By Kayla Walker
The New York State Board of Elections announced that it would certify Bill Van Auken, of the Socialist Equality Party, for the New York State Senator election ballot after receiving 25,000 signatures on nominating petitions over the summer.
Van Auken will challenge the Democratic incumbent Senator Hilary Clinton and the Republican nominee John Spencer, former mayor of Yonkers on the Nov. 7 general ballot.
“As the leading contender for the party’s 2008 presidential nomination, Sen. Clinton is the embodiment of everything that is reactionary and double-dealing within the Democratic Party,” Van Auken said.
Van Auken, a writer for World Socialist Web site, was the SEP’s presidential nominee for the 2004 election, who, according to www.Wikipedia.org, received 1,857 votes (0.002%).
Van Auken cited Sen. Clinton’s voting record on Iraq and immigration policies as well as her campaign contributions from Fox News Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, drug companies and health care corporations as instances for what he calls “reactionary and double-dealing.”
“She voted to grant President Bush virtually unlimited power to launch an illegal war of aggression against Iraq and continues to defend this decision while posing as a critic of the Bush Administration’s handling of the war,” Van Auken said.
The SEP is a Trotskyist political party, supporting Marxism as interpreted by Leon Trotsky of the USSR, who called for a “permanent revolution” by the proletariat. Trotskyist parties are on the left of the Marxist political spectrum and believe in the democratic rights of the people.
“The SEP’s platform establishes that the critical issues in the 2006 election: war, the attacks on democratic rights and the assault on living standards together with the growth of social inequality are interconnected,” Van Auken said.
“We are entirely realistic about the present political situation in America, in which the Democratic and Republican parties, aided by the corporate media, exercise a political monopoly on behalf of big business and America’s wealthy elite,” Van Auken said. “We see our campaign as laying the basis for the emergence of a new mass socialist party of the working class.”
Van Auken’s platform for the election includes an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, for billions of dollars to be spent on jobs, health care and housing, the defense of democratic rights of immigrant workers and for a break with big business and the Democratic and Republican parties.
