The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 7      February 18, 2008

 
Socialist candidates Calero
and Kennedy on national tour
(front page)
 
BY SAM MANUEL  
February 6—As the U.S. election campaign moves beyond the “Super Tuesday” primaries, the Socialist Workers Party candidates for president and vice president of the United States are hitting the campaign trail with stops on the East and West Coasts. They will visit 15 cities in the next month.

Socialist Workers presidential candidate Róger Calero is joining a February 7 protest in Trenton, the New Jersey state capital, to oppose plans to close St. James and Columbus hospitals in Newark. Officials of Catholic Health East, which owns the hospitals, say they must be closed because they are losing money.

Speaking at a February 1 hearing on the hospital closings, Sara Lobman, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, said, “Health care and our lives come before profits. The labor movement must take up the fight for universal, government-guaranteed health care.”

Calero is campaigning in Washington, D.C., February 9-11. He joins local socialist candidates in a campaign forum on Saturday, February 9, titled “Super Tuesday and beyond: Working people need our own party!”

Seth Dellinger, the SWP candidate for District of Columbia delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, has been active in supporting the fight by immigrant workers in nearby northern Virginia against legislation that deputizes local cops as immigration police. A family of workers involved in that fight will host a house meeting with Calero during the tour.

The Socialist Workers candidates have joined in the fight against immigration raids and deportations, “no match” Social Security letters, and for the immediate legalization of all undocumented workers with no conditions.

Calero will also talk with workers at meatpacking plants where the local socialist candidates and their supporters have been campaigning.  
 
Kennedy West Coast tour
As we go to press, Socialist Workers vice-presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy starts her West Coast tour in Seattle. She will also travel to the nearby Yakima Valley, a big center of agricultural workers. Thousands of immigrant workers and their supporters held May Day rallies in Seattle and the Yakima Valley the last two years demanding legalization.

Kennedy will participate in a regular monthly protest outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where more than 1,000 immigrants have been jailed. Many of them were rounded up in workplace raids or traffic stops.

Kennedy will also talk to longshore workers. Some of the longshore workers in Washington were active in extending solidarity to miners, most of whom were from Mexico, at the Co-Op Mine in Utah during their 2003-2006 fight to be represented by the United Mine Workers of America. Kennedy worked at that mine and was part of the organizing effort.
 
 
Related articles:
Democratic, Republican candidates offer ‘change’ from unpopular past  
 
 
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