Socialist Workers Party files for Louisiana ballot

Militant/Rachele Fruit

BATON ROUGE, La. — The Socialist Workers Party filed here July 20 to place its candidates Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart for U.S. president and vice president on the ballot in Louisiana in November.

“We are facing the deepest economic, political, social and moral crisis that any of us have seen since the 1930s. It is an irreversible crisis of the system of capitalism,“ Hart told the media at the secretary of state’s office after the filing.

Hart was in Baton Rouge earlier in the month to join protests against the killing of Alton Sterling by local cops and to talk with working people in the area. A video captured the cops throwing Sterling to the ground, then shooting him at point blank range.

Above, Hart, right, speaks with supermarket worker Ashley Ferdinand July 9. They met the day before at a protest against police brutality and she invited him to another meeting at Southern University.

“We need to demand that the cops who killed Sterling be charged and prosecuted,” Hart said. “Police brutality can only be ended once and for all when we get rid of the system that breeds it: capitalism.”

— STEVE WARSHELL