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Greens energized by Szwaja's 20 Percent in 7th District Race
Joe Szwaja |
Szwaja thinks of his recent 70-to-20-percent defeat by incumbent Jim McDermott as a victory. "We got more votes than any third-party candidate in recent history," he says. "This is an amazingly good showing against an entrenched incumbent. We did better than the Republican candidate did in 1996. We're now the second party in Seattle."
Szwaja traces the Greens' growth spurt back to the WTO demonstrations in Seattle a year ago, when thousands of people were energized and became active over political questions raised by the World Trade Organization meeting. "Corporate control of the economy, environmental concerns and democratic principles were the key issues that WTO critics raised. The people who organized around these issues became the core voters for the Green Party campaign."
Szwaja teaches American Government, World History and Spanish at Seattle's Nova High School, an "alternative" school where committees operating under democratic procedures make many of the major decisions about the school. "It's a grassroots democracy run by students and staff," Szwaja says. He also teaches weightlifting in his sprawling basement classroom, filled with comfortable chairs and sofas as well as blackboards and bookshelves.
"I began to think outside the Democratic Party when I was in Colombia in the '70s and I saw our government's complicity in the brutality and carnage there." Later, Szwaja was elected 5 times to the city council in Madison, Wisconsin.
Szwaja, who has taught at Nova for the last 8 years, said his congressional campaign grew out of a class on globalization he taught last spring. "We had an all-day panel here on the WTO, with a great coming together of opinions and ideas. But it struck me, where was our congressman, Jim McDermott? He was part of WTO, helped to bring it to Seattle, but had no dialogue with the protesters.
"Later, some of us met with McDermott on [the topic of] East Timor, where thousands of people have been murdered by the Indonesian government with the tacit support of the U.S. government. It took us two years to get a meeting with McDermott on East Timor. After the meeting, [McDermott's staff] said they'd get back to us on the issues we raised. We never heard from them again. He finally met with us when we threatened to sit in his office until he showed up. His foreign policy staffer told us, 'There's nothing you can do about East Timor, and there's nothing McDermott can do about it neither.'"
But Szwaja says, "Speaking out on issues can make a real difference in educating people, even if your bill doesn't pass."
That philosophy was the basis for Szwaja's campaign for Congress.
"We're definitely going to run more candidates in the future. Our campaign helped build our technical skills, public support and our confidence. We'll be looking at school boards, county boards. We doubled our membership in the past year."
Swaja says Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader's poor showing in the national election was largely due to scare tactics. "People were told they were electing Bush. But why not blame people who didn't vote, or Democrats who voted for Bush? I won't feel bad if Bush wins the presidency. I'm trying to build a movement to change society.
"We have a deformed democracy," Swaja says, "where 98 percent of incumbents get re-elected. That's not democracy. We need to take away big-money control of politics."
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