September 17, 2001
There is a fighting, working-class alternative to the big-business parties in the upcoming elections — the Socialist Workers Party candidates. These candidates have been getting an excellent response, particularly from working people and youth.
This is a period of heightened resistance by workers and farmers who are confronting the capitalist economic crisis and the assault on our wages, working conditions, social rights and human dignity. More and more are becoming open to consider new ideas about the root causes of these problems.
Through struggle, more working people are shattering our biggest obstacle: the tendency, fostered by exploiters, to underestimate our own capacities as a class. To build a movement that can confront the most ruthless ruling class in the world, we need to be part of a revolutionary party of workers.
September 17, 1976
The SWP has opened a political fight against the government’s use of undercover informers. The socialists are taking legal steps to compel the FBI to turn over the names and complete, uncensored files of nineteen present and past informers.
In a statement released with the FBI files received so far, Jack Barnes, SWP national secretary, declared: “The FBI’s informer program is an intolerable violation of the Bill of Rights and of the civil liberties of everyone in this country.”
The informers are the primary source of political and personal raw data that the FBI’s uses to devise schemes to foment dissension, get people fired, break up marriages and fuel personality conflicts. Government attorneys have stated that they will rely on the so-called doctrine of informer’s privilege in keeping secret the names of and facts about its informers.
September 17, 1951
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 7 — The government’s loyalty program was challenged as unconstitutional in a suit filed today by the legless veteran James Kutcher in the U.S. Court of Appeals here, appealing a court decision upholding Kutcher’s discharge from his clerk’s job in the Newark Veterans Administration. Kutcher, who lost both legs in battle in 1943, lost his job under Truman’s loyalty purge solely because of membership in the Socialist Workers Party.
Kutcher’s appeal contended that he was wrongfully discharged and deprived of his constitutional rights. The SWP was arbitrarily placed by the Attorney General on his political blacklist of “subversive organizations,” without notice or charges to the SWP, without any hearing or evidence, and denied repeated requests by the SWP for a public hearing to refute the charges.