The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 70/No. 20           May 22, 2006  
 
 
New Jersey socialist campaign wins hearing
 
BY SARA LOBMAN  
NEWARK, New Jersey—“It was Socialist Workers Party candidate Nancy Rosenstock who drew the biggest applause from the crowd…when she said more police in schools was not a solution,” noted Bill Albers, a reporter for PoliticsNJ.com, in a May 3 story on a debate the previous night between the four candidates for mayor. The event was held before a crowd of 500 students and working people at the Paul Robeson Campus Center at Rutgers University’s Newark campus.

“‘They’re treating our children like prisoners!’ she exclaimed, to loud cheers. ‘The police are there to punish us and keep us in line, not to protect us!’” Albers added.

The other mayoral candidates—Cory Booker, David Blount, and Ronald Rice—all of whom are Democrats, placed at the center of their campaign platforms the call for more cops, curfews, and stricter enforcement of laws aimed at harassing working people.

The Socialist Workers Party fielded two candidates in the May 9 municipal elections. Rosenstock is a meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Chauncey Robinson, a retail worker and member of the Young Socialists, ran for City Council in the West Ward. This was the first time since 1978 that the SWP was on the ballot for mayor of Newark.

Both candidates were part of one-hour televised debates on Cablevision that were aired repeatedly leading up to the election. Rosenstock also addressed a meeting of the Newark Firefighters Union and spoke at a “Candidates come to the Grassroots” cosponsored by the People’s Organization for Progress and the New Black Panther Party.

“Go into the campaign headquarters of Nancy Rosenstock and it’s not posters and buttons, it’s books,” reported Michael Weber in a March 17 news story presented on the cable news channel New Jersey Network. As the camera slowly panned the bookshelves in the socialist campaign headquarters, he noted the “books about Malcolm X, Karl Marx, Che Guevara.”

An April 27 article in the Newark Star-Ledger about the West Ward city council candidates quoted Robinson as saying, “We take the campaign seriously. If we do get in, we will continue to campaign. But we know we can’t change things working inside the system…. For us, it’s not about winning an election. We set our sights higher. We want to get rid of the class hierarchy.”  
 
 
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