On top of the chart in the United States are distributors in Newark, New Jersey, who netted 44 percent of their seven-week quota of 55 subs over the last seven days. This “target week” of the circulation campaign coincided with the first week of campaigning for Socialist Workers Party candidates for New Jersey governor and state assembly.
“We had a fabulous start to the circulation drive,” said Angela Lariscy, the SWP candidate for governor in New Jersey. “By next week supporters in Newark will discuss by how much to raise our quota.”
SWP campaign supporters sold six subscriptions and three copies of the new issues of the Marxist magazine New International (see front-page ad) at an all-day table at Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus.
“A student who bought a subscription and a copy of the Spanish translation of NI no. 13 came that evening to a meeting of students and other youth organizing to attend the world youth festival in Caracas, Venezuela, in August,” Lariscy reported. “The next night she came to the Militant Labor Forum in Newark and brought two friends, one of whom bought a subscription and a copy of New International no. 12.”
Partisans of the Militant in Los Angeles took the paper to a British Petroleum-operated refinery in Carson, California, to talk to workers about the explosion that killed 15 workers at BP’s facility in Texas City, Texas. Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy union members told the socialists the bosses had organized a safety meeting that day where they discussed the refinery blast in Texas City. The unionists reported that the bosses’ main message at the meeting had been that the workers are responsible for their own safety.
“That’s the real story,” one of them commented, pointing to the headline in the Militant article that places responsibility squarely where it belongs: on the bosses and their speed-up to increase profits at the expense of workers’ lives and limbs. Two workers decided to subscribe to the Militant. One also purchased both of the new issues of New International.
Click here to see the subscription drive scoreboard