Socialist candidate Frances Villar demands to debate Bloomberg, Thompson
Protest the exclusion of poor and working people in Tuesday’s debate!
Tuesday, October 13, at 6pm
1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street)
New York NY 10029
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VotePSL Action Alert
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Join us this Tuesday, October 13, at 6pm outside East Harlem’s Museo
del Barrio to protest the undemocratic exclusion of Frances Villar from
this year’s first general election mayoral debate.
The debate’s
hosts, the New York City Campaign Finance Board and NY1 have only
invited two candidates – billionaire Mike Bloomberg and former bank
executive William Thompson — to participate. Frances Villar, the first
woman of color to run for mayor in the general elections, has not been
invited, presumably because she has not raised the $50,000 required by
New York City election law.
This is an outrage. We
are asking everyone to take moment and sent a letter to NY1 and the
city’s Campaign Finance Board to allow Frances to debate and to demand
the abolition of the undemocratic New York City Campaign Finance Act, which requires candidates to raise $50,000 to appear in the debates.
“The
law used to limit participation in the political process to
property-owning white men,” Villar announced in a press conference last
Wednesday in front of the New York City Campaign Finance Board. “This
law is a remnant of those days. To this day, appearing on the ballot is
not enough for official recognition as a candidate. There is a
financial requirement written into New York City election law that
disadvantages political participation by poor and working people.”
There
is nothing more undemocratic than denying a candidate the opportunity
to speak simply because she does not have enough corporate friends. New
Yorkers want to hear a real debate about the way this city is
fundamentally organized and run, not just the same predictable
back-and-forth between Democrats and Republicans. The over 14,000
petitions collected by the Frances Villar campaign this summer testify
to New Yorkers’ desire to hear a fresh political perspective.
The
PSL’s Frances Villar for Mayor campaign is taking on the billionaires
and striking a raw nerve among the city’s working class. Frances has
been featured repeatedly in the city’s Spanish-language newspapers,
sometimes on the front page, as well as in the evening news. The
campaign already has a very real buzz and wide name recognition in many
of the city’s working class and immigrant communities.
For the
first time in a long time, the word “socialism” has reentered the
country’s political vocabulary. Right-wing talk radio and Republican
politicians are using it as a punching bag to defend the health
insurance status quo, while Democrats are running from the term as fast
as they can. With capitalism in its biggest crisis in decades, more and
more New Yorkers want to hear what socialism really is — and who
better to do this than an avowed socialist?
We demand the City
to abolish the ruling requiring a financial threshold to debate. We
call on both Michael Bloomberg and William Thompson to accept our
challenge to a debate over the future of this city. If they are so sure
about the correctness of the vision, then they should have nothing to
fear.
Contact us at [email protected] or 212-694-8762 for more information.
