The interview capped a week of campaigning that included a TV debate among the mayoral candidates and a protest at the University of South Florida demanding the reinstatement of Sami Al-Arian. A Militant Labor Forum featuring the candidate launched the fundraising effort for the five-week campaign.
The debate will be broadcast on public television Channel 16 and on City of Tampa cable TV throughout February. Campaign supporters are planning to go out street campaigning on February 2--the first day it airs.
The debate was taped on January 24. Upon being introduced to Fruit at the TV studio, Pam Iorio, Supervisor of Elections for the past 10 years and herself a candidate for mayor, acknowledged, "You made history with this campaign." Iorio was referring to the successful effort the socialist made to force Tampa city officials to open the electoral process to include write-in candidates, thereby making it possible for a working-class voice to be heard.
In the 30 seconds Fruit had to introduce herself, she said, "I am a meat packer and a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. I have been active in working-class politics for more than 30 years defending workers’ rights, which are under severe attack today as part of the war drive both at home and abroad by the U.S. rulers and their government in Washington.
"There will be no economic recovery for the working class," she continued, "and there will be no end to the horrors of war until the working class takes political power in this country and establishes a government of the producers--workers and farmers."
The protest supporting Al-Arian coincided with a January 24 grievance hearing between the university administration and the United Faculty of Florida, the union that has supported Al-Arian. Fourteen months ago the USF president banned Al-Arian from campus and began the attempt to fire him from his teaching position.
A number of speakers referred to the war and protested the attacks on civil liberties. Addressing the protest, Fruit said that "what is happening to Sami, an outspoken defender of Palestinian rights, is one important example of the attacks on workers’ rights that are part of the drive toward war."
She went on to say, "Much as we do not want to see this war happen, we must be prepared for the fact that it will happen."
An angry participant in the crowd yelled out, "No it won’t! Some of us were in Washington last weekend. Where were you?"
Fruit replied that she had participated in the demonstration against the war outside MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and that it is important to protest. "But we must also understand why the rulers are driven to war," she said--"that it is not a war on terrorism, and it is not about weapons of mass destruction, as they claim; but that they need to redivide the resources of the world."
One Arab-American man participating in the protest bought a subscription to the Militant, the pamphlet Palestine and the Arab Fight for Liberation, and donated $25 to the campaign.
The next evening Fruit spoke at the weekly Militant Labor Forum in Tampa. She was introduced by Young Socialists member Sonja Swanson, who said, "The goals of Fruit’s campaign reach far beyond the opportunist politicians opposing her. Fruit, along with the Socialist Workers Party, seeks to build a movement in the interests of working people, youth and farmers everywhere." Around $400 was raised at the meeting.
Fruit said that she would take her campaign to labor struggles, social protests, and into the arena of the antiwar demonstrations.
"We have seen some victories in the struggle against the death penalty, which is nothing more than one form of legal lynching in the U.S.," the candidate said. She pointed to the fight against the death penalty in Illinois that prompted Governor Ryan’s decision to empty death row in that state, and to the January 24 release, for lack of evidence, of Rudolph Holton from prison and death row. He is the 25th prisoner to be released from Florida’s death row since 1972.
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