The Socialist Equality Party (US) is running Naomi Spencer for the West Virginia House of Delegates in District 16. SEP members and supporters are currently collecting signatures to get on the ballot in the district, distributing the SEP presidential election statement and speaking to hundreds of residents about the campaign.
Naomi Spencer, 38, is a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party (US). She is a regular contributor to the World Socialist Web Site and has been a member of the SEP since 2005. A graduate of Morehead State University in Kentucky with a degree in art, Spencer works as a web designer and writer. She lives in Huntington with her husband and two sons.
Along with the SEP’s presidential and vice presidential candidates, Jerry White and Niles Niemuth, Spencer will provide workers and young people with a socialist alternative to capitalism and the corporate-controlled political system.
The issues facing workers in Appalachia are dire, but they are by no means unique. Workers all over the US and around the world confront the same problems: the danger of world war, relentless attacks on democratic rights and soaring social inequality.
West Virginia’s 16th District encompasses the city of Huntington, an industrial rail town on the Ohio River whose economic fate is intimately tied to the coal industry. The region, long a distressed area, has been buffeted by instability in the global economy.
After extracting trillions in profits from the labor of generations of miners and other workers, the global energy giants, coal bosses and bankers have left West Virginia in a state of economic, social and environmental ruin. The state has among the worst unemployment and labor force participation rates in the country. Poverty and the lack of access to public health and other services are widespread, affecting every aspect of life, including death itself. The life expectancy for males in McDowell County, for example, is only 64 years, 12 years below the national average and roughly the same as the impoverished African country of Namibia.