On Friday October 16, Dan Piper - a high school teacher, a union member, and the Socialist Resurgence candidate for the First House District in Connecticut - invited incumbent Matt Ritter to a series of three safe, virtual debates. As of this writing, Ritter has not yet responded to this invitation.

The residents of the First District are confronted with cuts to their healthcare, a resurgent pandemic, police brutality, ecological crises, swelling unemployment, a childcare crisis, an education crisis, an eldercare crisis, and quite possibly the greatest housing crisis in U.S. history. 

Many frontline workers who have been thanked up and down by officials for risking their lives for months are now seeing their healthcare threatened by employers while fighting back a pandemic in their workplaces. Others are forced into the ranks of the unemployed, often facing eviction and foreclosure - particularly when moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments are lifted.

 

This is not a year when debate on the issues can be sidestepped. The questions facing working people are too serious.

We call on Representative Matt Ritter to respond to the invitation to an urgent debate with Dan Piper who, as a school employee and frontline worker, sees the effects of state policies on his safety every day, as well as the safety of his co-workers, his students, and their families.

We believe that debates on the following issues cannot wait:

1. Policing and police violence

2. Institutional racism

3. Housing

4. Healthcare and public health

5. The state response to Covid-19 and the economic crisis

6. Immigrant rights

7. Childcare, eldercare and education

8. Labor, unions and workplace rights

9. The rights of trans students in Connecticut schools

10. Energy policy and climate change (Particularly, gas pipeline construction, the Killingly Powerplant, and the need for a transition to renewable power)