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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 17 May 2, 2016
Reporter’s notebook: SWP candidates on
campaign trail
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Socialist Workers Party vice-presidential
candidate Osborne Hart met here April 8 with more than a dozen relatives
of people killed by city or county cops.
“In 2013 we started to do protests week after week because we needed
answers, and more families came,” Nicole Ramirez Moran told Hart. Her
brother Jorge Ramirez Jr. was killed by Bakersfield police in September
2013.
“The media pull up things done when people who have been killed were
young” to justify the actions of the cops, said Serena Gonzales, who
hosted the meeting. Her unarmed brother James De La Rosa was shot and
killed in 2014 by cops who claimed he reached for his waistband as he
exited his car. “Enough is enough,” she said.
“As Malcolm X pointed out, they try to turn the victims into the
criminals and the criminals into the victims,” Hart said. “Police
brutality isn’t a case of bad apples, but of the system that uses cops
to keep the working class in line, to serve and protect the wealthy
rulers. The protests around the country have had an impact. You see
charges against some cops now.”
Hart said several mothers active in the fight against police brutality,
who were invited by the Federation of Cuban Women, would join May 1
workers’ celebrations in Cuba. “They made a revolution there and the
role of police is totally different because of it,” he said.
— Laura Garza
LONGVIEW, Wash. — Osborne Hart and Mary Martin, SWP candidate for
governor of Washington, met here April 5 with union dock and paper mill
workers who have gone through labor struggles in recent years.
Dan Coffman, former President of International Longshore and Warehouse
Union Local 21 and a leader of the 2011-12 fight against EGT
Development’s union busting, told Hart and Martin he appreciates
Militant coverage of the fight of ranchers and farmers in the West.
“Robert Finicum was murdered by the government and the Hammonds never
should have been put in prison, let alone twice,” he said, referring to
the FBI and police killing of Finicum in Oregon Jan. 26 and the frame-up
of ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond that Finicum and others were
protesting by occupying a wildlife refuge.
— Edwin Fruit
WASHINGTON — “We need $15 and a union right now. These politicians never
think about the cost of living. When I was 15, I made 99 cents an hour
and it went further than $11.50 today,” Danielle Hendrix, a cashier at
the National Zoo, told Glova Scott, Socialist Workers Party candidate
for U.S. Congress here at a protest by federal site contract workers
April 14.
“It will be a fight,” said Scott, “but it’s not impossible for millions
of working people to organize unions and use them to fight for workers
power.”
— Arlene Rubinstein
Related articles:
‘Workers need our own party, a labor party’
Socialist Workers Party joins labor struggles, goes for ballot
Spring subscription drive, April 2-May 17 (week 2) (chart)
Militant Fighting Fund, April 2-May 17 (week 2) (chart)
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