SEATTLE — The Socialist Workers Party candidates here, Rebecca Williamson for King County Executive and Jacob Perasso for mayor, participated in a candidates’ forum at the Filipino Community Center July 30 organized by the King County International Airport Community Coalition. Some 75 people came.
Perasso, a baker at Safeway and member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union, explained the SWP candidates are different from the others in that they speak for the working class and explain that capitalism can’t be reformed to work for our class.
“The capitalist system is rotten to the core. It will take struggles by working people and our unions to win what we need,” he said. “And ultimately we need to overthrow capitalist rule and take political power into our own hands.” He said that the SWP is organizing to do just that and invited participants to join the campaign.
Williamson, a freight rail worker and member of the SMART-TD union, said working people need to break from the Democratic and Republican parties. She explained the imperialist world order put in place after the U.S. emerged victorious after World War II in that battle over markets, influence and profits is coming apart. All the major capitalist powers are maneuvering against each other, which points toward another world war and possible nuclear conflagration. “Today’s social and political questions will be decided by which class rules,” she said.
In contrast, “my campaign is for unity,” mayoral candidate Clinton Bliss said, implying that workers and bosses could work together toward improving the city in the interests of all. Katie Wilson, who days later won the primary election, defeating the incumbent Bruce Harrel (who did not participate in the forum), said she was running because “we can do better” in reforming city policies, claiming her reform campaign has made life better for working people.
In response to a question about how to provide more housing, Bliss said “public/private partnerships” are needed. Wilson said that increasing zoning for building housing and “streamlining the process” would help.
“The housing question and homelessness can’t be solved under capitalism,” said Perasso. “Workers need to fight for higher wages and a massive government-funded public works program to build affordable housing and provide jobs for those who need them. But to solve the problem requires building a mass movement of millions of working people to make a revolution like workers and peasants did in Cuba.”
Candidates were asked how to combat environmental pollution from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that mainly falls on working-class communities.
“Mobilize our unions”
“Housing for working people is more often built in flood-prone areas and areas of higher pollution, cheaper land, where the capitalists can make a profit. That’s how the capitalist market works, it prices working people out of safer housing,” Perasso said. “We need to mobilize our unions to fight for safer working-class housing and workers control of production and safety on the job.”
In response to a question about recent federal cuts to Medicaid, Wilson called for seeking “progressive revenue sources,” or taxes on the wealthy, to reduce the impact of the cuts.
“The cuts are an attack on the working class and we need to oppose them,” Perasso said. “But to end the problems that stem from a medical system designed around producing profit for the bosses and investors, health care needs to be taken out of the realm of profits completely.
“Here again, the Cuban Revolution is a good example. The revolutionary combatants forged the basis of a medical system based on human solidarity beginning in the opening years of the revolutionary struggle, setting up clinics that treated everyone without regard for profit.”
Perasso also explained that rising Jew-hatred was a dangerous threat to the working class and workers need to defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews. He and Williamson called on workers to fight for amnesty for all undocumented workers in the United States to unite the working class and join fights against deportations of union workers and others.
Many in the audience liked what the SWP candidates had to say. Several came by the SWP campaign literature table afterward to talk and get more information. One of the other candidates for King County Executive bought a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.