“The Right’s Last Dance: 2008 Elections” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on July 25, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

Report to the CPUSA National Committee, July 7, 2007

To begin, I want to acknowledge that more than my fingerprints are on this report. Many comrades in discussions and by email gave me ideas and suggestions that I believe give the report more depth and range. I want to thank the comrades who took time out to convey their thinking.

The report focuses on some aspects of the current situation. It doesn’t try to span the entire country or the globe. Its aim is less ambitious. I will make an assessment of the Bush administration and the people’s struggle against its policies. Then the report will look at the 2008 elections and some of the main questions that will frame them. Finally, some aspects of our party’s work will be considered. 

“Change is Here, Change is Coming” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on July 3, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

Editor’s note: Excerpted from remarks by Sam Webb, national chair of the Communist Party USA, to the national committee of the Communist Party, June 20.

I make no attempt to be comprehensive in these remarks. My aim is much more modest, as you will see.

Let me begin with a simple observation: If the last 30 years were an era of reaction, then the coming decade could turn into an era of reform, even radical reform. Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.

“Obama, Reform and the Role of the Left” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on May 3, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

After the first, perhaps over analyzed, hundred days of the Obama administration, it is fair to say that President Obama is a reformer and we are entering an era of reforms, possibly radical reforms.

Some on the left (ignoring the right wing talk shows and their fantastic claims about Obama’s socialist pedigree) mockingly dismiss the new president and his reform inclinations, saying that his main mission is merely to save capitalism. Even if that is true, and there is no reason to doubt it, what does it tell us – that he is neither a politician of the left nor an advocate of socialism? Well, we already knew that.

“Off and Running: Opportunity of a Lifetime” first appeared on  PoliticalAffairs.net on February 6, 2009. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

I was standing on the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day, alongside nearly two million other people on Inauguration Day, and proudly watched the first African American take the oath of office in our nation’s history. That alone made the day deeply memorable, joyful, and historic. But I couldn’t help but think – and I’m sure that millions of others had the same thought – that the transfer of power from Bush to President Obama not only tore down a barrier that once was thought near impenetrable, but also signified the fading away of one era and the beginning of another. 

“Finances and the Current Crisis: How did we get here and what is the way out?” first appeared on PoliticalAffairs.net on October 3, 2008. Read it on PoliticalAffairs.net.

If there were such a thing as a perfect economic storm, I would say we are close to it.

The housing crisis continues and shows no sign of ending; credit and money markets are either churning or freezing up; the stock market is gyrating; unemployment is leaping upward (sharply so in the communities of the nationally and racially oppressed); poverty is up and wages are down; oil and food prices are climbing; the value of the dollar is falling sharply compared to other currencies; the level of indebtedness is astronomical and will be difficult to unwind in the near term. And we sit on the edge of a financial collapse with all the accompanying dislocation and hardship that it would bring.