> Harris takes socialist campaign to Florida
> [From the Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, Oct. 2, 2000]
>
> BY BILL KALMAN
>
> PLANT CITY, Florida--"Conditions of life for working
> people won't get better unless we fight to make them better," said James
> Harris, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, at
> meetings in Miami, Plant City, Orlando, and Tampa from September 14
> through 18. "And this means fighting for a government of our own--one of
> workers and farmers. This can only come about through a revolutionary
> struggle of tens of millions, acting in our own class interests as we
> resist and oppose the brutality, racism, economic ruin, and unrelenting
> assaults on the job by the employers."
>
> Many of the 32 Florida residents who signed up to be electors for the
> ticket of Harris and Margaret Trowe were among those who came to one of
> these campaign meetings. Because of these electors, the socialist
> alternative for president will be on the Florida ballot this fall for
> the first time ever.
>
> Harris began his Florida tour by meeting with Harvey Johnson, a green
> bean farmer in Homestead, the agricultural center south of Miami.
> Johnson, who farms 150 acres, is a plaintiff in the Black farmers'
> lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "When I started here
> in 1985, there were 12 Black farmers," he told Harris. "Now I'm the last
> one." Back then, Johnson could get $8 per bushel for machine-picked
> beans, and $10 for handpicked. "Now I get $6 and $8," he said.
> Meanwhile, his cost of production per bushel has risen to about $7.35.
> "Another year like last year and I'll have to quit," he told Harris.
> Like many other farmers who face racial discrimination at the hands U.S.
> government agencies in addition to exploitation at the hands of the
> banks and capitalist monopolies, Johnson has yet to receive one cent he
> is due according to the ruling against the government from the lawsuit.
>
> Harris contrasted the conditions facing working farmers in the United
> states with that of farmers in Cuba. At a meeting in Miami later that
> day, he said the Cuban revolution made it possible to guarantee farmers
> the right to farm. "In the 42 years of the Cuban revolution, no farmer
> has been driven from the land because of debt. This is because since
> capitalism was overturned the drive for profit by the capitalist food
> monopolies has been removed from food production. It has been removed as
> a factor in society as a whole and in its place the needs and interests
> of working people have taken top priority."
>
> On September 16 Harris spoke at a reception here in Plant City hosted by
> Karl Butts, a vegetable farmer. Butts and Harris participated in a trip
> to Cuba earlier this year by working farmers involved in protests to
> defend their land and livelihoods. Four other farmers came to the
> meeting.
>
> "Our campaign is a campaign of participation in ongoing struggles,"
> Harris said, "and the construction of an organized leadership of working
> people that can lead those battles to victory." Jo Ann Glavich and her
> sister Doris, both of whom farm in central Florida, came to the meeting.
> "It takes a lot of fire in a lot of guts to make a change," she said.
> "There's a change in the consciousness of working people taking place
> right now," Harris responded.
>
> The Glaviches farmed about 40 acres of strawberries between them, until
> they applied DuPont Benlate DF fungicide on their fields in 1989 and in
> 1990. The chemical left a toxic residue that decreased plant yields,
> they said, rendering their land virtually worthless for strawberry
> production. While DuPont compensated the farmers for the two years they
> used the chemical, the agrichemical giant has refused to pay anything
> towards crops lost for the rest of the decade. The sisters have been
> fighting DuPont ever since.
>
> U.S. intervention in Colombia One question that came up at a couple of
> the meetings was Washington's bipartisan drive to provide massive
> military aid to Colombia, allegedly to stem the drug trade. "There is no
> war on drugs," Harris explained. "Drugs are big business. The main way
> drugs come into the country is not through individual couriers who have
> swallowed balloons; it is on big planes and big ships. International
> drug trafficking can only be organized the same way as any other
> capitalist enterprise: with the assistance of the capitalist state. The
> military aid to the Colombian government--and U.S. moves in the
> region--are used to help them check the struggles of Colombian working
> people and are aimed at massive upsurges such as that which occurred in
> Ecuador earlier this year."
>
> Earlier one morning Harris and several supporters campaigned outside the
> hiring hall of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), which
> organizes the workers who load and unload the freighters at the Port of
> Miami. Harris found widespread opposition to the police beating of a
> young Black man after he peacefully surrendered after a car chase, shown
> on TV the previous evening. Thirteen longshoremen bought copies of the
> campaign newspaper, the Militant, with a headline on the march against
> police brutality in Washington, D.C.
>
> Harris also spoke with workers at Tartan Textile, an industrial laundry
> in Pompano Beach where members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial
> and Textile Employees (UNITE) conducted a spirited strike earlier this
> summer. A number of Haitian and Latino workers took information about
> the socialist campaign and several invited the socialists to return the
> following Saturday. Campaign supporters sold three copies of the new
> Pathfinder pamphlet, The Working Class and the Transformation of
> Education, at the two plant-gate events.
>
> Harris also addressed meetings at a community bookstore in Orlando
> [The Stone Soup Collective] and at the University of South Florida in
> Tampa. His supporters set up a campaign table in front of the student
> union, selling a dozen copies of the Militant along with a number of
> Pathfinder books, including Women's Evolution, Socialism and Man in Cuba,
> and the Communist Manifesto. Nine people signed up to find out more about
> the socialist campaign.
>
> Harris was interviewed by the USF affiliate of National Public Radio;
> WMMF, a community radio station in Tampa; and the Miami Times, a
> newspaper oriented to the Black community in Miami.
>
> Bill Kalman is a railroad worker in Hialeah.