National Committee Meeting Oct 20, 2001

Opening remarks to the National Committee.

"...in that horrific instant [Sept 11th] and the weeks that have followed, domestic and world politics took an altogether new, frightening, dangerous, and unanticipated turn."

"...Rather than bringing us closer to a solution to the problem, the administration's response to the terrorist attack is sharpening every struggle to the extreme, endangering every democratic gain won over the past seven decades and, most ominously, plunging the nation into wider and possibly unending war."

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The horror and shock of planes crashing into the World Trade Center did not slow down the push by the Bush administration and the extreme right-wing to achieve their anti-worker, anti-people agenda.

The fight to free the Charleston 5 already had special significance prior to the tragedy of September 11th and the now urgent war or peace emergency. But the new situation and the surrounding challenges of deepening economic crisis, threats to civil liberties, the racist and chauvinist hate attacks against Arab Americans and immigrants, the heightened racial profiling, the attacks on democracy, place even more importance to this battle for justice set in the Deep South.

Our aim is for our Party to be as big a factor in the struggle for peace, and against the ultra right and the economic crisis, as we can be. To weigh in. To bring our clear politics into the struggle.