Well, it’s been a great convention. And you know, our former chairman, Gus Hall, used to say that a great meeting or convention doesn’t require a summary or concluding remarks – and then he would proceed to give a summary.

And I admire Gus a lot, along with Henry Winston, James Jackson and others. Gus and I share a similar background in Youngstown and Warren and in steel where he worked and led the steel strike and where my family also worked and participated in the steel strike and ongoing struggles. And one of the things about Gus is that he had a a great confidence in the thinking and fighting qualities of the working class. And I share that confidence in our working class – and for that reason I’m honored to accept the election of the national committee to help lead this party going forward.

Now I don’t want to give a summary, but I would like to say a few words of a personal/political nature. In the first place I’d like to thank John Bachtell for his leadership over the years. I’ve know John for a long time – we go way back. In fact the first time I heard about John I had just got out of high school and we learned of this dude who had taken it upon himself to order bundles of the Daily World and was passing them out a factory gate.

And people were like “Who gave him permission to do that?” But the fact is that this kind of initiative is what characterized John throughout. He led the YCL in the 80s and helped rebuild it from scratch. John went on to lead the NY district of the party – one of the most difficult assignments we have. In that capacity he led the party in the 90s doing recruiting at street tables after which he went on to lead the Chicago district and then for the last five years as national chairman.

And it was during his period as national chair that John faced perhaps his greatest test: leading the National Committee and keeping the party together in the face of basic challenges to our existence. And here we have to say that John felt very deeply about the unity of the party and helped successfully navigate us through this difficult period.

And this was because he understood that the unity of party was not based on his opinion, or even comprised of a balance of competing opinions, but was rather founded on a deeper truth, a truth that arose from combining theory with our revolutionary practice. And it was this truth that guided us in putting forward a new program which we have debated in this convention, a program that reaffirms us as a revolutionary working-class political party, a concept that help us arrive at this successful convention today.

And so we have to thank John Bachtell for this accomplishment.

And let me conclude by saying we have two principle tasks as we go forward: defeating the the group of right-wingers and neo-fascists grouped around the Trump administration in next year’s election and building this party in the process. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And ain’t nobody going to stop us. Not Trump, not Pompeo, not the doubters and naysayers. Like the old 60s R & B tune says, Aint Nobody Stoppin Us Now. So let’s go ahead and celebrate our 100th anniversary. Happy Birthday CPUSA!

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