Moore-Alexander for President/Vice President

SOCIALIST PARTY NOMINATES MOORE FOR PRESIDENT

Antiwar Activist Nominated on Third Ballot at Party's National Convention in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS — Antiwar activist Brian P. Moore of Spring Hill, Florida, was nominated for President of the United States at the Socialist Party USA national convention in St. Louis late Saturday afternoon. The 64-year-old Moore, a former independent candidate for the U.S. Senate, defeated longtime party activist and author Eric Chester of Massachusetts, a retired economics professor, on the convention's third ballot to win the party's nomination. Stewart A. Alexander, a longtime civil rights activist from Murietta, California, was tapped as Moore's vice-presidential running mate. Alexander was the Peace & Freedom Party's candidate for lieutenant governor of California in 2006.

A graduate of Mission San Luis Rey College in California with a Master's degree in Public Administration from Arizona State University, Moore once studied in a Franciscan seminary before joining the Peace Corps in 1969. As a Peace Corps volunteer and later working for a non-profit agency, Moore was heavily involved in community development and infrastructure projects in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Bolivia, Panama and Peru. Conversant in Spanish and familiar with Brazilian Portuguese, he later helped design and implement several public health projects in other Latin American countries. He also raised $3 million for a de-worming project that successfully protected more than one million children from parasitic infections in some of the most poverty-stricken areas of Brazil, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

No stranger to long-shot political campaigns, Moore waged several unsuccessful bids for mayor and city council in Washington, D.C., and twice ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's fifth congressional district. Last year, he polled 19,695 votes as independent antiwar candidate against Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican challenger Katherine Harris. During that campaign, he called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney and traveled to Cuba to underscore his opposition to the four decades-long U.S. embargo against that island nation and to learn more about that country's national health care system and its economic development programs.

A founder and chair of the Nature Coast Coalition for Peace & Justice, an antiwar group founded in 2002, Moore has been a persistent critic of U.S. military involvement in Iraq. In accepting the Socialist Party's nomination, the Florida gadfly said that he will make the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and opposition to a potential attack on Iran central themes of his campaign. "Stopping the war is our highest priority," he said. "More than a million Iraqis, including tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, have died in this tragic and misguided debacle, not to mention more than 3,800 of our own men and women — and for no legitimate reason," added Moore.

The Socialist nominee also favors public-financing of elections to lessen the effects of corporate influence in American politics and to help usher in a multi-party system. Citing a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, Moore stressed that he will also focus on the widening gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, a disparity greater than at any time since the 1920s. "The wealthy have benefited tremendously from the recent boom in the financial markets, while the working poor in this country are struggling more than ever just to make ends meet," said Moore, whose party's economic program includes guaranteed jobs, housing, and health care for every American.

Moore is also seeking the California-based Peace & Freedom Party's nomination and will compete against longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader — a man who endorsed Moore's Senate campaign last year — and several others in the party's February 5 presidential primary.

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