WWP campaign to confront Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin

Supporters of Workers World Party’s 2016 campaign with Monica Moorehead for president and Lamont Lilly for vice president will be petitioning for ballot status in Wisconsin throughout the month of July. Lilly will be at two events July 7 in Milwaukee, one a “Stop the Bradley Foundation!” protest and an evening of “Building People’s Power,” a community conversation that Moorehead will join via Skype.

A leading member of WWP’s Durham, N.C., branch and a member of WWP’s National Committee, Lilly also has credentials as a journalist, an organizer and a speaker. His political commentary has been featured in Workers World newspaper, Truthout, Counterpunch, the LA Progressive, Black Youth Project, the Durham News and Triangle Free Press.

Lilly was awarded a 2015 Local Hero Citizen’s Award by Indy Week of Raleigh-Cary-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., for “pushing for workers’ rights and police reform.”

Moorehead has been an activist and organizer for more than four decades. A member of Workers World Party since 1975, Moorehead is a member of the party’s secretariat and a managing editor of Workers World newspaper. She was WWP’s candidate for president of the United States in 1996 and 2000.

What is the Bradley Foundation?

To build for the “Stop the Bradley Foundation!” protest, the Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement issued a statement which included the following excerpts:

“Wisconsin over the past five years has seen some of the worst austerity in United States history. Many of the gains our class has won over the past 80 to 100 years are now gone or reduced to shells. These includes rights to public sector collective bargaining, tenure by state statute and prevailing wage, among numerous other laws that now attack every single sector of the working class and oppressed peoples.

“Conditions for people of African descent in Wisconsin are some of the worst in the United States and the world. Latinos/as are facing raids and deportations. This is a part of the international austerity assault by all Wall Street forces.

“The Bradley Foundation, with the complicity of similar right-wing organizations, has been using Wisconsin for decades as a laboratory to test ruling-class policies and attacks. Most notably have been charter schools and so-called ‘welfare reform.’ This has increased rapidly since 2011 after Act 10 was implemented, gutting public sector collective bargaining.

“WWP, Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement and others are targeting the Bradley Foundation to expose its role as a leading right-wing, pro-Wall Street ideological think tank. Like the Koch family’s [American Legislative Exchange Council] and Americans for Prosperity, Bradley is a major architect of the neoconservative program of austerity, privatization, charter schools, resegregation, deregulation and union busting.

“The Bradley Foundation epitomizes everything the WWP socialist campaign opposes.”

In this spirit, Lilly will lead a community conversation about “Building People’s Power.” He will raise the necessity to build the anti-racist, independent people’s movement as a united front, with socialism as the solution to capitalist austerity and organizations such as the Bradley Foundation.

“Stop the Bradley Foundation!” protest sponsored by WI Bail Out the People Movement, July 7 at 1241 N. Franklin Pl., Milwaukee, 4:30 p.m.

“Building People’s Power” community conversation sponsored by WI Bail Out the People Movement, July 7 at 734 N. 26th St., Milwaukee, at 7 p.m.

For more information about the July 7 events, visit wibailoutpeople.org and  facebook.com/wibailoutpeople.