Vol. 77/No. 39 November 4, 2013
Benson and one of his mayoral opponents, Al Bartell, were both asked, “What will you do to help the little people?” Bartell said he would create an office of public engagement to hear people’s concerns.
Benson said the way forward was for workers to organize and fight, citing the example of the “Atlanta Public School bus drivers who have been fighting through their union in public protests demanding back pay for training days they had to attend, better working conditions and respect.”
Rachele Fruit, running for city council on the SWP ticket with Benson, took part in the program. On Oct. 7 she joined school bus drivers, members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1644, at a school board meeting to press their demands.
“Workers in Atlanta face the same attacks as workers throughout the world and are fighting for the same things — the right to organize unions, livable wages, decent health care and education,” Fruit said at the Oct. 14 candidates’ event.
“The Affordable Care Act brings us not one step closer to government-funded, universal medical care,” Fruit said.
“We say that health care, child care, elder care, education, the most basic necessities of life and culture should not be commodities that are bought and sold, but should be considered basic human rights as they are in Cuba,” Fruit said. “These conquests in Cuba have only been possible because workers and farmers there made a revolution in 1959 and wrested political power from the capitalist exploiters. That’s why Cuba is enemy number one to the U.S. rulers.”
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On Oct. 17 Seth Galinsky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Queens borough president in New York City, and Dan Fein, the party’s candidate for mayor, joined hundreds of Haitian-Americans, Dominicans and others to protest the Sept. 23 ruling by the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic that could strip citizenship from as many as 300,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent.
“Wi nou kapab” (“Yes we can” in creole), Galinsky said, addressing the demonstrators. “The decision of the Constitutional Court taking away the citizenship of Dominicans of Haitian descent is not just an attack on them and on Haitians, it is an attack on the entire working class in the Dominican Republic.
“The bosses want to divide the working class,” he said, “they try to do the same thing here in the United States.
“They try to avoid the blame for growing joblessness and their deepening attacks on workers, attacks that flow from the crisis of their capitalist system, by scapegoating immigrants,” Galinsky said. “Workers, no matter where we’re from, have the same enemy — the bosses who exploit our labor to fill their bank accounts.
“We say no deportations in the Dominican Republic and no deportations right here in the United States,” Galinsky told the crowd.
— John Studer