2004 Boston Tea Party call – We’re united, we’ll win!

>Archive - PWW Print Edition Archive - 2004 Editions - Jul 31, 2004


 

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BOSTON – Delegates to the Democratic National Convention and thousands more at satellite events filled this city with a resounding call: Save our country. Defeat George W. Bush in the Nov. 2 election!

“We’re united. We’ll win in November,” said delegate Roberto Alonzo of Dallas, one of 51 Democrats in the Texas Legislature who fled to Ardmore, Okla., in 2003 to stop a Republican scheme to steal five House seats through redistricting. “That is the fight for us,” he said. “To save those five House seats. The anger is still there and it will be there up through the election.”

Alabama delegate Ralph Paige is president of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, one of several Black farmer groups who won a discrimination lawsuit against the Agriculture Department several years ago. They recently denounced the Bush administration for refusing to pay thousands of Black farmers their promised settlement. “I won’t stand for another president who says one thing and does another,” Paige told the World. “This year I believe we have the organization to hold Kerry’s feet to the fire. We have to defeat Bush.”

Boston’s streets swarmed with crowds from many grassroots movements here to press their grievances against Bush and call for his defeat in November.

Charlene Coates, a Kucinich delegate from Parma, Ohio, said, “George Bush bolted and welded the doors shut on the American people. If Kerry is elected there will be a crack for peace, health care and jobs. We have to put a stop to Bush. To do that we have to maintain our alliances.”

California delegate Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers, told the World, “We need to raise the minimum wage and apply it to farm workers.” He denounced a clause in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” that requires schools toprovide military recruiters with students’ phone numbers and addresses. “Our children shouldn’t be targeted by military recruiters,” he said. Rodriguez also denounced the blockade of Cuba, which could be “another export market” that benefits farm workers.

Ana Dias and Bart Dame, both Kucinich delegates from Hawaii, where Kucinich won 51 percent of the primary vote, hailed his role in inspiring the fight for peace and justice. “Peace in Iraq and protecting our civil liberties brought people out in droves,” said Diaz. “We are working in our precincts to answer Bush’s campaign of mass deception.”

Daniel Buck, 19, of Fort Collins, Colo., was the youngest delegate from the Rocky Mountain state. Standing with his parents at a “Take Back America” rally outside the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, he told the World, “I think the election is going to be a ‘perfect storm’ for young people.” Citing the threat of a revived military draft, he said, “If Kerry plays it right, he can draw millions of young voters. I’m a student at Colorado State. Tuition is high and the Republicans want to push it higher. It’s insanity.”

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney drew cheers as he told the rally Bush is waging “a war on working people … a bare-knuckled assault that rewards the richest and produced the worst income inequality in a century … They launched a preemptive war on Iraq … and now it is the sons and daughters of America’s working people who are trapped in a bloody occupation.” The voters, he added, “want their sons and daughters back and they want them now!”

Sweeney hailed the power of the grassroots coalition working to oust Bush. Labor, he said, is committing all its energy and resources to the battle in the “strongest election effort in labor movement history.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) told the rally, “We have to have a huge vote margin to insure that the election is not stolen.” She urged a stronger effort to register single women and get them to the polls. “They are progressive and two-thirds of them vote Democratic,” she said.

The authors can be reached at pww @ pww.org.