• Campaign Literature « 2024 General Election « Claudia de la Cruz for President
  

Campaign Literature—2024 General Election

Tabloid - 11" x 17". [California]   ...see also revised edition from after Harris replaced Biden

VOTE SOCIALIST
CLAUDIA DE LA CRUZ FOR PRESIDENT, KARINA GARCIA FOR VICE-PRESIDENT

Why We're Running
THE CHOICES WE GET under this system aren't good enough. In fact, when it comes to the most important decisions, the choices in front of us are enough to make us sick. In November, the political and media elite want you to believe that you have no option other than to pick between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is running Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia for President and Vice-President because workers deserve the chance to vote for someone who represents our interests, not the billionaire class.

Biden and Trump have been loyal to the ultra-rich their entire lives. Biden has backed job destroying trade agree­ments, helped supercharge mass incar­ceration, made it impossible to default on student loan debt, and abandoned every promise he made to working peo­ple on the 2020 campaign trail. Trump is a billionaire himself, grew up fabulously rich, and in office gave the rich arid their corporations a $2 trillion tax break while slashing health and safety regulations meant to protect workers. Both fed the war machine with an ever-greater amount of taxpayer dollars, and neither are serious about saving the environ­ment from climate change.

Outside of politics, the choices don't get any better. Under capitalism, we're free to live anywhere we choose – as long as we can afford rent. We can choose our own doctor, but only if they accept our insurance.

Every aspect of our life is marked by the fact that we live in a dictatorship of the rich. What we can do in life is deter­mined by how much they decide to pay us, and the world around us is shaped by policies imposed by their bought-­and-paid-for politicians.

The need for another option has been made even more urgent by the genocide in Gaza. The Democratic Party wants us to think that Biden is the lesser of two evils, but he has blood on his hands. The murder of tens of thousands of Pales­tinians, almost half of whom were chil­dren, was made possible by U.S. military aid and diplomatic support for Israel. Despite a historic outpouring of sup­port for Palestine by hundreds of thou­sands of people across the country, Biden chose to allocate an additional $14 billion for the lsraeli armed forces after the massacre was already underway. A war criminal guilty of genocide does not deserve our votes.

Unless we end the dictatorship of the rich, none of these problems can be per­manently solved. We can win a ceasefire in one country, but then another imperi­alist war begins somewhere else in the world. We can win important conces­sions to combat social injustice, but then the Supreme Court takes them away. We have to fundamentally change who has the power – over the economy and over the government – so that workers are the ones making the decisions.

This vision for the future is socialism. Once the workers are in charge, we can guarantee that everyone has a decent home, a good job and quality healthcare. We can combat every form of inequal­ity, save the environment, and end war for empire.
Our campaign is part of this broader fight, which will need to continue far beyond the election in November. But there are so many more of us than there are of them – if enough of us join the fight, we can end the dictatorship or the rich and replace it with socialism.

VOTE FOR CLAUDIA DE LA CRUZ & KARINA GARCIA TO PUT THE RICH AND POWERFUL ON NOTICE: THE DAYS OF THEIR SYSTEM ARE NUMBERED.

@CLAUDIA_KARINA2024  @VOTESOCIALIST24. VOTESOCIALIST2024.COM
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Meet the Candidates
 
Claudia de la Cruz
 
CLAUDIA DE LA CRUZ is a mother, popu­lar educator, community organizer and theologian. Born in the South Bronx to immigrant parents from the Domin­ican Republic, she was nourished by the Black and Caribbean working class communities of the Bronx and Washing­ton Heights in the 1980s and 90s. At an early age, she was already questioning the conditions of poverty, violence, and oppression in her neighborhood, and what she saw and experienced served as her first entry point to understanding working class consciousness.

When she was 13, Claudia began her political organizing work at her home church—lglesia Episcopal Santa Maria (later the Iglesia San Romero de Las Américas-UCC), grounding her work on principles of liberation theology. She actively participated in campaigns to free political prisoners; to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, Puerto Rico; to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba; for the freedom of Palestine; against police ter­ror-to name a few. In high school, she became a peer educator, conducting workshops on reproductive health and safe sex at community hubs and progressive churches, particularly for youth in the Bronx. It was through this work and her experiences as a working class Black Caribbean young woman that she understood there was only one solution to our collective problems: to fight for a better future, a socialist future.

Through her time completing her stud­ies at the City University of New York (CUNY), she coordinated Palenque, a project that brought together teenagers from across the city to study histories of struggles and resistance through popu­lar education, arts, and culture. In 2003, she participated in mobilizing youth from this program, along with church and community members to participate in rallies against the war in Iraq, includ­ing the historic mass marches in Wash­ington, D.C.

A year later, while working at a commu­nity based organization in Washington Heights, Claudia, along with a group of four teenage women co-founded and directed Da Urban Butterflies (DUB). DUB was a youth leadership devel­opment project and center for young women from the Washington Heights community and the Bronx to build sis­terhood, learn histories of struggle and resistance, and engage in collective action for justice.

Claudia completed seminary in 2007, and became the pastor of her home­ church, Iglesia San Romero de Las Américas-UCC. In her commitment to sustain such a significant place for sol­idarity, internationalism, working class politics, culture and values-grounded on the faith, principles and traditions of liberation theology and grassroots orga­nizing-she served the church in her position as pastor for eight years.

Most recently, she has served as the Co-Executive Director and co-founder of the The People's Forum in New York City—a political education venue and cultural home for working-class orga­nizers, leaders and intellectuals from all over the country, and around the world. In her role at The People's Forum, Clau­dia continued her work towards building internationalism and people to people solidarity. She has led and participated in numerous international gatherings and events all over the world. Claudia has been a key convener of groups and social movements, and contributor to the overall conception and develop­ment of political education and cultural programming.

Claudia lives with her eight year old son. She considers herself blessed to learn from and grow with him, and to have a community of family, friends, and fellow fighters for justice to help nourish him. She is running for President of the United States with the Party for Social­ism and Liberation with a firm and clear conviction that there is a need to build political organizations and a mass politi­cal movement independent from the two party system of the ruling class.

Karina Garcia

KARINA GARCIA is a Chicana organizer and popular educator who has been fighting for a better world since she was 17 years old as a high school student in Califor­nia. From El Barrio in New York City to the border areas of Texas, she has helped lead campaigns against land­lord abuses, wage theft, and police bru­tality, as well as fights for reproductive justice, immigrants rights and student financial aid reform. She is a founder of the Justice Center en El Barrio in New York City and is a member of the Cen­tral Committee of the Party for Social­ism and Liberation.

Karina's father migrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was just 16 years old, and the will of working-class immi­grants like him to survive and thrive inspired her to take on life with determi­nation. This served her well when Kar­ina received a full scholarship to study at Columbia University. She moved across the country by herself, knowing that she had to seize upon every oppor­tunity to give back-a single year of tui­tion was the equivalent of her family's entire household income. As soon as she arrived, she joined every conceiv­able progressive organization on cam­pus. She led struggles to expand finan­cial aid for low-income students, for immigrant and worker rights, and to speak out against the Iraq war. In 2006, her activism received national attention when she led a campaign to confront and shut down the anti-immigrant fas­cist militia, the Minuteman Project.

When Karina took a semester off to do a speaking tour in California, she met with high school and college students to keep building the movement for immi­grant rights. That same year, she joined the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Graduating with a degree in Economics, Karina went on to become a New York City high school math teacher. After school, she advised a student group that protested against budget cuts, the Iraq war, police brutality and anti-im­migrant laws. In 2012, she moved into a national organizing position for the National Latina lnstitute for Reproduc­tive Justice where she worked for nearly a decade training immigrant women and working-class Latina activists in New York, Texas, Virginia and Florida.

Karina believes above all in organiz­ing the power of the working class. She has been involved in organizing with domestic workers and trafficking sur­vivors in building their anti-wage theft and anti-trafficking campaigns, fight­ing alongside immigrant communities in NYC against ICE raids and Trump's vit­riol, and representing her fellow educa­tors in the United Federation of Teach­ers. Karina writes for Breaking the Chains magazine, a unique socialist and feminist magazine and most recently she organized mobilizations against the Supreme Court decisions that evis­cerated abortion rights with the goal of rebuilding a working-class women's movement.




But what about Trump?
ANSWERING THE "LESSER OF TWO EVILS" ARGUMENT

TENS OF MILLIONS of people across the country are deeply concerned about the prospect that Donald Trump will return to the White House. Faced with this pro­foundly troubling possibility, many feel like they have no choice but to view the election purely as a referendum on whether or not Trump comes back into power, regardless of who his opponent is. But for people who want to defeat the racist, pro-corporate, anti-women, war-mongering and planet killing pol­itics that Trump represents, this would be a big mistake.

Is Biden really that different from Trump?

Every election year, whoever the Dem­ocrats nominate pledge that they'll pro­tect the rights of the people, improve conditions for working families, and pro­mote equality over bigotry. And every time they're elected, these politicians who promise us the world do essentially nothing they said they would. In fact, we can see many examples of how Biden's actual policies in office have been so similar to Trump's.

Take the genocide in Gaza against Pal­estinians for example - both Trump and Biden have given Israel their uncon­ditional support and pumped billions of taxpayer dollars into the apartheid regime's military. When he first came into office, Biden kept using Trump's "Title 42" policy to kick out virtually everyone who arrived at the U.S.-Mex­ico border seeking asylum, and then replaced it with an immigration policy that is just as restrictive and effectively the same as Trump's "safe third coun­try" rule. Far from the historic expan­sion of social programs that he prom­ised, Biden has actually presided over the end of vital COVID-era safety net programs that froze evictions, provided payments to working class parents, subsidized childcare and froze student loan repayments.

Trump and Biden sound different on some issues. Trump, for instance, speaks in disgusting and degrading ways about women. But we should keep in mind that when the Democrats had control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first two years of Biden's term, they could have passed a law legalizing abortion once and for all but chose not to.

Is it better tor people's movements if Biden is president?

Some progressive people make the argument that while Biden is no friend of the people, it is more likely that he will grant concessions when met with peo­ple's struggle. In general, this argument holds that in election years we should work to elect Democrats, and then spend the rest of our time pressuring those Democrats to follow through on their promises.
 
This position means that the movement gives up most of our leverage before we even start using it. Any Democrat run­ning for a given office will typically be somewhat less terrible than the Repub­lican running for that office. If that's all that's required to earn progressive peo­ple's support, what incentive do the pol­iticians have to make any concessions at all? The Democratic Party elite eas­ily can — and in fact do — adopt the arro­gant attitude: "If you don't like it, what are you going to do? Vote for the Repub­lican?"

This is why the Democratic Party keeps moving further and further to the right over time. That, in turn, allows the Republicans to move further and further to the right, eventually resulting in the rise of figures like Trump. Obamacare, for instance, was modeled off of a right wing proposal implemented by Mitt Romney when he was the governor of Massachusetts. A single-payer system that guarantees healthcare to all is not even on the table, despite the fact that it is overwhelmingly popular and exists in most other wealthy countries. Things won't change unless we call their bluff.

Do we have to vote for Biden to save democracy?

But even with all of this in mind, there are still some who argue that Trump is uniquely dangerous in that he intends to shred every basic democratic right and implement a form of dictatorship or fascism. Voting for Biden then becomes incidentally the way to "save democ­racy".

There is no doubt that the civil rights that were won over generations of struggle are under attack. The Vot­ing Rights Act is being dismantled. An unelected Supreme Court is slashing people's rights. And the rise of Trump's ultra-right movement with its hateful and violent tendencies is of course a danger­ous expression of this anti-democratic tendency — Trump himself is now openly promising a form of semi-dictatorial rule if elected.

But the rise of far right politics is a symptom of profound problems in soci­ety. Demagogues like Trump talk about these problems but identify false ene­mies and offer false solutions. Take the opioid crisis for example — a dire crisis for working people, but one caused by executives at pharmaceutical corpora­tions, not by immigrants or China like Trump says.

Biden and the Democrats say that everything is basically fine, and their main complaint about Trump is that he is an unpredictable and incompetent manager of the status quo. lt will be completely impossible to build the kind of grassroots people's movement that we need to defeat the anti-democratic far right if that movement's program is essentially "let's get back to normal." We can only unite broad sections of the working class in the massive numbers necessary to defeat Trump if our move­ment also takes up the demand for the right to healthcare, education, a job, housing and a life with dignity.

Voting for Biden does nothing to defeat the enemies of democracy, shifts the entire political spectrum further right­wards, and in most cases won't even result in different policies than if Trump were in office! There is nothing strategi­cally or tactically smart about it.

What will make a difference is if we use our vote to send a message to the ultra-­rich elite who rule this country. That's why the Party for Socialism and Libera­tion nominated the Claudia De la Cruz/Karina Garcia presidential ticket. Every vote for Claudia and Karina is an unmis­takable signal to the millionaires and bil­lionaires that there is a growing move­ment that aims to end their rule once and for all.





OUR PROGRAM
 
END CAPITALISM BEFORE IT ENDS US

Seize the Biggest 100 Corporations, Create A New Economy for the People

Overthrow the Dictatorship of the Rich — Build a Democracy That Serves the Working Class

End the Rule of Money and Lock Up the Corrupt Elite

End All U.S. Aid to Israel, End the Genocide and Free Palestine

Cut the Military Budget by 90% — Peace, Not War with China & Russia!

End the War on Black America!

Defend Women's Rights, Full Equality for LGBTQ People

Save the Planet from Capitalism

VOTESOCIALIST2024.COM