Text version of the Militant, a socialist newspaper 
the Militant Socialist newspaper
about this site directory of local distributors how to subscribe submit a photo or image order bundles of the Militant to sell
news articles editorials columns contact us search view back issues
SOCIALIST WORKERS CAMPAIGN
The Militant this week
FRONT PAGE ARTICLES
Fuel price protests spread in Europe
Farmers, truckers, fishermen mobilize from Spain to Ireland
 
Strikers shut down Los Angeles bus system
 
Rally calls for right to return to Palestine
 
Locked-out Steelworkers at Kaiser win contract
 
FEATURE ARTICLES
'Militant' gets good response at march for Palestinian rights
 
Steps needed to collect contributions for fund
 
forums
calendar
SUB DRIVE
Overall sales chart
Submit Letter to the editor
submit forum
submit to calendar


A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people
Vol. 64/No. 37October 2, 2000


Harris takes socialist campaign to Florida
 
BY BILL KALMAN  
PLANT CITY, Florida--"Conditions of life for working people won't get better unless we fight to make them better," said James Harris, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, at meetings in Miami, Plant City, Orlando, and Tampa from September 14 through 18. "And this means fighting for a government of our own--one of workers and farmers. This can only come about through a revolutionary struggle of tens of millions, acting in our own class interests as we resist and oppose the brutality, racism, economic ruin, and unrelenting assaults on the job by the employers."

Many of the 32 Florida residents who signed up to be electors for the ticket of Harris and Margaret Trowe were among those who came to one of these campaign meetings. Because of these electors, the socialist alternative for president will be on the Florida ballot this fall for the first time ever.

Harris began his Florida tour by meeting with Harvey Johnson, a green bean farmer in Homestead, the agricultural center south of Miami. Johnson, who farms 150 acres, is a plaintiff in the Black farmers' lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "When I started here in 1985, there were 12 Black farmers," he told Harris. "Now I'm the last one." Back then, Johnson could get $8 per bushel for machine-picked beans, and $10 for handpicked. "Now I get $6 and $8," he said. Meanwhile, his cost of production per bushel has risen to about $7.35. "Another year like last year and I'll have to quit," he told Harris. Like many other farmers who face racial discrimination at the hands U.S. government agencies in addition to exploitation at the hands of the banks and capitalist monopolies, Johnson has yet to receive one cent he is due according to the ruling against the government from the lawsuit.

Harris contrasted the conditions facing working farmers in the United states with that of farmers in Cuba. At a meeting in Miami later that day, he said the Cuban revolution made it possible to guarantee farmers the right to farm. "In the 42 years of the Cuban revolution, no farmer has been driven from the land because of debt. This is because since capitalism was overturned the drive for profit by the capitalist food monopolies has been removed from food production. It has been removed as a factor in society as a whole and in its place the needs and interests of working people have taken top priority."

On September 16 Harris spoke at a reception here in Plant City hosted by Karl Butts, a vegetable farmer. Butts and Harris participated in a trip to Cuba earlier this year by working farmers involved in protests to defend their land and livelihoods. Four other farmers came to the meeting.

"Our campaign is a campaign of participation in ongoing struggles," Harris said, "and the construction of an organized leadership of working people that can lead those battles to victory." Jo Ann Glavich and her sister Doris, both of whom farm in central Florida, came to the meeting. "It takes a lot of fire in a lot of guts to make a change," she said. "There's a change in the consciousness of working people taking place right now," Harris responded.

The Glaviches farmed about 40 acres of strawberries between them, until they applied DuPont Benlate DF fungicide on their fields in 1989 and in 1990. The chemical left a toxic residue that decreased plant yields, they said, rendering their land virtually worthless for strawberry production. While DuPont compensated the farmers for the two years they used the chemical, the agrichemical giant has refused to pay anything towards crops lost for the rest of the decade. The sisters have been fighting DuPont ever since.  
 
U.S. intervention in Colombia
One question that came up at a couple of the meetings was Washington's bipartisan drive to provide massive military aid to Colombia, allegedly to stem the drug trade. "There is no war on drugs," Harris explained. "Drugs are big business. The main way drugs come into the country is not through individual couriers who have swallowed balloons; it is on big planes and big ships. International drug trafficking can only be organized the same way as any other capitalist enterprise: with the assistance of the capitalist state. The military aid to the Colombian government--and U.S. moves in the region--are used to help them check the struggles of Colombian working people and are aimed at massive upsurges such as that which occurred in Ecuador earlier this year."

Earlier one morning Harris and several supporters campaigned outside the hiring hall of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), which organizes the workers who load and unload the freighters at the Port of Miami. Harris found widespread opposition to the police beating of a young Black man after he peacefully surrendered after a car chase, shown on TV the previous evening. Thirteen longshoremen bought copies of the campaign newspaper, the Militant, with a headline on the march against police brutality in Washington, D.C.

Harris also spoke with workers at Tartan Textile, an industrial laundry in Pompano Beach where members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) conducted a spirited strike earlier this summer. A number of Haitian and Latino workers took information about the socialist campaign and several invited the socialists to return the following Saturday. Campaign supporters sold three copies of the new Pathfinder pamphlet, The Working Class and the Transformation of Education, at the two plant-gate events.

Harris also addressed meetings at a community bookstore in Orlando and at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His supporters set up a campaign table in front of the student union, selling a dozen copies of the Militant along with a number of Pathfinder books, including Women's Evolution, Socialism and Man in Cuba, and the Communist Manifesto. Nine people signed up to find out more about the socialist campaign.

Harris was interviewed by the USF affiliate of National Public Radio; WMMF, a community radio station in Tampa; and the Miami Times, a newspaper oriented to the Black community in Miami.

Bill Kalman is a railroad worker in Hialeah.

 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home