Your Future, Your Fight! SEP 2012
Submitted by anonymous on February 20, 2012 - 6:59pm
Take up the fight for socialism in the 2012 elections!
International Students for Social Equality are hosting this public meeting to discuss the 2012 elections and the need for a socialist alternative. The Socialist Equality Party has launched an election campaign to lead this struggle, and Jerry White, SEP presidential candidate and World Socialist Web Site author, will speak in Champaign about the campaign and the fighting program the SEP offers to the working class.
Join the discussion!
February 28. 2012 - Champaign Public Library Foundation conference room #222 - 7pm
200 W. Green Street, Champaign
Can't make the meeting? Learn more and get involved by visiting www.socialequality.com.
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More about the speaker: Jerry
More about the speaker:
Jerry White, 52, has been active in the socialist movement for more than three decades.
White was raised in a working class family in Queens, New York. In 1979, he joined the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, while working at United Parcel Service and attending the City University of New York.
White was won to the Trotskyist movement—and its perspective of world socialism—at the age of 19. From then on he dedicated his life to the fight to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class.
The 1980s was a period of sharp economic decline, which prompted the ruling class to embark on a policy of class war at home and militarism abroad. After moving to Detroit, White played a leading role in the Workers League’s fight to mobilize the working class against union-busting and plant closings. This meant a struggle against the betrayals of the AFL-CIO, which worked to sabotage struggles and keep workers tied to the Democratic Party.
As a journalist for the party’s newspaper, the Bulletin, he reported on the struggles of coal miners and workers in the auto, steel, airline and other industries. In 1990, he wrote Death on the Picket Line: The Story of John McCoy, which chronicled the life of a fourth generation coal miner murdered by scabs in West Virginia.
In the 1990s and 2000s, White represented the party in several election campaigns. He was the first presidential candidate of the newly formed Socialist Equality Party in 1996.
In 2008, White opposed Barack Obama and John McCain. As the SEP candidate, he traveled throughout the US and Europe to explain the significance of the September 2008 financial crash. Workers would have to develop their own socialist response to the crisis, the SEP warned, because whether a Democrat or Republican won the election they would make the working class pay for the breakdown of capitalism.
Since Obama’s election, White has played a major role in the SEP’s fight against the administration’s attack on auto workers, during the mass protests in Wisconsin, and the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the struggle of locked-out Cooper Tire workers in Ohio.
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