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The Peace and Freedom Party has released our Workers’ Voter Guide for the 2018 General Election. This includes PFP endorsements for candidates and propositions to appear on the November ballot.

For a full-sized, printable PDF version, please download from here. 

Please feel free to print and distribute this information as you wish! The downloadable file is intended for printing on both sides of two 8.5” x 11” (standard letter-sized) pieces of paper.

To view PFP endorsements for ballot propositions online, click here; for candidates running in November, click here. 

Thank you for voting Socialist in Election 2018!

On October 20-21, thousands will gather in Washington D.C. to participate in the Women’s March on the Pentagon. At the request of the event’s organizers, we are pleased to state that the Peace and Freedom Party officially endorses the Women’s March on the Pentagon.

The PFP is proud to note that the Women’s March steering committee is chaired by our own State Central Committee member Cindy Sheehan; our 2016 presidential nominee and 2018 gubernatorial nominee Gloria La Riva is on the board of organizers as well.

The dates for the demonstration were chosen to commemorate the original Women’s March on the Pentagon, which in 1967 drew some 50,000 participants. In 2018, the event is designed explicitly to “Confront the Bipartisan War Machine” of America in peaceful resistance to “the continuing march of military aggression by the USA.” Event organizers also seek to revive the concept of an antiwar agenda for activists in this country going forward.

Join the Peace and Freedom Party’s Alameda County chapter for the monthly Suds, Snacks and Socialism forum at the Starry Plough Pub in Berkeley (3101 Shattuck Avenue; click here for map) on Saturday, November 3. All are welcome to discuss the topic Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

In 1850, in an essay on Chinese Socialism, Karl Marx wrote: “It may well be that Chinese socialism is related to European socialism just as Chinese philosophy is related to Hegelian philosophy. But it is an amusing fact that the oldest and most unshattered Empire on this earth has been pushed, in eight years, by the cotton ball of the English bourgeois toward the brink of a social upheaval that must have most profound consequences for civilisation.” 

For the forum, we are arranging a group of knowledgeable comrades to discuss the contemporary relevance of Marx’s words, including David Ewing of the US-China Peoples Friendship Association; Al Sargis, founder of the Friedrich Engels Institute of Marxist War and Military Analysis (FEIMWAMA); and Gerald Smith of the Oscar Grant Committee.

With the release of our Workers Voters Guide for the 2018 General Election in California, the Peace and Freedom Party also formally announces our endorsements for propositions appearing on the November ballot. PFP endorsements for candidates running in the November 2018 General Election may be seen here.

Eleven propositions will be listed on the November 2018 ballot in California. Prop 9 will not appear on the ballot due to its removal by court decision. The Peace and Freedom Party’s recommendations for voting on these eleven propositions, along with our rationale for recommending such, run below.

With the release of our Workers Voters Guide for the 2018 General Election in California, the Peace and Freedom Party also formally announces our endorsements for propositions running in the November election. For PFP endorsements on ballot propositions, please click here.

In the June primary election, Peace and Freedom Party candidates received well over the needed number of votes to keep the party on California primary election ballots for another four years. But under the terribly undemocratic “Top Two” election law, none of our candidates, or the candidates of any other smaller parties, will be on the November ballot for statewide office. Our “choices” are limited to the big-money candidates who came in first or second, and not even write-ins are allowed.

We are not making any endorsements for statewide offices in November, but we do have recommendations in three congressional districts and in one state senate district. With only one big-money candidate on the ballot in several districts, these candidates were able to win a spot on the November ballot by coming in second in the primary. We recommend that you vote for the following candidates if you live in their districts.

The buzz is that “we” have to “take back” the House and Senate in the November midterm elections. Legendary bluesman Muddy Waters said it best: “you can’t lose what you ain’t never had.” What the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is really telling us to do is to give them Congress, which is a whole other story.

“We” Never Had Congress
Trump has an abysmal 38% approval rating. The Democratic Party in the same independent national poll is even deeper in the abyss with only a 31% approval rating … for at least a dozen reasons:

1.The Democratic Party is consistently far to the right of its constituents. While nearly 75% of Democrats support single-payer health care, President Obama and the Democratic Congressional members didn’t even allow single-payer to get before Congress. Single-payer was rendered “off the table.”

“Stop Prison Slavery” was just one of the demands of a group of Sacramento activists, including many Peace & Freedom Party members, at a recent rally and press conference held outside the federal building in downtown Sacramento. One of the main demands was to stop the use of incarcerated people as cheap labor.

John Reiger (pictured in top image below), State Chair of the Peace & Freedom Party, reminded the public and the press of the PPF’s longstanding support for prison reform measures. He not only talked about the need for comprehensive prison reforms, but also an end to solitary confinement, an end to the death penalty, no more life-without-parole sentences, and the need to shift resources from prisons to programs to help people who might be in danger of ending up in prison.

Other prison strike supporters from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), labor, prison reform groups, and ex-prisoners stressed the need to change the racist, expensive, exploitative American criminal justice system.

 

The Peace and Freedom Party has taken positions for or against a number of bills in the 2017-2018 session of the California legislature. This article lists our current positions with links to relevant documents.

Spread the word about the Peace and Freedom Party. Encourage your friends to register Peace and Freedom, join the supporting membership program, and get involved.

Here are some introductory handouts you can download and print for distribution. For a more extensive archive of our literature, click here.

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