Civil Liberties and Repression
Adopted by the National Executive Committee in Regular Session
Santa Clara, California, July 16, 2006
It is a salient fact that the leading assault on the democratic rights of U.S. workers today comes from the United States government—the same government sworn to uphold our Constitution and the Bill of Rights; that preaches democracy in the Middle East while it wages wars there for control of oil.
For decades civil liberties have been assaulted under the guise of fighting crime, drugs and terrorism. The Supreme Court chips away at our protections, Congress increasingly circumscribes our freedoms, and intelligence agencies routinely ignore constitutional protections, compile files on tens of thousands of citizens, spy, wiretap and plot break-ins and disruptions.
Today, the government’s “war on terror” has brought few terrorists to justice, yet serves to justify full-scale assaults on our liberties under the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 legislation. U.S. citizens have been “disappeared” and unconstitutionally held without trial. Persons defined as “enemy combatants” have been spirited off and tortured. Phone records, bank records, email and library records are subject to seizure without warrants.
Our freedoms and liberties are not mere privileges we enjoy by the grace of our ruling class or government bureaucrats. They are, it has been said, conquests of civilization wrested from tyrants by our forebears at the price of rivers of blood.
Capitalism is increasingly incompatible with freedom and democracy. To save capitalism, its ruling class must destroy freedom and democracy. To save freedom and democracy, the capitalist system, the system of economic despotism, must be destroyed. Socialist economic democracy alone can fully guarantee lasting freedom and democracy.
Socialist Labor Party of America, P.O. Box 218, Mountain View, CA 94042-0218 • www.slp.org • socialists@slp.orgDOWNLOAD PDF FORMATTED AS LEAFLET (1 pg, 464K)
(Photocopy back-to-back and cut in half.)