BY GREG McCARTAN
"Our campaign joins with protests condemning the brutal police beating of immigrant workers in Los Angeles," said Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president James Harris in an interview April 3.
"Far from rogue cops, this is the punishment meted out to working people - especially those of us who are Black and Latino - day in and day out," Harris said. "The Democratic and Republican parties, and the government they run, bear direct responsibility for this attack because they have been spearheading the anti-immigrant, chauvinist, and `America First' ideological offensive."
SWP vice presidential candidate Laura Garza said that the immediate protests in Los Angeles, and numerous other actions over the past months by Chicano and Mexican workers and youth, show that "the wealthy rulers of this country have a problem: they are running into resistance. Their policies have brought about a new rise of the struggle of Chicano and Mexican population in the United States. In protests, conferences, and demonstrations thousands are saying, `We will not be intimidated or pushed back.' "
Harris noted that the good response to a national march planned for October 12 to defend immigrant rights is another example of this working-class resistance. "SWP candidates and our supporters will be joining all such actions to call for an end to deportations, equal rights for immigrants, and for immediate prosecution of cops who beat workers," Harris said.
Harris is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at the Hormel meatpacking company in Atlanta. Garza is currently a staff writer for the Militant. Both have several decades of activity in the fight for Chicano and Black rights, in addition to the labor movement.
In the interview Harris pointed out that the cop beating in Los Angeles County is an extension of the anti-working-class policies of the wealthy minority and the parties that serve them.
The fact that the U.S. Congress did not even bring the issue of the minimum wage to the floor last week, "is part of the capitalist economic crisis and the U.S. rulers' drive to take more surplus value from the labor of working people for themselves," Harris said. "Any fight for raising the minimum wage is more difficult today than in the past; working people and the labor movement will have to put up more of a struggle to accomplish this goal.
"Our campaign demands the minimum wage be raised to union scale. This fight is not only about raising living standards, but about building unity within the working class to be able to more effectively fight for our rights," the socialist candidate said.
"It will take a fighting labor movement to win gains. Unions need to join with those protesting police brutality and anti- immigrant violence as well," Harris stated.
Pointing to the AFL-CIO endorsement of President William Clinton's reelection effort, Harris noted that "Clinton has been in league with the Republicans in making sure there has been no increase in the minimum wage for four years. Labor can't place itself at the beck and call of the parties that defend capitalism. We don't need more `friends' in Congress or the White House like the ones we've had. We need a movement of working people independent of the ruling rich that fights unequivocally for the interests of the exploited and oppressed."
"The fact that two sheriff's deputies can savagely beat - apparently without fear of reprisal - two Mexican workers in full daylight on the side of an Interstate highway is just one more demonstration that there is not a `level playing field' in the United States today," Garza said. "Those who are attacking affirmative action programs claim that racism and discrimination are a thing of the past, that it is not part of `America' anymore. They are dead wrong." She encouraged participation in the April 14 March to Fight the Right in San Francisco that includes defending women's rights and affirmative action.
At the end of March the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opened a new assault on affirmative action programs. The court ruled in the case Hopwood vs. State of Texas that "the use of race in admissions for diversity in higher education contradicts, rather than furthers, the aims of equal protection." The ruling, in the case of several white students who sued the University of Texas Law School seeking an end to affirmative action preferences for Blacks and Mexican- Americans, is now appealed to the Supreme Court.
At the same time, California governor Peter Wilson and others turned in signatures in that state to place an initiative on the November ballot that would prohibit the government from using affirmative action programs in hiring and contracting and in admissions to public schools.
Several days later Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole told an audience in Orange Country that "We ought to do away with preferences. It ought to be based on merit! This is America!"
"Our opponents in this election," Garza said, "while cutting social spending, are calling for building walls, erecting more jails, and putting more cops on the border. They are responsible for feeding the atmosphere of thuggery that is personified in the actions of the Riverside cops. This is part of a drive to reverse past gains of Blacks, Latinos, and women, as they seek to shore up their system at our expense.
"But if the employers and their mouthpieces think they can head down that road without encountering a fight they are wrong. We battled to tear down the racist system of Jim Crow, to end the inferior system of `separate but equal' segregated education, and to open up equal pay and job access for women. The labor movement can strengthen itself by fighting to defend those gains and to prevent divisions based on nationality from permanently condemning a layer of the working class to second- class status."