The day before, Trowe spoke with several Arab-American students staffing a booth at an International Fair at Wayne State University in Detroit. Asked about Washing-ton's support to the Zionist regime, Trowe noted that both the Democratic and Republican parties supported the creation of Israel and the theft of the land from the Palestinians, and have backed it up with arms and billions of dollars in aid. The U.S. rulers, she said, are advancing their own class interests in the Mideast, seeking to strengthen their foothold in the oil-rich region and to keep working people in check.

Trowe also campaigned outside two plants. At the Iowa Beef Processing plant, where the socialist candidate got a friendly response, one of the workers described the conditions they face. "They keep wanting us to go faster and faster and work more and more hours," she told Trowe. At American Axle, a large plant organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW), a unionist told her, "They don't care about safety. They don't want the machines to stop, they don't want the line to stop--they just want you to put your hands in and keep the line going." Five workers bought the Militant and one got a subscription after talking to the socialist.

At a Militant Labor Forum here, Trowe shared the platform with Chris Hoeppner, Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Senate. Hoeppner pointed to the protests by working people against the killing by the Detroit police of two workers--Dwight Turner and Errol Shaw, a deaf man. "The biggest challenge we face as working people," said Hoeppner, "is to throw off the self-image the rulers try to give us, the image that we're incapable of changing things." The combative protest organized by members of UAW Local 600 against the killing of Turner, their co-worker, he said, showed how that self-image can change. Several of these workers took the floor at a community meeting of 500 people and, in the presence of many cops and their supporters, condemned the killing and explained that "this is a union question."

Trowe noted that "Detroit is the police murder capital of the country," with 47 police shootings since 1995, including three in the past month. The employers and their government enact an extrajudicial death penalty every day, she explained, not only through the cops on the street but through the bosses' brutal disregard for safety on the job, with workers' lives and limbs sacrificed to the altar of profits.

"Look at the two capitalist candidates debate their plans for prescription drugs. The best plan makes you pay $2,000 dollars out of pocket. Isn't that a death sentence for the hundreds of thousands or millions who don't have $2,000? For capitalists, we have no value after we stop being producers for them."

One person attending the forum was a nurse who met the socialist candidates that day at a farmers' market. She told Trowe that when she worked in the emergency room, elderly people in their 80s would come in with pneumonia, but their fever might not be high enough to admit them according to the hospital guidelines. The medical staff would have to either lie about their temperature to get them admitted or put them in a corner and hope their temperature would rise.

This increasing brutality, a normal feature of capitalism today, Trowe said, is what is pushing one group of workers after another to stand up and fight for their dignity. And, she added, it is a reason to join the socialist movement, a vehicle to organize the power of workers and farmers to make a revolution in this country.