Socialist Action launches first presidential ticket

Jeff Mackler in New York City (Photo: Socialist Action)

From SocialistAction.org, June 23rd, 2016 (H/T Jeremy Siple):

Socialist Action is launching a national election campaign, with National Secretary Jeff Mackler as the party’s candidate for U.S. president, and Karen Schraufnagel as its candidate for vice president.

Jeff Mackler has spent a lifetime fighting for the working class and social justice. He is a veteran opponent of U.S. imperialist wars and interventions, and a leading environmental and social justice activist. From the Vietnam era until today, he has organized and chaired many huge rallies against U.S. wars. He is a founder of the Northern California Climate Mobilization, and has played a major role in organizing Bay Area climate change protests.

A former teachers union leader, Mackler was the organizer and longtime elected officer of the AFT and CTA locals in Hayward, Calif. He is the director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the author and editor of close to 25 books and pamphlets on labor and social history, politics, civil liberties, and economics. Mackler was Socialist Action’s candidate in California for the U.S. Senate in 2006.

Karen Schraufnagel is a member of Socialist Action’s National Committee and organizer of its Twin Cities branch. She is a founder of Minnesotans Against Islamophobia, and is active in the anti-Zionist Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and the animal rights, antiwar, and environmental movements.

Socialist Action’s forthcoming 10-point socialist platform encompasses a broad-ranging critique of Wall Street’s politics-for-profit policies. Key issues that Mackler and Schraufnagel are campaigning for include:

• Rapid conversion to 100% renewable energy to stop fossil-fuel-induced climate change
• For a just transition: Guaranteed jobs at top union wages for all workers displaced in the conversion to renewable energy
• Quality, universal government-paid health care and education
• Abolition of all racist, sexist, and homophobic laws and practices.
• Affordable housing and jobs for all at top union wages
• For $15 and a union now, as a short first step toward a minimum wage high enough to sustain quality living standards
• Abolition of the U.S. war machine
• Amnesty, legalization, and equal rights for all immigrants
• For a Labor Party based on a revitalized, democratic, and expanded labor movement that is allied with the oppressed and exploited
• For a workers’ government! Abolish capitalism! For socialism!

Join us in supporting Jeff Mackler and Karen Schraufnagel in fighting for the working class and against the twin parties of U.S. capitalism.

Contact us today to see how to get involved! For more information, including the full platform of the 2016 campaign:  https://www.facebook.com/VoteSA2016/     https://votesocialistaction.org/

Note from ATPR: Socialist Action was founded in 1983 by a group of individuals expelled from the Socialist Workers Party. A Trotskyite, Marxist political party, Socialist Action has scored at least one electoral win in the past decade; in April 2006, Adam Ritscher was elected to the Douglas County, Wisconsin Board of Supervisors. That same year, the party’s newly minted presidential candidate,  Jeff Mackler, ran for the U.S. Senate in California as a write-in candidate and received 108 votes. Socialist Action members have participated in numerous anti-war efforts, pro-immigration groups and local trade unions. The party, headquartered in San Francisco, publishes the monthly Socialist Action newspaper, which charges subscribers a $20 yearly rate. 

(Via American Third Party Report)