“The labor movement needs to oppose all moves to cut current or future Social Security benefits, Medicare programs, or workers compensation,” Harris said. “At the same time we must recognize that the existing social security system does not meet the needs of working people. We need to fight to extend Social Security to cover universal, government-guaranteed, lifetime health care for everyone in this country.”

The fight around Social Security is not primarily an economic question, Harris said, but the great political and moral crisis of our time. It is a class question.

“Social Security was not a gift from any ruling-class politician. It was won through the labor battles in the 1930s and extended as a by-product of the civil rights movement in the 1960s,” Harris stated. “We can only effectively resist cuts in existing pension benefits and fight to extend Social Security with the same kind of working-class mobilizations.”

Harris, a textile worker in “right-to-work-for-less” Georgia, said that the need to organize trade unions and use and extend union power to resist the bosses’ attacks on wages and working conditions is the number one issue of the SWP’s 2005 campaign.

“I am with the socialist campaign 100 percent on that,” replied a teacher who told Harris that Atlanta is one of three major U.S. cities where teachers have no collective bargaining rights.

At the same time, Harris added, the SWP campaign starts with the world, opposing the drive by Washington and its allies to prevent nations oppressed by imperialism from developing nuclear power and other sources of energy needed to expand electrification in order to bring much of humanity out of darkness. “Countries like Iran, which is a major oil producer like others in the Mideast, and other semicolonial countries, have the right to develop nuclear power to achieve economic and social advances and decrease their dependency on a diminishing natural resource, petroleum,” Harris said.

At a May 7 campaign kick-off, Harris noted that while incumbent Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin was recently chosen by Time magazine as one of the five best mayors in the United States, “This sterling image is far from the reality of most working people in the region. We have a completely different view.” Harris noted that Atlanta ranks fifth in child poverty rates among U.S. cities with populations exceeding 100,000.

“Forty percent of this city’s children live in official poverty,” stated Harris. “But this is not simply the result of the policies of one mayor—Democrat or Republican—or her predecessors. The problem is capitalism. Atlanta mirrors the trends that are evident in the country as a whole. They reflect the condition of the world economy—the actual condition of world capitalism, which is in deepening economic crisis, a world depression. The roots of the crisis are international, not local.”

While campaigning in downtown Atlanta, Harris was invited to attend a prisoners’ rights meeting. This is a big question in Georgia, which is the number one state in per capita prison population and is home to over 40 prisons.

The SWP campaign participated in two public forums organized by Fairness for Prisoners’ Families & Communities United for Action, Power & Justice. The meetings reported on a victory the group won in March against the Board of Pardons and Paroles voiding the board’s “90 percent rule.” Under this policy, implemented in 1998, anyone convicted of one of 20 different crimes in Georgia had to serve 90 percent of their sentence before being considered for parole. The rule affected as many as 18,000 inmates.

“Working people caught in the coils of the U.S. judicial system know we are on enemy ground. We fight to delay injustice, to buy time, to mobilize broad popular support that can protect us from being railroaded,” Harris said. “A degree of justice is something workers sometimes win despite the legal system, not because of it. The prison population in the United States doubled under the Clinton administration. A similar trend continues under the Bush administration. The horrible injustice of the death penalty in the United States is anti-working-class and racist to its core.”

Harris said the SWP campaign supports the initiative by Fairness for Prisoners’ Families that calls for ending the state-secret status of parole files. The law makes it impossible for the prisoners or their lawyers to have access to their own records. “This is an outrageous curtailment of basic democratic rights, and as such it should be resisted,” Harris said. “What is happening today and in recent years at Guantánamo, what is happening with the ‘preventive detention’ of U.S. citizens, what is happening to the curtailment of the right to appeal deportations, targets us above all, not as suspicious foreigners, but as workers who are today and will in the future resist the brutality capitalism has in store for us.”

2005 Socialist Workers Party election campaigns