SWP wins support in ballot fight across the country
https://themilitant.com/2020/08/01/workers-need-our-own-party-a-labor-party-2/
BY EDWIN FRUIT
Vol. 84/No. 31
August 10, 2020
Senate candidate Lea Sherman signs up Don Hill in Paterson, New Jersey,
July 26, to put SWP presidential ticket on ballot. SWP turned first
batch of signatures in to state officials next day.
MILITANT/ROY LANDERSEN
Senate candidate Lea Sherman signs up Don Hill in Paterson, New Jersey,
July 26, to put SWP presidential ticket on ballot. SWP turned first
batch of signatures in to state officials next day.
SEATTLE — Across Tennessee, New Jersey and Washington state, Socialist
Workers Party campaigners are collecting signatures from working people
who want to see a working-class party on the ballot in 2020. Through the
fight for ballot status they’re winning support for the party’s ticket —
Alyson Kennedy for president and Malcolm Jarrett for vice president —
and they will be doing the same in Minnesota soon.
The party’s candidates are the only voice in 2020 explaining that
workers need to build their own party, a labor party, that can defend
the interests of all working people against the entire capitalist class
and its government.
Kennedy and Jarrett have already been certified for the ballot in
Colorado and Vermont, and have met all the requirements in Louisiana.
SWP candidates have run in every presidential election since 1948.
Supporters of the party’s ticket are going house to house in cities and
towns large and small, asking working people to sign nominating
petitions and help sign up others they know — their co-workers, friends
and family.
They are collecting signatures in Walmart parking lots, at house
meetings, and at protests against police brutality. Along the way
they’re broadening knowledge about the party’s campaign platform,
increasing the readership of the Militant newspaper and books by party
leaders and other revolutionaries.
Here in Washington, campaigners plan to file their petitions to the
state election commission by Aug. 7, with hundreds more than the 1,000
signatures required.
Kennedy met laid-off library storyteller Xiomara Bugarin at her home in
West Seattle July 26. The candidate talked about the different class
responses of the Cuban and the U.S. governments to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I know the Cubans send doctors all around the world,” said Bugarin, who
was born in El Salvador. “It impresses me that they do this despite the
U.S. blockade.” The Cuban government mobilized the population to keep
the virus in check, Kennedy said. “They are only able to do this because
they had made a revolution in 1959.”
Bugarin signed the petition saying, “Working people need more options in
the elections.”
UPS worker Danel Griffin told Kennedy when she was campaigning in a
Walmart parking lot that he had been considering voting for Jesse
Ventura for president on the Green Party ticket.
“The Green Party is a capitalist party of reform,” Kennedy said, “but
it’s still a capitalist party.” In 2001 when Ventura was governor of
Minnesota, he brought in the National Guard and hired scabs in an
attempt to break a strike by government workers. “A labor party would
organize solidarity with strikes and the fight against police
brutality,” Kennedy said.
UPS worker Danel Griffin signs at Walmart parking lot to put SWP
presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy, left, and running mate Malcolm
Jarrett on the ballot in Washington state.
MILITANT/ZENA JASPER
UPS worker Danel Griffin signs at Walmart parking lot to put SWP
presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy, left, and running mate Malcolm
Jarrett on the ballot in Washington state.
Griffin signed the petition and got a subscription to the Militant and
a copy of the book, The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why
Washington Fears Working People.
Kennedy also spoke with Jaleel Harris, who is starting a job as a
baggage handler at the airport. Harris recently got involved in the
fight against police brutality. “I think the violence and looting hurts
our cause,” Harris told Kennedy. “I support defunding of the police to
reallocate money for resources like schools for the Black and Latino
communities.”
Kennedy agreed about the looting. “But ‘defunding’ will not change the
nature of the cops under capitalism,” she said. “Their role is to defend
the wealthy ruling class and put working people in their place.
“Only working people taking political power into their own hands can
change that,” Kennedy added. “In Cuba working people did make a
socialist revolution. That’s what is needed in the U.S.”
Harris signed the petition and got a subscription to the Militant and a
copy of Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?”
Rolly Konae told Kennedy about the intense speedup he has faced
delivering packages for Amazon. “Before the pandemic we had to do 120 to
130 a day. Now it is 185 to 190.”
Kennedy, who is a cashier at Walmart, described how Walmart workers in
Kentucky who work in online grocery pickup told her they organized to go
together to speak to bosses who were trying to double the amount of
orders workers had to pick in a day. After some back and forth bosses
agreed to send more workers to help. “We need to act like we have a
union,” Kennedy said.
‘We need more unity among workers’
BY SUSAN LAMONT
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee — “The Democrats and Republicans, which are so
much the same, have grown so dominant, so in control,” Jimmy Smartt, an
auto technician here in eastern Chattanooga, told SWP campaigners.
Smartt and his wife Heather invited this correspondent and Rachele
Fruit, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, into their apartment
when we told them we were campaigning to put a working-class ticket on
the ballot.
They were interested in the SWP platform that calls for building a labor
party.
“We need to look to each other more, not to those in power,” said Jimmy
Smartt. “We need more unity among the workers at the bottom.”
Some 91 people had signed in Tennessee to put the ticket on the ballot
as of July 27. Campaigners plan to collect at least double the 275 state
requirement.
The Smartts signed the petition, subscribed to the Militant and bought
Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? “The answer is ‘No!’” Jimmy Smartt
said. “That’s what I tell people all the time!” He agreed to be one of
the 11 electors needed to get on the ballot.
Kirstin Griffin in Cleveland, Tennessee, first met SWP campaigners in
May at a protest in Brunswick, Georgia, to demand the arrest and
prosecution of the vigilantes who killed Ahmaud Arbery.
The 22-year-old nursing student signed up to be an elector for the SWP
campaign July 24. She told party campaigners Janice Lynn and Sam Manuel
she wants to learn more about the Cuban Revolution, which made it
possible to have universal, government-guaranteed cradle-to-grave health
care for all, as opposed to what passes as health care in the U.S.
Griffin got a subscription to the Militant and purchased Red Zone: Cuba
and the Battle Against Ebola in West Africa. She was glad to see a
Militant article about nurses on strike in Illinois to win safer
staffing levels and a pay raise.
At Griffin’s invitation, the campaigners participated in a protest that
evening calling for the moving of a statue honoring confederate soldiers
to a museum. Several protesters signed up to put the SWP candidates on
the ballot.
In Lebanon, 20 minutes outside of Nashville, SWP campaigners Kaitlin
Estill and Lisa Potash met retired army veterans Charles Bailey and
Reginald Sweatt. Estill told them that under capitalism, society is
organized to meet the needs of the capitalist class, not the needs of
working people.
“You’re right,” Bailey said. “There’s potato farmers right now that are
digging holes to throw their potatoes in and hog farmers killing the
animals they can’t sell. All the while, meat prices are going up.”
The Socialist Workers Party campaign platform demands that the
government guarantee farmers their costs of production, including their
living expenses. Sweatt and Bailey signed the petition.
The SWP campaigners also met Devontta Shields at his doorstep. He told
them he quit his job at a local factory that makes Kool-Aid because he’d
come home each night covered in the Kool-Aid powder. Workers need to
wage a fight to wrest control of production from the bosses, Estill
said, so they can organize work safely.
Shields recently went to his first-ever protest against police
brutality. After seeing news on these protests “I decided I was going to
go to one and then it turned out there was one in my hometown,” he said.
Shields signed to put Kennedy and Jarrett on the ballot.
‘Let me sign that!’
BY CANDACE WAGNER
TRENTON, New Jersey — Lea Sherman, the SWP’s candidate for U.S. Senate,
and vice presidential candidate Malcolm Jarrett filed 270 signatures
with state election officials July 27 to get the party’s presidential
ticket on the ballot.
“This shows we have support among working people in New Jersey,” Sherman
said. The party plans to keep campaigning and get well over the required
800 signatures. “We invite all those who want to see a workers party on
the ballot to join us in exceeding the requirements over the next couple
of weeks and turning those signatures in.”
Donna Barber, elections manager for the New Jersey Division of
Elections, told Sherman to call and inform her when they’ll be bringing
the rest of the signatures in.
“Let me sign that. We need a voice,” retired nurse Diane Popeck told SWP
campaigner Chris Hoeppner July 26. She is one of the 270 people whose
signatures were filed July 27. Popeck told Hoeppner she was fired once
when she needed to extend her maternity leave, but fought and won her
job back. When her husband got injured on the job at UPS, and wasn’t
treated right, “I convinced him to fight. You fight until they give up,”
she said. She subscribed to the Militant and bought three books to
learn more about the party.
Sherman met retired postal worker Don Hill on his doorstep in Paterson
the day before. “With many businesses reopening, the companies are
organizing to restore their profits at the expense of working people,”
Sherman told him. “We need to fight for workers control on the job to
protect our health and safety.”
Hill told Sherman he had visited Cuba several times and that “the whole
world should emulate the Cuban example” of sending volunteer doctors
around the world. “Washington tries to blaspheme the Cuban Revolution.
But the record speaks for itself.” He signed the petition and subscribed
to the Militant.
SWP campaigner Laura Anderson told Robert Davis in Elizabeth about her
visit to join the picket line of striking shipbuilders in Bath, Maine.
“More experienced union members said they didn’t know what to expect
from the young ones” on the picket line, Anderson said. “But these young
workers are the most enthusiastic about defending the union they only
recently joined.”
Davis, a young gas station worker, really liked that. “There is a lot of
injustice. It’s not right,” he said. Davis told Anderson he supports the
protests against police brutality. “But this looting is no good. They
are destroying our own community. It has to stop.”
Davis subscribed to the Militant and said he would like to help out on
the campaign.
❖
Want to help campaign for the Socialist Workers Party and aid the fight
to get on the ballot? See listing for the campaign office nearest you.
Or email: socialistworkers2020@xxxxxxxxx.
Joanne Kuniansky contributed to this article.
Join campaign to put SWP’s presidential ticket on ballot!
Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, issued
the following statement July 28. Malcolm Jarrett is the party’s
candidate for vice president. Join the fight to put the Socialist
Workers Party 2020 presidential campaign on the ballot everywhere we…
Socialist Workers Party 2020 campaign platform
This is the SWP’s fighting campaign platform to confront the economic,
social and moral crisis caused by capitalism: UNIONS/FOR A LABOR PARTY
Support workers’ struggles to organize to defend themselves, to use
union power on behalf of ourselves and all…
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Richard Dawkins
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all
decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this
sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running
for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from
within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation,
thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this
very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the
natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons
and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people
are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find
any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life