Vol. 73/No. 35      September 14, 2009

Amanda Ulman, a 34-year-old garment worker and the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor, has been certified by election officials as an official candidate on the ballot. Ulman filed documents and paid the required fees August 26.

“The government of the billionaire rulers has launched a frontal assault on basic living conditions of working people, from jobs and wages to pensions, health care, housing, and essential public services,” said Ulman. “Central to these attacks is maximizing the exploitation of immigrant workers, especially those without documents, which drives down the wages of all workers. This is why we see the legalization of all workers without papers as a life and death question for the working class.”

Supporters of Ulman’s campaign raised the $1,250 needed to file for a place on the November ballot. While officially a “nonpartisan” race, the field of other candidates includes three Democrats and one Republican.

“The Socialist Workers candidates in Houston are running against the capitalist class and all of their candidates in the Democratic and Republican parties who spearhead the assault on working people. These include mayoral candidates such as City Controller Annise Parker, former city attorney Gene Locke, Harris County Education Department Trustee Roy Morales, and City Councilman Peter Brown,” Ulman explained.

“The working class needs to answer this war on our class by organizing a revolutionary struggle to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers. We must reorganize the economy and all social relations, from top to bottom, in the interests of workers and farmers,” she said.

The next day Ulman traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, to join supporters of a woman’s right to choose abortion in defending the clinic of Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who has been targeted by antiabortion groups.

Ulman has been active in defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion in the Houston area and elsewhere, as well as in the fight for the immediate and unconditional legalization of undocumented workers. In her campaign she has also called for immediate withdrawal of all U.S.-led imperialist forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and everywhere else they are stationed.

Ulman joins Socialist Workers candidates in state and city campaigns across the country in putting forward immediate demands to protect working people in face of the devastation the ruling class is organizing and to unify the working class in struggle to demand: guaranteed unemployment compensation at union scale for all workers until they find a job; increase the federal minimum wage to union scale; a federally funded crash public works program to put millions to work at union scale to build schools, roads, and public transportation; no cuts in medical benefits for any worker laid off from their job—guaranteed lifetime medical care and retiree pensions for all; immediate, unconditional legalization of all undocumented workers; and an end to all income taxes on workers.

Joining Ulman in the campaign is Steve Warshell, 55, a Deer Park factory worker who is the SWP candidate for city controller here. Both are defenders of Cuba’s socialist revolution, and call for the immediate release of the five Cuban revolutionaries framed up on conspiracy charges and unjustly held in U.S. prisons solely for the “crime” of defending their country from attacks by armed counterrevolutionary groups launched from U.S. territory.
 
 
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