Happy May Day !

Green Party members will be joining with other working people’s organizations to commemorate International Workers Day this year online, given the social distancing we must practice in this coronavirus pandemic. What Greens can to bring to these events is an understanding of the connections between the Red and Green traditions of May Day.

The Red tradition of May Day emerged in the 1880s in the United States. The immediate impetus came from the Haymarket Massacre in 1886. On the night of May 4, 1886, 176 Chicago police attacked about 200 workers who remained after a day long demonstration for the 8-hour day. The police fired live ammunition, killing four and wounding 70. Somebody threw a stick of dynamite. Eight of the labor organizers where charged and convicted. Four of them were hung to death. One of the Haymarket martyrs, Albert Parsons, a white former confederate soldier married to Lucy Parsons, a former slave of African, Indian, and Mexican descent, said at this trial, “What is Socialism or Anarchism? Briefly stated it is the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of production and the right of the producers to their product.”

Lucy Parsons campaigned across the United States and Europe to have the workers movement commemorate May 1 as International Workers Day. Many workers’ organizations supported her call, including the American Federation of Labor, which then urged its adoption by the Second International of socialist parties. The first international May Day celebration in 1890 was a big success. The demonstrations worried the establishments across the world. After Coxey’s Army descended on May 1, 1894 in the first mass march on Washington, D.C. to demand public works spending to employ the unemployed in the midst of a severe depression, President Grover Cleveland got Congress to declare a federal Labor Day holiday in September in move designed to divide the labor movement.

This year, the parallels to that time are so stark, and it's crystal clear that it's not the rich that hold up the economy. It's us workers. Everything has ground to a halt, and now state governors of both capitalist parties are pretending that the pandemic isn't serious and are ushering us back to work. But now is the time to demand safer workplaces, living wages and more...just the basic respect that we deserve as workers.

Howie's comprehensive COVID-19 relief plan is calling for things like:

Medicare to Pay for COVID-19 Testing and Treatment and All Emergency Health Care
Defense Production Act to Rapidly Plan the Production and Distribution of Medical Supplies and a Universal Test, Contact Trace, and Quarantine Program to Safely Reopen the Economy
An OSHA Temporary Standard to Provide Enforceable PPE Protection for Workers
$2,000 a Month to All Adults Over Age 16 and $500 per Child
Loans to All Businesses and Hospitals for Payroll and Fixed Overhead To Be Forgiven If All Workers Are Kept on Payroll
Moratorium on Evictions, Foreclosures, and Utility Shutoffs
Cancel Rent, Mortgage, and Utility Payments; Federal Government Pays Those Bills;
High-income People Pay Taxes on this Relief
Suspend Student Loan Payments with 0% Interest Accumulation
Federal Universal Rent Control

If you feel this is a plan you can get behind, can you make a donation to Howie's campaign today?

This is a campaign about issues that matter most to the 99%. We are rallying progressives from all across this country to create an unstoppable movement that is THE party of the left.

We cannot settle for the watered-down pseudo-results that we are currently being fed. Lives are on the line.

We need an Economic Bill of Rights that guarantees income above poverty level, jobs, housing, Medicare for All, tuition-free education, and secure retirement.

With Ecosocialism, our country would be a world leader in ensuring the health and wellbeing of both our environment and our people.

In eternal solidarity,

Team Howie