A Senate candidate that will really challenge the war

David Sole, age 58, is the Green Party nominee for U.S. Senate.  He has been a life-long anti-war activist, anti-racist fighter and union activist.

David Sole is a founder of MECAWI (the Michigan Emergency Committee against War & Injustice), formed to oppose the U.S. wars against and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.  MECAWI has been the leading anti-war organization in the Detroit area, organizing numerous demonstrations, teach-ins and rallies.  On August 4th, MECAWI organized an important protest against the U.S.-Israeli terror against Lebanon and Palestine.

Sole was the chief organizer of the first statewide conference against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at Wayne State University.  He was an initiator of the National Conference to Reclaim Our Cities in 2005, which drew national attention to how U.S. wars are funded by cutting social programs and robbing the workers and poor here at home.

David Sole has a history of over 40 years of activism.  In 1964 Sole helped shut down his high school in New York City as part of a civil rights protest against racist school funding.  His anti-war activity began in 1967 protesting at the historic March on the Pentagon and Stop the Draft Week.  He was in the streets of Chicago to protest racism and war during the August 1968 Democratic Convention demonstrations.  He was a draft resister during 1969-70, refusing to fight in Vietnam.

In 1969 he became a leader of the Ann Arbor Students for a Democratic Society, organizing many anti-Vietnam War protests and demonstrations in support of the Black Panther Party.  In 1970 he went as a volunteer sugar cane cutter to Cuba on the 2nd Venceremos Brigade.

As a leader of Youth Against War & Fascism he organized protests in Pontiac, Michigan against the Ku Klux Klan and in support of the Black community's right to equal education through busing.  When the KKK attacked an anti-racist picket line in Pontiac in 1972, Sole fought back and was arrested, along with 7 others (the "Anti-Klan 8") for defending themselves.  He was later acquitted.

Sole has been a member of the United Auto Workers since 1971.  He worked at GM's Fleetwood Plant and served on the Executive Board of UAW Local 15 until 1987 when he was a victim of GM's plant closings.  Sole co-chaired the UAW Local 15 Stop Plant Closings Committee and spoke nationally as a leader of the "A Job Is A Right Campaign" for a moratorium on plant closings.  As a result of this struggle the UAW national contracts incorporated a modified moratorium.  He became President of UAW Local 2334 in 1995 and continues to serve in that position to this day.

During the historic and bitter Detroit newspaper strike during the 1990's, Sole served on the Steering Committee of the AFL-CIO's Labor, Community, Religious Coalition to Support the Strikers.  He has walked picket lines in support of farmworkers, undocumented workers, and dozens of other unions over the years.

Sole's anti-war work includes organizing local, statewide and national demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama, the U.S.-NATO war against Yugoslavia and the two U.S. wars against Iraq.  During the years of U.S.-UN sanctions that were killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi's, Sole helped raise funds and then helped transport over $4 million worth of antibiotics to the children's hospitals in Baghdad.  This "Iraq Sanctions Challenge," in direct violation of U.S. law, was led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Detroit's Bishop Thomas Gumbleton.

As someone from a Jewish background, Sole has been especially vocal and effective in support of the Palestinian peoples right to self-determination.  For over 35 years he has vigorously opposed the crimes of the Zionist settler state of Israel.  As a creation of U.S. imperialism and recipient of $6 billion a year in U.S. aid, Israel acts as a proxy for U.S. military goals of Middle East domination.  In doing so Israel is also a death trap for the Jewish people.  He supports a democratic Palestinian state for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Sole is a Detroit representative of the International Action Center and a member of Workers World Party.