Capitalism isn’t helping the economy, vice presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy for the Socialist Workers Party told approximately 20 students Monday.

The pro-union, pro-working class platform is represented by the unlikeliest of candidates. Presidential candidate Roger Calero was a Nicaraguan meatpacker holding a green card, and Kennedy worked in coal mines in the United States fighting wage and sex discrimination. Both have been campaigning across the country and are hopeful that change is imminent.

“Roger Calero and I were talking about the need to build a strong political movement of workers and farmers to take the political power away from the billionaire class that’s running this country and establish a workers and farmers government to begin to reorganize society based on human need,” she said in the Miller Learning Center.

The Socialist Workers Party is running on a platform against prosecution of illegal immigrants, capitalism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently against the $700 billion bailout.

“We don’t believe buying out or injecting money into the system, more bank regulation, or anything like that is going to change what we’re facing in the world,” she said. “They want to stabilize the system to exploit workers and profits of working people, it’s going to do nothing to change our condition.”

The party has faced criticism due to socialist stances, including the view that Cubans enjoy a more ideal government system and that coalition forces should leave every nation in which they are stationed.

But the economic crisis is the central election issue for many.

“What’s happening with the economic crisis is people really are looking for an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties,” said Chris Hoeppner of Atlanta. “The fundamental problem in the Capitalistic economy is there is no simple solution.”

Students, many of whom were from the sponsoring organization Common Ground, seemed captivated by the speaker and, like many Americans, craving change.

But voting for the Socialist Workers Party next month will be impossible for many. The

Calero-Kennedy ticket is on the ballot in only 10 states, and write-ins are not eligible in every state.

They won’t be on the ballot for Georgians, but voters can write the names in.

“No we’re not powerless, we have self worth and can see the power we really do have,” Kennedy said. “We have the capability to change the world.”