City Hall proposal to convert two town jails into ICE detention centers. These detention centers would be right in the center of this town of 15,000, almost next to the high school and junior high. Half of the population is undocumented. Those ICE jails would have imprisoned up to 4,000 immigrants simply for not having papers. The story was first reported in The New York Times.

Jesús and Eusebio Goméz, sons of Maribel Ramirez

The meeting was February 17 at McFarland City Council chambers, and 200 people filled the hall. Ramirez, her two sons and other community members went door to door asking people to sign a card opposing the ICE jails. More than 1,000 people signed. She said many more would have signed but for fear of deportation.

Gloria La Riva interviewed Ramirez, who despite the great risk to her personal situation for being undocumented, courageously took a stand for her community.

Gloria La Riva is a longtime member of the Peace and Freedom Party as well as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and has run for U.S. President and California Governor several times with the endorsement of both organizations. She is currently seeking the PFP nomination to run as our party’s candidate for U.S. president in Election 2020.

A recent statement from the PSL which announced a position of critical support for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign drew the ire of fellow PFP primary presidential candidate Howie Hawkins, who released a response to the PSL statement entitled “You didn’t join the Peace and Freedom Party to support Democrats.”  Gloria La Riva in turn has released a counter-response to that of Mr. Hawkins, and we run Gloria’s statement in full below.

Dear sisters and brothers of Peace and Freedom Party,

I ask for your support and vote in the March 3 Peace and Freedom Party primary. I also urge you to register and vote PFP, as the only socialist party on the California ballot, and which has had a solid program of defending peace, true equality, social justice and socialism since 1968.

I have won the Peace and Freedom nomination for governor of California three times, and was the PFP candidate for President in 2016. I received the most votes for a socialist presidential candidate since 1976.

My vice-presidential candidate is the renowned Native leader and political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, unjustly imprisoned for 44 years. In accepting the invitation to run with me, he said, “I am not only a Native traditionalist, I am a socialist.”

I have been a PFP member since I moved to California in 1981, and always encourage others to register and join. I am decidedly opposed to the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party, who work hand-in-hand to wage war at home and abroad. Both are imperialist parties that have initiated wars of aggression, genocide and occupation. Both are also responsible for economic policies meant to enrich the super-wealthy at the expense of the working class. The disastrous policies of social service cutbacks, mass incarceration and support for the police can be laid at the feet of Democrats as well as Republicans.

Howie Hawkins of New York, a socialist organizer and union worker for nearly 50 years, is seeking the U.S. presidential nomination of several socialist, leftist and eco-conscious parties – including Peace and Freedom Party as well as the national Green Party. 

Earlier this week, Howie Hawkins posted a response to a statement from Richard Becker, a member of both PFP and PSL. Becker’s statement, released through the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s official website, suggested that socialist-minded voters who are only able to participate in the Democratic Party primary cast their votes for Bernie Sanders in that primary and, should he get the Democratic nomination, that voters in swing states should support Sanders. We run Howie's statement in full below.

In 1964, as a teenager in the San Francisco Bay Area, I watched Ronald Reagan and the Republicans lead a successful referendum to repeal the recently-adopted Rumford Fair Housing Act. I saw the Democratic convention seat the Mississippi segregationists instead of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The “lesser evil” Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, won and immediately escalated the war in Vietnam.

With racists and militarists in charge of both major parties, I asked, “Where is my party?” My party emerged in 1968: the Peace and Freedom Party. Even though I was still too young to vote for it, I rooted for it. I concluded then what I still believe today: that we need a major independent working-class party committed to a democratic, socialist, and ecological society.

I am running in the Peace and Freedom Party presidential primary with that same commitment today. I intend to be on the ballot in all 50 states and D.C., mostly on Green Party lines because they already have over 20 ballot lines, but I am also seeking the ballot lines of other progressive parties where presidential ballot-line fusion is possible in states like California, Oregon, South Carolina and Vermont.

An important objective of our campaign is to build solidarity across the independent progressive and socialist left for a mass party based in the working-class majority and for all people who love peace, justice, freedom and the environment.

Unlike my opponent in the Peace and Freedom primary, whose Party for Socialism and Liberation supports a “safe strategy” of supporting Bernie Sanders in the “battleground” states, I believe every state is a battleground for the independent left where we must fight for ballot access and the right to raise our demands in elections. In every state, we are fighting the Democrats as well as the Republicans who are on the opposite side from us on so many issues, from Medicare for All to a ban on fracking to rent control to dismantling the US global military empire.

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