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Vol. 74/No. 36      September 27, 2010

 
Iowa socialist candidate
debates opponents
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE  
DES MOINES, Iowa—David Rosenfeld, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of Iowa, appeared on the "Deace in the Afternoon" radio program on WHO Newsradio September 3. Talk show host Steve Deace had invited Rosenfeld, Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate Eric Cooper, and Brian English from the Iowa Family Policy Center, a rightist “profamily” organization, to appear on the show.

Deace pointed out that Democratic incumbent Chet Culver and Republican challenger Terry Branstad have organized three public debates excluding Rosenfeld, Cooper, Iowa Party candidate Jonathan Narcisse, and “fathers’ rights” advocate Gregory Hughes.

“All the candidates running for governor ought to be included in the debates,” Rosenfeld said. “If I am excluded, there is not going to be a voice of the working class present on the stage. Nobody is going to talk about the scope and the depth of the economic crisis, the need to legalize immigrants, the need to build a movement to organize to defend ourselves against the economic crisis. We need to build a labor party, and above all the working class needs to take political power. These are issues that deserve a hearing in the debate.”

Noting the persistent high unemployment in Iowa and the United States, Deace asked how to bring jobs to Iowa.

Libertarian candidate Cooper called for getting rid of the minimum wage and letting average wages fall to $5 an hour to make “all the unemployment problems disappear.”

The Socialist Workers campaign is for raising the minimum wage to union scale, Rosenfeld said. “It’s capitalism itself that has brought us to this point,” he explained, referring to the grinding economic crisis. “We need to fight for the capitalist government to launch a massive public works program to build roads, schools, levees, and hospitals, to staff them, and create millions of jobs. We need a shorter workweek with no cut in pay.”

Deace asked the panelists about Branstad’s proposals for agriculture. There are some 92,600 crop and livestock farmers in Iowa. Branstad, who was Iowa governor from 1983 to 1999, calls for fewer regulations and for promoting “partnerships between universities” and farmers to come up with a “Five-Year Strategic Vision and Implementation Plan” for agriculture.

Cooper mocked the plan as a Soviet-style measure, and asserted that the market would solve all farmers’ problems. Rosenfeld condemned both the Democrats and Republicans for doing nothing to aid working farmers, while bolstering the profits of big agribusiness.

The Socialist Workers candidate described talking with dairy farmers who are caught in the squeeze between high input costs and low prices for their product. He called for “a program that takes away the risk for these working farmers to produce, stops all foreclosures, and guarantees income from the government to cover their costs of production.”

Rosenfeld was interviewed a few days later by the Iowa City Press Citizen. SWP congressional candidate Rebecca Williamson and Margaret Trowe, the party’s candidate for Iowa secretary of agriculture, campaigned at the Iowa State University “ClubFest” September 8, an event where student organizations have booths and discuss their plans for the semester with the thousands of students who attend.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialists join action against banning mosque
Washington: Socialist greets Teamster strikers
SWP candidates visit site of toxic chemical release  
 
 
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