Olympia Newton is one of them. Newton joined the socialist movement in 1997 in Washington, D.C. Since then she has lived in Los Angeles; Price, Utah; and New York. She worked in the garment industry and coal mining and has shouldered a range of leadership responsibilities for the Young Socialists and Socialist Workers Party. She has been a regular worker-correspondent for the Militant, participating in international reporting teams in north Korea and Venezuela.

Róger Calero is the second. Calero served in this capacity before, from 2001 to 2005. He has written extensively for the paper on union struggles, battles for immigrant rights, and the class struggle in Latin America.

U.S. immigration agents arrested Calero in December 2002 while he was returning from a reporting trip to Mexico and Cuba for the Militant. The government sought to deport him based on a 1988 conviction, while Calero was in high school, on the charge of selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop. Through an international defense campaign, Washington’s efforts were defeated. A federal judge declared Calero “not deportable” in May 2003.

Calero was the SWP candidate for U.S. president in 2004 and is currently the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in New York.

Arrin Hawkins, who was an editorial volunteer since the beginning of 2005, has moved to Pittsburgh to help build the communist movement there. Hawkins joined the Young Socialists in 2000 in the Twin Cities and then the Socialist Workers Party. She was the SWP candidate for vice president in 2004.  
 
 
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