Camejo as SWP Presidential Candidate on PBS Radio, 1976

The party's growth and the third candidate

Announcer: The nation's black press, national newsmakers, questions, answers, analysis. Your host, Reginald Bryant.

Bryant: Good evening, and welcome to Black Perspective on the News. This evening we are continuing our Options 76 coverage. We have as our guest, on this evening of the first of the presidential debates going on here in Philadelphia, Mr. Peter Camejo. Mr. Camejo is a candidate for President of the United States for the Socialist Workers Party. Mr. Camejo, it's indeed a pleasure to have you with us, and we will get into some of the things that you're interested in, which have to do with items such as free college educations, a year against the war [?], and perhaps, very significantly, you have been denounced in the past by Ronald Reagan. This had to do with involvement in large-scale demonstrations, but perhaps that denouncement is food for thought here. Asking the questions of our guest: Mr. Jerome Mondesire, who is the assistant to the editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer; from Mutual Black News in Washington, Charlotte Blount; and asking the first question from WPVI-TV Action News here in Philadelphia, Vern Odom.

Odom: Thank you, Reggie. Mr. Camejo, I wonder if you'd briefly trace the development of the Socialist Workers Party within the last ten years. I've noticed you growing in numbers, I would imagine, because you're on more and more ballots regularly, not only in national elections but in senatorial campaigns for states. So briefly, if you'd tell us how far you've spread at this point.

Camejo: Well, in the last period, we were very active in the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s and then extremely active in the antiwar movement. And in that period, a lot of new interest was created in socialist ideas. And recently, we've begun to become much more active in the labor movement because of the cutbacks and the economic crisis. So the interest in the Socialist Workers Party has been growing. Our vote's been growing. And, of course, the most recent thing that people know about the Socialist Workers Party is our landmark suit against the FBI and the CIA to try to end the harassment that's gone on against all dissent in this country, that's been making headlines throughout this country. I really consider this probably the most important event of the Bicentennial, as far as the Bill of Rights is concerned: that a party has stood up and said Americans have the right to have dissenting points of view without governmental harassment. And as you know, we still have 66 agents planted in our party as we're speaking here tonight, so this hasn't come to an end. A lot of people have heard of us because of this.

Question: How many ballots are you going to be on? How many states in the upcoming presidential election?

Camejo: There are 538 electoral votes, and outside of Carter and Ford, I am the third candidate in terms of electoral votes. We're now certified in over 300, and we will reach close to 400. There are only four people in the United States that will actually be on the ballot so they could actually win the election and have a majority of electoral votes. This is one of the reasons, not the only, but one of the reasons why I think that it's the American people that should be deciding who's going to be the next president, not the League of Women Voters or the media or the government; that we should have a chance for all points of view to be heard, which unfortunately is not what is happening, as every American knows. You hear the Democrats and Republicans, you don't hear other points of view. And yet the Democrats and Republicans combined today are a minority of the American people. Carter got 4.2 percent of the actual total population of this country's vote in the primary, Ford got 3.4, so combined they got less than 8 percent of the American people, and yet we call them the majority candidates. I call them minority. I call them that for two reasons: not only because they got low votes, but because I believe they represent the corporations, the rich, which are a minority in this country, and the policies they're carrying out are against the interests of the working-class majority.

Question: Big labor seems to be supporting Mr. Carter.

Camejo: Big labor bureaucrats, I wouldn't say the labor movement, because how do you explain the fact the man could only get 4.2 percent in the primaries? Why didn't the workers go out and register and vote for him? When they had the elections in steel, when Ed Sadlowski was running in Chicago, fighting for the right of workers, 70 percent voted, but when the primaries were held in Illinois only 20 percent voted. So it shows that when the working people of this country see an election that is meaningful to them, they'll turn out and vote. It's not that people are down on voting. It's they're down on the Democratic and Republican parties.

Two parties, one program

Blount: Mr. Camejo, which way do you think the presidential elections will go this year? The country is very tired, seemingly, of the Republican administration for various reasons, and Democrats haven't been with us for some time. So which way will it go? Can you predict that?

Camejo: Well, I think what we're seeing is massive cynicism and disillusionment in the Democratic and Republican parties, both. This is reflected in the fact that people just are refusing to register. And I think the way this nation is going to go this election is that the working people are going to lose again. Because what we have is every year on a Tuesday in November, you get into this box, you pull the curtain so no one can see what you're doing, and you vote for them or you vote for them, then they announce they won again. Because to me, the Democrats and Republicans, they're basically for the same thing. Carter and Ford were both for the war in Vietnam. Carter and Ford are both against the right of women to choose to have an abortion. In fact, I can't understand Carter and Ford's position on this question, because neither of them can have an abortion even if they wanted to. The real issue here is whether women will have the right to control their body and decide. They both say they're for the ERA. If the Democrats and Republicans were for it, it would be passed. They control every state government. So I don't see any difference. What I think is happening is that the American people are told, these are the only two choices you have. And who's going to win this year is going to be the same people that won last time around when Nixon got elected: the people who run this country, the corporations. The working people are going to lose until we have our own party, a mass party of labor in this country.

Question: What is the answer, the solution, for getting 2 million additional Americans out to vote this year to the polls?

Camejo: Well, I think what the Socialist Workers Party is doing is the answer. We're saying it's movements like the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the labor movement that have made social change, and that we, the unrepresented in this country, have to form our own party, a party of labor. We're campaigning like the early abolitionists. Now, they knew they couldn't win the office, but they said there was something wrong in this country, and that was slavery. We say today the problem is they're putting profits before human needs, that we need a mass party in this country that will put human needs first, and that the answer is to start building that kind of alternative. We've got to win the unions to break with the Democratic Party, to start talking about forming a labor party in this country. We've got a party to unite Chicanos, blacks, and women who've suffered oppression to form an independent political force, such as a mass labor party would represent, to give an answer to the Democrats and Republicans. That's why I think a vote for the Socialist Workers Party this year will be the most effective way to fight for our rights, as women, as blacks, as Chicanos, or as working people.

Mondesire: Mr. Camejo, you keep talking about trying to appeal to the working class, appeal to the workers. Why is it then that the socialist kind of thought doesn't dominate any of the major labor organizations in this country? You've been around, you said, since the late 1950s, and yet you can't point out one large labor organization in this country which has national clout, which has a Marxist as a head of it, or which has a Marxist point of view. Why is that?

Camejo: Well, Jerome, I think your question is absolutely correct. There is definitely, socialists are a minority in this country. Now, if you had a poll in the world between, well, capitalists and socialists, we're the majority point of view in the world, but not in this country. And I think the explanation is very simple. Up until very recently, that is for the last 30 years, we've had a relative prosperity. But now the wages of the average worker are down 6 percent from 1972. We have 8 million unemployed, 25 million living in poverty. Blacks in 1970 were making 61 percent of the income of whites. They're now making 56 percent. Women were making 59 percent of the income of men six years ago. Now they make 54 percent. The gap is opening up. Discrimination is getting worse. And now people are starting to realize there's something wrong. Now people are saying, wait a second, maybe the socialists are right.

And so our vote is dramatically rising. In the last city elections in Seattle, Patricia Bazzard [?], a Socialist Workers Party candidate for city council, got 26 percent of the vote. We see Ed Sadlowski, someone you'd never heard of two years ago, winning the elections in the entire Chicago district. We see the Shanker machine down in Miami at the convention having to withdraw its previous position they took in Hawaii against busing to a more modified one. They didn't come out for the right position, but they had to modify. In other words, we see the beginnings of a new radicalization of labor. I think we're at the beginning of a new wave of interest in socialism, and I think that the problem that you raised, that our movement is still small, is rapidly changing, and before long you're going to see, not only in labor unions but throughout this country, thousands, tens of thousands, and later millions of people beginning to realize we need to have democracy in our economy.

Question: Can you tell us how many new members have joined the Socialist Workers Party during the last three or four years of recession?

Camejo: Well, I can tell you that we got 100,000 votes in '72, and by '74 it went up to 440,000 votes, and we were only on the ballot in 10 states.

Question: But how large is your party?

Camejo: Yes, but in terms of actual members, what the Democrats would call their city committee, people that show up every week that actually function, we're just in the thousands. We're still a very small organization, but that has been rising very rapidly, and I expect that just as our vote is rising, the whole interest in the socialist movement will continue to rise.

Jobs and the New York budget

Question: Mr. Camejo, Congress has shelved the Hawkins full employment bill for this year, at least. What can be done, actually, to get that bill rolling and in law next year?

Camejo: Well, first let me shock you by telling you that that bill is already law. In 1947, the United States passed the Full Employment Act, which made it illegal to be unemployed, which said it's the United States policy to maintain full employment. The Humphrey-Hawkins bill is just a rehash of that same bill. Now, the Democrats and Republicans who've run the government since 1947 have never enforced it. In fact, Humphrey got originally elected in 1948 by using this same tactic. This is just a ploy. The Humphrey-Hawkins bill does not have a single concrete provision to provide jobs. What we've got to do is cut the war budget. Stop spending $110 billion for war and use that money to put everybody back to work. We've got to stop spending $40 billion in interest payments to the rich in the federal budget. Or what we're doing in New York City. Do you know why the New York City budget can't be balanced? I'll tell you. The majority of the American people haven't the slightest idea that of the $11 billion, $2 billion go in interest to the richest people in this country. If we just said to the rich, look, you're rich, why do we have to give you our tax money? And what are the Democrats and Republicans doing? They're closing the schools, the hospitals, they've laid off tens of thousands of people. Fifteen thousand teachers have been laid off. Five-year-old children have to walk to school so they can pay this $2 billion to the rich. We socialists say, let's stop paying the $2 billion, reopen the schools. Now, who's the majority in New York City? I say the Socialist Workers Party represents the majority. The Democrats and Republicans are a fringe group.

The FBI and the CIA

Question: Let me ask you about the FBI right now. The FBI has had agents in your organization for a number of years. I'd like to ask you why weren't a number of those agents spotted by your organization in the past? As long as there are FBI agents within the organization, doesn't that kind of tell the average worker who may be considering joining your organization that he better watch out, that he would get into a lot of trouble?

Camejo: Well, Attorney General Levi announced September 15th that the 40-year campaign to attempt to destroy the Socialist Workers Party is going to be terminated, that they're no longer going to do these things. The fact is that what we have learned through our legal suit in court is that they didn't just do it to the Socialist Workers Party. They did it to everybody, to the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. They went after Martin Luther King. They went after everybody. And our suit is to try to protect all these people. We think we have to stand up for the Bill of Rights. We've got to stand up against this type of harassment. We've actually gone so far, we've published an entire book with the actual documents of the FBI describing what they've done. And for people listening today that would like a copy of this, they can write to our campaign office at 14 Charles Lane. It's very easy to remember, Charles 14, 14 Charles Lane, New York City. And we'll make available for them the full information about the FBI harassment and what our suit has done. We expect to win. We are demanding that Mr. Levi withdraw the 66 agents that still remain in the Socialist Workers Party.

Question: Do you know who they are?

Camejo: No, of course not. If we knew, they wouldn't be there.

Question: Why didn't you spot more of the agents in the past? According to what things have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, they've had hundreds of agents in the organization.

Camejo: Well, through the years, they've used hundreds of different people. But the most dangerous thing you can do in any organization that's fighting for social justice is to begin your own internal witch hunt. That's one of the things the FBI tries to get you to do. They plant false stories about who's an agent. This is one of the ways they destroyed the Black Panther Party. They would pass false information to leaders of the Black Panther Party that another dedicated member, like a Fred Hampton, or whatever, was really an agent, to try to get them to attack each other. And in the Socialist Workers Party, anybody who joins us, we accept at face value that they're well-intentioned. We have no witch hunts inside our organization.

Question: But can you afford to do that? I mean, that seems to me to be...

Camejo: We certainly can afford to do it because, as the FBI has submitted before Congress and Senate, we don't do anything illegal. We never violate the law. It's the FBI that's been violating the law through burglaries, through harassing our members, getting people fired from their jobs. What we're demanding is that the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, be respected. And we're taking the best possible course to achieve this, and that is to go before the American public and the courts.

Question: I want to take a further look at the intelligence-gathering situation. Mr. Levi says the harassment of the Socialist Workers Party is over. A couple months later, Clarence Kelley calls a news conference to say that they're lying to me, my underlings here are not telling me the truth. I wonder how you feel the situation could be cleaned up and straightened out, the public getting the truth, those elected to get the truth from those agencies getting the truth, because apparently they're saying that they can't at this point.

Camejo: Well, Congress had an investigating committee. The Senate had investigated. And both of these combined couldn't find out what the Socialist Workers Party found out, which tells me something. And that is, we can't expect that we're really going to find out unless the American people can see what they've got in their files. Now, they admit they have 8 million pages on the Socialist Workers Party, and they've given us 20,000. That is, they've given us less than 1 percent. The first step that must be taken is open the files. Let the American people see what the government has been doing to the population of this country, to the people who dare to dissent, to the civil rights movement, to Martin Luther King. What did they do to Martin Luther King? Now, secondly, I'm against organized crime. Therefore, I don't think we need an FBI or the CIA. I'm against secret political police. I think one of the first steps we should take is to abolish this type of harassment, period.

Question: The FBI, CIA, period?

Camejo: Absolutely. The CIA goes and overthrows democratic rights for people in Chile. It tries to go around the world assassinating people. The FBI, like what they did to us in Chicago, the local police hired people to physically beat up our members.

Mondesire: Just as we speak, there was a bomb explosion in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, and a Chilean member of Allende's cabinet was killed, apparently, by foreign agents. There's terrorism, there are skyjacks by the Croatians, by the PLO. How is a country like the United States to survive without a foreign intelligence service in light of the world's reality?

Camejo: Well, I think, Jerome, the answer to your question is, who killed Allende? Who made the coup? The CIA. In other words, you're telling me that the people who murdered Allende, we should count on now to find out who murdered...

Mondesire: But the CIA does not commit every act of terrorism in this world.

Camejo: Well, we don't know that until we see their files. Of course they don't commit every terrorist act. Of course they don't. But the point is, who committed this bombing in Washington? I'll tell you, we had our headquarters bombed and burned to the ground in Los Angeles. And several other organizations of dissent had the same thing. And we found out because one of these people got religious, was born again, and confessed that they were supplied by the CIA. Now, it's the CIA that went down and did it in Chile and killed Allende. And you come and say to me, we need the CIA so that people won't get murdered. Well, I say it's the CIA that's carrying out the murders. But the key thing to prevent this is let the people know.

Mondesire: I didn't say we need it. I said, how do you expect a nation to survive in light of the world reality unless they do have a foreign secret service?

Odom: Can you restructure the American government, the way it goes now, to get these answers straight out and forward on a regular basis? How would you restructure the government to do that? What changes in the system would you advocate being brought about?

Camejo: Well, Vern, first I think we should not have any secret diplomacy. I think the concept of secret diplomacy is to keep it secret from the people. I mean, when Kissinger meets secretly with Brezhnev in Russia, so the enemy won't find out what they're talking about. Obviously, you and me and the people of Russia. The point is, we're opposed to all that. We don't need to have secret political police. If you want to defend democratic rights in this world, you don't need secret political police going around the world assassinating people and organizing coups. The reason we have that is we have a system that puts profits over human needs and therefore, by its very nature, must be secretive. The Pentagon Papers: what did that prove? Look what happened when the Pentagon Papers were published. Mr. Carter announced that he wanted a law to put people in jail that would dare to publish that. That's exactly what we need. Congress is spending more money investigating Mr. Schorr, who told the American people what the crimes of the government were. And the government is supposed to be representing us, carrying out crimes against us. What are they doing? They're chasing Mr. Schorr down instead of chasing down the people who commit these crimes. Not a single person has been indicted for any of these crimes I've mentioned, including the physical attacks.

Is it a harangue? Running to win

Bryant: Well, a couple of things come to mind as this discussion moves or rages on, and that is you represent, I imagine, in your mind an alternative. Additionally, there is Mr. Hall from the Communist Party, Mr. Anderson from the American Party, Eugene McCarthy, someone named Maddox, Zeidler [?], MacBride [?], Levin [?], LaRouche [?], all of them pursuing, or perhaps not pursuing, at least taking the opportunity to have an opportunity to say something about things they believe. Is it not the case, my first question, that when indeed you as a self-professed radical make some of these claims, instead of bringing people over to your side, you alienate some of them? There's someone who said that when you yell very loud, people who are on your side continue to agree, people who are against you continue to disagree, and those on defense may spill over into the camp opposite. Is there some way, I'm not suggesting that your delivery is intemperate, but is there some way that perhaps those things that you say that are valuable and would contribute to an alternative for the American people could somehow be voiced so they'd be more palatable to them? I just have the sense that harangue sometimes turns the white people off.

Camejo: Well, I think that the people in this country are quite angry. I think they're showing it by the fact they refuse to vote. I think the majority agree with me that we should stop this waste of billions on war and start using it to create jobs in this country. I believe the majority agree with my position on the question of abortion against Carter and Ford. I believe the majority agree with me we should stop paying $2 billion in New York City and use that for human needs. I believe the majority agree with me that we should stop what the CIA is doing in Chile. I don't believe that the position I'm presenting is turning people off. I think it's turning people on. In fact, I think poll after poll shows that the platform of the Socialist Workers Party, the Bill of Rights for Working People, and we put what we stand for in black and white in writing so people can read it, represents what the majority in this country want. We consider ourselves the majority party.

Bryant: If that's the case, and I don't know if it is or not, it may indeed be, what is the reticence, the reluctance of the American people then to come forward and to make some significant, drastic change in the way their government is running?

Camejo: Well, I don't think there is a reluctance, in the sense that when I'm out shaking hands in unemployment lines or factory gates, I find a lot of sympathy. What I find is that the commercial media, CBS, NBC, ABC, and the rest, are run by major corporations. There's a lot of money involved in the mass media, and they'll only let certain points of view be heard. I think if we could have real equal time in this country, I would win this election. But I don't believe they're ever going to allow that completely, and I think we're going to have to do it from the bottom up, the way we did it in the antiwar movement. Remember, Reggie, in the antiwar movement, we were a tiny minority in '64 when I was opposed [?] to the war in Vietnam. I was a tiny minority. All these Democrats and Republicans, the Kennedys, McGoverns, they were all for the war. Eugene McCarthy was voting for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. But we went out and told the people the truth, and we won them. And we're telling people the truth. But the problem is that we have an elite by birth, the Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the Kennedys, the Morgans, these people who run this economy. We need real democracy, we need a labor party in this country. And we're going to win the majority in this country. I'm convinced of it.

Question: My question quickly, Vern, I know that you [inaudible]. They all want the peace out of you, Mr. Camejo. The other question is, are you running, and do your people run, to win, or do you run indeed to make certain points?

Camejo: We run like the early abolitionists. They ran to win the American people, not the office. I'm running deadly serious. I want every vote. We're running to win because we say there's a basic problem in this country that's creating racism, sexism. We're seeing millions of people deported from this country just because they happen to not be born within this country. A dehumanizing attitude towards people. We're running to get this message and to say we need a new party in this country. The Democrats and Republicans represent the rich [?]. That's the purpose of our campaign. And I believe in that sense our campaign is winning. We're being successful. And I think it's reflected and will be reflected come November 2nd.

Question: If, shall we say, time shows that one of the other candidates such as Carter or Ford wins the election ultimately, and they came forward and asked you if you would like to participate in the administration, would you accept a position in either administration, if offered?

Camejo: No, I would not accept a position in any administration, which is an administration of the corporations, which I believe either Carter or Ford would be. I think Carter's record and Ford's record are extremely clear. They represent the major corporations. And, of course, I would not participate in either one.

Race, South Africa and the closing questions

Question: Mr. Camejo, there were no black reporters allowed in the first presidential debate. What kind of attitude do you think that is?

Camejo: Well, I think it reveals something. You know, the Democrats and Republicans, as the Saturday Night show said, this is the year when all Americans, black and white, rich and poor, men and women, get to pick which rich white man will sit in the White House. The Democrats and Republicans pick from a minority of the population, white males, and then they pick only rich ones, and I think it reflects their real thinking when they're going to have reporters they chose. This is supposed to be a news event. That's how they can keep me from being on it. They call it a news event. I've never heard of a news event where you pay the stations to cover it. It's obviously illegal. And then they exclude blacks. See, when Carter says something like, there's not a slip that they excluded blacks. It's not a slip when Carter says "ethnic purity," "black intrusion." The point is that the Democrats and Republicans are racist parties. If they weren't racist parties, blacks would not be making 56 percent of the income of whites after 30 years of the greatest prosperity ever.

Question: Then why, with the Republican Party being not traditionally for blacks and minorities, would we see in 1976 the largest black delegation, alternates and delegates, 148 combined...

Question: Delegation where?

Question: In Kansas City. Seventy-six regular and the other alternates.

Camejo: Well, after Jim Crow was defeated through the mass movement led by Martin Luther King and others, the people who run this country realized that they needed to include some blacks in their machinery for controlling the country. So they allowed some, a token. But for the mass of black people, there's been no solution, just as there hasn't been for the massive Chicano people or Puerto Ricans in this country. I'll tell you the proof that you have right now before your eyes: you have children dropping their blood on the soil of South Africa to send you and me a message that they want to be human beings and they're not going to be treated like slaves anymore. You have a message from 18 million people and Carter and Ford having a word to say. Well, this government is the greatest supporter of that South African racist regime, complicit 100 percent. And the proof of it, you got Kissinger running around down there says he's for majority rule in Rhodesia. He doesn't even know the name of the country, it's called Zimbabwe, but he's for majority rule there. Why not two years ago? Why not four years ago? Because there's a revolution taking place, and now he wants to maneuver to save American interests. But he won't call for majority rule in South Africa, because the racists can still hang on. This society is still racist, even if they use blacks for certain things to help them, like neo-colonialism. They use blacks in many places in Africa. They use Latins. I'm the first Latino to run for president. The American corporations use Latinos all over Latin America to front for them. But what have these two parties done? They run this country. What have they done to Latinos? What have they done to blacks? What have they done to women?

Question: Mr. Camejo, is there a nation on the face of the earth today which you would point to as the closest model to the kind of democracy you'd like to see in operation?

Camejo: No, there isn't. I'm for civil liberties, whether it be in Russia, China, or anywhere. But when the Democrats and Republicans say that they're for democracy, I say they're hypocrites, because they support totalitarianism in Spain or wherever. I'd like to urge people, they'd like to write to us. We have an entire book published to explain very clearly the socialist perspective for America. It's called Prospects for Socialism in America. I would urge people again, our address is 14 Charles Lane. We'll send you campaign literature. We'll even send you the facts about Jimmy Carter that no one else will publish. So please write to us at 14 Charles Lane, New York City.

Question: Let me ask one more question in the time we have left. You constantly campaign on a platform of jobs. Now, if your government took over Washington, how would you get along with Rockefeller, DuPont, and the others who can, say, control all the jobs? I mean, if they took all of them away, you'd be left there with a lot of people out of work, would you not? Now, how would you compromise there?

Camejo: Well, if I got elected, everyone would have a job in this country, and the Rockefellers would have to go out and work for a living.

Bryant: I think on that note, we thank you for being our guest, Peter Camejo, on Black Perspective on the News. I'd also like to thank Jerome Mondesire, Charlotte Blount, and Vern Odom for being our journalists and asking the questions. We trust that you've enjoyed it, and you'll join us again next week. And good evening.