National Committee Meeting November 2000

This is a political crisis of serious proportions. Bush and his crowd are trying to achieve by anti-democratic - one could convincingly argue fascist - methods what they could not achieve by fair and democratic means. It is a thinly veiled attempt to undo the people's will and takeover over all three branches of our federal government. It is a clear and imminent danger to our constitutional and democratic rights. What is occurring in Florida should give pause to those who doubted the extreme right danger connected to a Bush presidency.

U.S. corporations invested one million to buy the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The Labor 2000 campaign, although outspent 15 to1, mounted a national campaign that fought the corporations to a stand-off, a draw.

As Communists, we are charged with building unity of the whole working class. In the aftermath of welfare reform and with continued corporate downsizing, poverty is deep in times of plenty. Wages are stagnant despite record economic expansion. This is a challenge to the labor and people's movements and to ourselves.

In Philadelphia, the vote was unprecedented. Gore's vote of more than 435,000 to a Bush vote of just over 98,000 is what helped to win the state of Pennsylvania as a whole. Philadelphia's very high voter turn out produced a 95% African American vote for Gore. While we do not have concrete figures, I suspect the Latino vote was similar.

Joining with Los Angeles and other Southern California areas, the greater Bay Area counties, where the population is concentrated in Northern California and the labor movement is strongest, helped give Gore a big win in the state. With the exception of one county with 50 percent, Gore took the greater Bay Area by margins of 60 to 76 percent depending on the county, helping offset more conservative areas of the state.

What's developing is tremendous. Palm Beach will never be the same again, and neither will the people's movements or the Communist Party. I want to appreciate the work of the comrades in Florida and in Palm Beach where I was earlier this week. Their small, rather quiet town filled with senior citizens was suddenly catapulted into the center of the struggle against the ultra-right, with the whole world watching. They are rising to the occasion, as they have throughout their lives. This is a passionate struggle to stop George W. Bush from stealing the presidential election. It is a fight that can be won, despite the courts and the right wing. People in Florida came to the polls in large numbers on the issues.