Vol. 75/No. 27      July 25, 2011

Calero, SWP campaign director for the special September 13 election in the 9th Congressional District, was reading from a press release announcing the campaign. The dinner and program, attended by some 80 people, was held at the end of a second day collecting signatures to place Hoeppner on the ballot.

“I grew up in Woodside, an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Queens,” Hoeppner said. “Today my neighborhood has people from all over the world—Egypt, China, Korea, to name a few—and we’re facing the same problems working people in other parts of the world face.” He noted the example of the elementary school across from the house where he lives. “P.S. 151 used to have a playground. Now it’s filled with classroom modules,” he said. “Meanwhile, they’re shutting down other schools and firing teachers. They’ve closed St. John’s Hospital on Queens Boulevard.

“My dad, who’s a retired fireman, congratulated me on my nomination today and slipped me a few bucks” for the campaign, Hoeppner told the crowd.

“I don’t say vote for me because I’ll solve the problems you’re facing,” Hoeppner said. “That’s impossible for one person to do. But we will join with any workers fighting the injustices of this system today, and we’ll work with them to build a movement to replace it with one based on working-class solidarity.”

Hoeppner said campaign supporters will travel to Germantown, Maryland, in late July and early August to join others in defending a clinic there from opponents of a woman’s right to choose abortion, who are mobilizing to try to shut it down.

A striking building worker in Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ met supporters circulating Hoeppner’s petitions and invited the candidate to visit the picket line in Queens (see article on this page). Another worker urged him to come to a rally of Sky Chefs food-service workers at Kennedy Airport. Immigrant college students fighting for legalization asked him to speak to their club.

Calero, who is a spokesman for the party’s 9th C.D. campaign, was SWP candidate for U.S. president in 2004 and 2008. Last year he ran in Harlem for the seat in the 15th district.

Three people who met socialist campaigners while petitioning attended the Saturday night event.

Speaking at the rally Steve Clark, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and also editor of the Militant, welcomed the campaign, saying its example would help transform party branches not just in New York but elsewhere to better enable them to respond politically to growing numbers of workers looking for ways to combat the consequences of the capitalist crisis.

“We’ll come out of this campaign a stronger party,” Clark said, equipped to fight more effectively alongside other workers in resisting deteriorating job conditions, defending workers’ rights to organize and act, and demanding jobs in face of an unemployment rate closer to 20 percent or more, not the 9 percent the government claims.

In response to a question about the unemployment crisis, Hoeppner said the SWP campaign, among other things, calls for a government-funded public works program to create jobs for millions rebuilding roads, railways, and other crumbling infrastructure and constructing schools, hospitals, day-care centers, and other projects working people need.

Asked by someone why the campaign doesn’t talk more about all the money going to CEOs’ salaries and the war budget, Clark said those are a symptom, not the cause, of the capitalist crisis. The labor of working people is the source of all wealth, he said, “but most is appropriated by the ruling families who own the factories, banks, and land.

“The only way to change that,” Clark said, “is to follow the example here of what workers and farmers did in Cuba more than half a century ago: make a revolution to take power away from those wealthy families and replace it with a government of working people.”

Nearly $2,300 was raised in a campaign fund appeal.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialists file for N.Y. ballot spot
Socialist Workers Party joins fighters on picket lines, in the streets
Support an independent working-class campaign!
Queens, Brooklyn workers help get socialist on ballot  
 
 
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