Militant/Norton Sandler

SWP vice-presidential candidate Arrin Hawkins, right, campaigns July 2 among independent truckers on strike at the Port of Miami

“Our campaign supporters now know that coming to New York and getting a firsthand feel for the tremendous response we are already getting to the most ambitious ballot effort we will mount this year, will affect the tone and spirit of our campaigns across the country for months ahead,” Calero said.

The New York ballot drive began on the July 10-11 weekend with more than 43 petitioners hitting the streets of New York City the first day, and 47 the second. At the same time, campaigners also fanned out in Buffalo, Albany, Schenectady, Lackawanna, and Binghamton. By the end of the weekend, nearly 8,000 people had signed for the SWP candidates. A full-time team of campaign volunteers has been bringing in hundreds more signatures every day since then.

Joining the effort to assist the SWP campaign in New York have been Socialist Workers candidates and their supporters from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Miami, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. These and other candidates from around the country will be coming into New York on the July 17-18 weekend to help out with the campaigning underway here.

Aside from petitioning, there’s much more work associated with the campaign effort. Many supporters of the campaign from New York and beyond are lending a hand by cooking meals for the volunteers, printing flyers, fund-raising, and doing the paper work necessary to prepare the petitions to be filed with the state.

Campaign organizers are projecting having up to 20,000 signatures collected by the end of the day July 18, out of their goal of 24,000. The legal requirement is 15,000 signatures.

“Because this New York ballot drive is running way ahead of schedule, the possibility is now wide open to organize volunteers to get the party’s slate on the ballot in Minnesota, Delaware, and other states, as well as Washington, D.C., which we were not sure we would be able to do not too long ago,” Calero said.

The party will also be organizing to file the required number of electors to get on the ballot in Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

SWP campaign supporters have completed petitioning and have already filed for ballot status, or will rapidly do so, in Iowa, Mississippi, Utah, and Vermont. State authorities have already certified the party’s presidential slate with ballot status in Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington State.

Petitioners are circulating literature explaining that the SWP is campaigning to back workers’ rights to organize unions and to defend the labor movement, which is under attack by the bosses and the Democrats and Republicans, the twin parties of capitalism.

The SWP also backs “the efforts of nations oppressed by imperialism to expand electrification,” the petitioning flyer says, and will “expose the drive by Washington and its allies to prevent semicolonial nations from developing the energy sources they need, including nuclear power, to bring much of humanity out of darkness.”

The party’s candidates and their supporters are also calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. and other imperialist troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Korea, Haiti, Colombia, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And they are demanding jobs for all by cutting the workweek to 30 hours’ work at 40 hours’ pay at union scale, to spread the available work around.  
 
‘Response has been great’
“The response to the petitioning has been great,” said Willie Cotton, the SWP candidate for U.S. Congress in the 15th Congressional District, after returning from petitioning in Harlem July 11. “It reminds me of the huge response we got during the Militant sales drive this spring, when we doubled the number of subscribers in eight weeks.”

Also on the New York slate are Millie Sánchez in the 8th C.D. and Dorothy Kolis in the 16th C.D.

In Buffalo, in western New York near Niagara Falls, petitioners spread out July 10 and worked the crowd making its way through the Taste of Buffalo food festival. “We were competing with petitioners from the Democratic Party,” an SWP campaign backer reported. “One woman signed my petition right away after reading our demand to support workers’ right to organize. She said she had been fired from a factory that did not have a union.”

Beachgoers in Brooklyn were greeted by a team of campaigners as they exited the D subway line and headed for the surf and sand at Coney Island. “I approached one young woman, but she told me she wasn’t old enough to vote,” recalled campaigner Sonja Swanson. “She then called over her mother, sister, and several friends and made sure they all signed the petition.”

“A woman came up and asked about the campaign. She was excited after seeing the pictures of the candidates and what they stood for,” reported Janine Dukes, part of a campaign team at Getty Square in Yonkers. “She also helped collect signatures for about an hour, calling out to the people on the street to sign up to help get these candidates on the ballot.”

A number of campaign supporters in New York also noted that their efforts to put on the ballot a working-class alternative to the parties of imperialist war, economic depression, and racist oppression—the Democrats and Republicans—contrast favorably with the attempts by various radicals to gain ballot status for Ralph Nader and Green Party candidates who are acting as the left wing of the Democratic Party under the banner of “independent” candidacies.  
 
Nader, McReynolds, and the Greens
On a few occasions, the SWP petitioners have run into individuals collecting signatures for Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo for president and vice-president (see article on page 7). Their campaign material urges people to sign for candidates “who want to vote for peace, civil liberties and a better life for Americans and the world’s people.”

“I saw a Green Party member petitioning for Nader in the subway,” said SWP campaigner Argiris Malapanis. “He was talking with two middle-age women who were chewing his ear off for ‘stealing votes from Kerry.’ The Green Party guy was defensive, arguing that ‘Nader is only trying to make the Democrats better, more progressive.’”

Other Green Party members are circulating petitions for that party’s presidential candidate, David Cobb, and a separate petition for David McReynolds, the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in New York. McReynolds, 74, was a long-time leader of the War Resisters League and ran as the Socialist Party candidate for president in 2000.

In a statement announcing his senatorial candidacy, McReynolds states, “In the national race there are many who will support John Kerry because of the great fear of a second term for George Walker Bush. I understand that fear and share it. But New York is a safe state for Kerry—so it will be possible to vote ‘as far left as possible’ with a clean conscience. More important,” McReynolds continues, “it is possible, in the Senate race, to cast a vote against Charles Schumer, who exemplifies what might be called a ‘liberal trapped by militarism.’”

Schumer is the Democratic incumbent. The other Senate seat, held by Hillary Clinton, is not up for election until 2006.

An article in the July 12 Metro, a free daily in New York City, pointed to the minimal differences between McReynolds and the Democrats. “‘What is really disturbing is that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chuck Schumer still haven’t said, in hindsight, that they would have voted against the [Iraq] war,’ said McReynolds, citing recent reports that intelligence failures exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in the months leading up to the conflict,” the article said.

Calero and Hawkins, and the other SWP candidates in New York, will be speaking at a meeting at the campaign headquarters on Saturday night, July 17, following the day’s petitioning (see calendar on page 11 for more details). “At that rally we plan to announce that we have broken the back of the New York petitioning drive and are setting our sights on getting the party on the ballot in Washington, D.C., and beyond,” Calero said.

For more information, or to help with the Socialist Workers campaign, contact the New York SWP Campaign, Tel: (212) 736-2540, e-mail: nyswp2004camp.@yahoo.com, or stop by the campaign center at 306 W. 37th St., 10th floor north, in Manhattan’s Garment District.

Norton Sandler is the Socialist Workers National Campaign Director.
 
 
Related articles:
SWP vice-presidential candidate visits Florida  
 
 
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