Vol. 72/No. 40      October 13, 2008

“Let’s look, for example, at the crisis in banking,” replied Calero. “Vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden says, ‘Open the books.’ What he means is, open the books to a panel of ruling-class politicians and capitalists who are trying to stabilize the system so they can keep on exploiting us.

“The socialist campaign says, ‘Open the books to the inspection of working people.’ We should know where the profits are going. We should know how the money is being spent. There should be representatives of the small farmers and of the unions on commissions that have access to the ‘business secrets’ of the giant banks and corporations.”

“Having access to the facts is a condition for working people being able to defend ourselves,” Calero explained. “Earlier this year a company put 143 million pounds of contaminated beef on the market. Hillary Clinton said the lesson was we need a better ‘recall system.’ But we say, workers should be able to shut the plant down when that happens.”

Another student followed up, “If you nationalize a company, don’t you give it over to the government?”

Calero replied, “My point is nationalization under workers’ control. Take the energy industry. If we nationalize it and run it under workers’ control, workers will determine line speed, safety conditions, and have the power to stop pollution. This will be a step toward working people gaining experience and confidence in our ability to manage production, advancing us further toward taking political power out of the hands of the capitalists.”

A young man asked, “What can be done about the political repression that is developing in this country?”

“The ruling rich in this country are anticipating greater resistance by working people as austerity conditions are imposed on us,” Calero said. “They are developing new instruments of repression in order to keep us in line.

“Our challenge is realizing our class interests and organizing independently of the capitalist political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. We need to forge a revolutionary movement that can replace the ruling rich with a workers and farmers government.”

Calero also participated in the discussion at a meeting of more than 30 people at Metro State University in St. Paul on the theme, “Hurricanes: The Politics of Disaster Response in Cuba, Haiti and the United States.”

The socialist was interviewed on two radio stations and by the daily student newspaper at the University of Minnesota. He also campaigned at the entrance to the Dakota Premium Foods beef slaughterhouse in South St. Paul.  
 
 
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