SWP names slate for 2004 elections in state of Florida

[Laura Kamienski <tkd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  Vol. 68/No. 21           May 31, 2004
 http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6821/682151.html

SWP names slate for 2004
elections in state of Florida

BY SETH GALINSKY
MIAMI—“U.S. president George Bush claimed that the torture of Iraqi
prisoners is not the way ‘Americans’ treat people,” said Norton Sandler
in the main report to the May 2 Florida state Socialist Workers Party
convention. “But there is no such thing as ‘one America.’ This is a
class-divided society.”

Workers in the United States have nothing in common with torturers,
Sandler stated, “but Washington’s brutality in Iraq shows the true face
of U.S. imperialism around the world.”

The delegates to this one-day meeting decided on candidates for the
upcoming elections and voted on the outlines of a state election
platform. Twenty-three SWP campaign backers attended.

The state convention nominated Nicole Sarmiento, 22, a student at the
University of Miami as the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida;
Karl Butts, a vegetable farmer in Plant City for Congress in the 11th
C.D. in Tampa; and Omari Musa and Seth Galinsky for U.S. Congress in the
17th and 21st Districts, respectively, in the Miami area. Musa and
Galinsky are garment workers.

The convention also nominated Lawrence Mikesh, a meat packer, as the
party’s candidate for mayor of Miami-Dade Country.

Sandler noted that Washington is carrying out its assault on working
people at home and abroad under the banner of the “war on terrorism,” as
they seek to redivide the resources and the wealth working people create
around the world through our labor in favor of the handful of
billionaire families who rule the United States, while dealing blows to
their imperialist rivals in Paris, Berlin, London, and Tokyo. This
assault is being led by the politicians from the Democratic and
Republican parties alike, Sandler said, and will continue regardless of
which of these parties is in office after the November election.

“We will campaign vigorously against their war party,” Sandler said,
referring to both the Democrats and Republicans. “Our campaign will say,
‘not one penny, not one man or woman for the imperialist war machine.’
We will urge others to join us in campaigning for the immediate and
unconditional removal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia,
Haiti, Colombia, the Korean Peninsula, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

In his report, Sandler said workers in the United States are working
longer and longer days while millions are unemployed. In Florida alone,
nearly 400,000 are out of work according to the government’s own
figures, while tens of thousands of immigrants, and those who have
stopped looking for jobs or exhausted their benefits, are not counted in
the “official” statistics.

“The bosses are combining jobs, speeding up the assembly line, putting
the life and limbs of workers in the mines, factories, and mills
increasingly in danger,” said Sandler. “The rulers’ attacks on rights,
including secret detentions and trials, especially targeting the foreign
born, and stepped-up government spying and disruption attempts are their
necessary counterpart to the war the employers are carrying out against
working people in this country.”

Sandler said the SWP slate of candidates in Florida will call for
shortening the workweek to 30 hours while guaranteeing 40 hours pay to
spread the available work around. “We also call for a federal
government-financed massive public workers program to build desperately
needed housing, schools, hospitals, and day-care centers, and to repair
the decaying roads and bridges across the United States and Florida.
These measures will put millions back to work,” he said.

At the same time, prices are climbing higher for gasoline, milk, and
other commodities. “SWP candidates are going to demand that the energy
industry be nationalized and placed under workers control. Committees of
workers and farmers can inspect the books of these energy trusts,
exposing their secret deals, their war plans, their contrived shortages,
and price rigging,” said Sandler.

“By running the oil and chemical plants ourselves, we will gain valuable
experience that is part of preparing the working-class for running all
of society,” he said.

Sandler noted that Florida is a vast agricultural state with 44,000
farms. Some 60 percent of these farms have less than 50 acres. Small
farmers across the state have difficulty making ends meet and many are
being forced off the land. The Socialist Workers Party election campaign
will demand an end to farm foreclosures and access to cheap credit for
small farmers. We will stand side by side with farmers who are Black who
are fighting to keep their land,” said Sandler.

During the discussion, Cheryl Goertz from Tampa presented figures that
show the impact of the deepening economic and social crisis in Florida
on workers who are Black and Latino, and the changing face of the
working class in this state.

In Florida, 23 percent of the population speaks a language other than
English at home; in Miami-Dade County it’s 68 percent. The per capita
income in the United States is roughly $33,170, and in Florida it’s
$30,730. For Black Floridians, however, per capita income is only
$18,750 and for Latinos even less, $18,000. While the official “poverty
rate” for whites is 10 percent, in Florida for Blacks it’s 30 percent
and 24 percent for Latinos

Recent figures indicate that 1.3 million employed workers in Florida
have no access to health-care coverage, including 700,000 people in
Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone.

Several delegates noted that the SWP campaign calls for the
establishment of federal government-guaranteed social security and
health-care coverage for all.

The report and the discussion pointed to the example of workers in
Florida and elsewhere fighting back against the rulers’ attacks. Sandler
highlighted the successful fight at the Point Blank Body Armor plant in
Oakland Park, where workers won union recognition and a contract. He
also pointed to coal miners in Huntington, Utah, fighting to win union
recognition there.

“We will campaign from inside the resistance,” said Seth Galinsky from
Miami. “We were part of the April 25 March on Washington to defend a
woman’s right to choose.” Galinsky said at the Point Blank plant where
he is employed that workers born in Haiti and various Latin American
countries including Cuba came together to win this fight. “They are part
of making the U.S. working class stronger,” said Galinsky.

Omari Musa, also from Miami, said that one aspect of the 2000 election
in Florida was the attempt to disenfranchise Black voters. We should
resist all attempts to deny workers who are Black the right to vote, and
we should also oppose denying the right to vote to people who have
served time for felony convictions.

Karl Butts from Tampa noted how the rise in fuel prices is affecting
independent truckers and what farmers are paying for off-road diesel
fuel for their tractors and other farm implements and petroleum-based
farm in-puts. He said the SWP’s campaign plank calling for
nationalization of the energy industry under workers control will win
support among farmers.

Lawrence Mikesh from Miami noted that there is a strong possibility that
Ralph Nader will be on the Florida ballot for the fall presidential
election in addition to George Bush and John Kerry. Mikesh said that
while the Democrats and Republicans are the SWP’s main opponents, the
party will also campaign against Nader. “Nader was quoted as saying he
is pushing the Democrats to be more progressive,” Mikesh said. “But
we’re pushing for working people to fight to take power out of the hands
of the war makers, including the Democrats.”

Martín Koppel, who attended the meeting for the Socialist Workers
National Campaign Committee explained, “We won’t say ‘open the borders’
as a general slogan. We have to start by addressing the concrete
situation. We raise demands to stop the deportations, stop the factory
raids, end restrictions on drivers licenses, and end ‘no match’ letters.”

In deciding on the SWP slate, the delegates noted that Nicole
Sarmiento’s opponents in the race to replace Democrat Robert Graham as
U.S. Senator include Republicans William McCollum, a former U.S.
Congressman; Mel Martinez, who served three years in the current
administration in Washington as George Bush’s secretary of housing and
urban development; and John Byrd, the current speaker of the Florida
House of Representatives. Sarmiento’s Democratic Party opponents include
Alex Penelas, the current mayor of Miami-Dade County; Peter Deutsch, a
U.S. Congressmen from Ft. Lauderdale; and Betty Castor from Tampa, a
former Florida commissioner of education.

The congressional district in which Omari Musa is running encompasses
northern Miami and southern Broward County, where Democrat Kendrick Meek
is the incumbent. Seth Galinsky, a garment worker at Point Blank Body
Armor, will be running against Republican Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a leading
right-wing opponent of the Cuban Revolution in Florida and the U.S.
Congress.

Sarmiento, Butts, Musa, and Galinsky will be write-in candidates. Later
this summer, the SWP campaign will also file the names of 27 electors,
the amount necessary to qualify the party’s presidential slate for the
November election.

“We will campaign together, in action, with young people and others who
want to go with us to the factory gates, on campus, street corners, door
to door,” Sandler said in his concluding remarks. “We will raise our
platform. We will defend the Cuban Revolution. We will win access to the
media to gain a wider hearing for a revolutionary socialist perspective.”