NEW YORK CITY, February 13 — Today, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bus driver with 30 years on the job was arrested after his bus accidentally struck a 15-year-old girl, injuring her leg. On Christmas Eve, another driver with almost eight years on the job was arrested after his bus accidentally struck and killed a 78-year-old man. The two bus operators, Francisco DeJesus and Reginald Prescott, were charged with failure to yield, a misdemeanor, and have been suspended without pay pending investigations.
This is how Mayor de Blasio and the racist NYPD plan to cut down on traffic fatalities, in a new plan called Vision Zero. They criminally charge bus operators for traffic accidents, while the cops walk away from racist murders.
Not only are MTA bus operators not “reckless drivers,” they are among the safest drivers in the city. Collectively they drive thousands of miles and move two million riders each day on the busiest streets, often with faulty equipment.
In 2013, 176 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents. After a particularly tragic killing of a young child at an extremely dangerous intersection, de Blasio attempted to target reckless drivers by lowering speed limits, adding street lights at 1,000 intersections, adding speed bumps, and enacting stiffer enforcement of traffic laws.
Also, the law passed by the City Council exempts drivers “engaged in work on behalf of the City, the state of New York....” like cops, fire, and Emergency Medical Services workers. It should certainly include bus operators.
Mass transit around the U.S., is one of the last stable, well-paying jobs for Black, Latin and immigrant workers, and it is under attack. On top of budget cuts, privatization and the increased use of temporary, part-time workers, many cities are imposing criminal background checks on transit workers. PLP-led bus operators in Washington, DC have waged a mass struggle against this. Now NYC bus operators are threatened with being criminally charged for traffic accidents. Building a campaign of racist hysteria to portray transit workers as criminals behind the wheel is the beginning of a massive racist assault on all transit workers and public mass transit.
Transit Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelson has barked at the arrests and has threatened safety slow-downs in retaliation. But so far, there has been no bite, just bark, as he tries to get the City Council to specifically exempt bus operators from the new law. Shutting down the transit system and taking over City Hall, even for a day, might get their attention.
For our part, PLP is organizing an anti-racist movement among transit workers that can respond to police terror in our communities and on our jobs. We’re building a movement that will put transit workers on the road to communist revolution, where mass transit will be free and safe, and where the racist bankers and bosses and former union hacks will be a thing of the past.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Justice” Department report on the racism of Ferguson’s cops and courts is a cynical ruling-class effort to pacify infuriated workers. The report was released the same day it was announced that Holder’s department would not press federal charges against killer cop Darren Wilson for the assassination of Mike Brown. Four days later, Barack Obama led an equally cynical commemoration of the 1965 antiracist struggle in Selma, Alabama.
The bosses’ frantic maneuvers in Missouri and Alabama were reminiscent of Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, which muted what remained of a mass anti-war movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In New York City, meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio is playing a racist shell game. He’s come out against “stop-and-frisk” while “quality-of-life” arrests have soared. He’s granted Muslim students two public school holidays while the NYPD spies on their parents — the Muslim working class.
As calls mount for U.S. ground troops to battle the Islamic State in Iraq and occupy Afghanistan indefinitely, liberal politicians are leading the charge for racist, genocidal U.S. imperialism. Since the first Gulf War was launched in 1990, the U.S. bosses’ program to protect their Middle East oil fields has been in high gear. But the rulers also know that a mass conscript army would be significantly more effective than the current “all-volunteer” force, an unstable mix of alienated Black and Latin enlisted women and men and Christian fundamentalist officers. Racism is alive and well in the post-9/11 U.S. fighting force.
History of Fightback
The limited reform successes of the Civil Rights Movement were made possible by a global anti-colonialist movement in Africa and Asia after World War II. As part of its Cold War offensive against the Soviet Union, the U.S. ruling class needed to put on an anti-racist charade. In the face of persistent, militant organizing and mass demonstrations, the federal government desegregated of the U.S. military in 1946, enacted Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (to supposedly desegregate public schools), and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
This original civil rights movement dated from before World War II. It attacked lynching and segregation and was led on a national scale by the old communist movement. But the old movement made a major error when it suspended sharp anti-racist struggle in the U.S., in line with the Moscow leadership’s devastating turn away from armed struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and toward a “united front against fascism..
Victory over the German and Japanese fascists was won over the dead bodies of tens of millions in communist-led Russia and China. But within the U.S., the united front meant abandonment of dedicated anti-racist fighters to the tender mercies of the segregationists and their lynch mobs. Coupled with a timid response to the anti-communist purges known as McCarthyism, this retreat took a huge toll. Bereft of fighting communist leadership, the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties ultimately became a toothless reform movement. It would exhaust itself searching to reform the un-fixable.
Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s. With the revisionist Soviet Union imploding, the U.S. ruling class no longer had to represent itself as a “democratic” alternative, either at home or around the globe. As their economy lost ground to imperialist rivals, U.S. bosses intensified their exploitation and brutal oppression of U.S. workers. The officially sanctioned, everyday racist policies in Ferguson are just one illustration of the gutter racism in the age of Obama.
Bosses Desperate to Pacify Angry Workers
The Justice Department’s report is a revelatory document for millions of anti-racist white workers and youth who could not have imagined how racist policing suffocates Black neighborhoods. For the Black workers, there may be a sense of vindication. Even the federal government, it seems, can no longer deny the realities of racism.
Last summer, Obama’s pleas to “keep it peaceful” (read: don’t upset the status quo) on primetime TV failed to stop the anti-racist movement sparked by the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. When KKKop Panteleo walked free last December, after choking Garner to death on videotape, mass anger erupted into demonstrations in over a hundred cities. The old-guard leadership of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson was unable to corral the masses into the electoral dead end of the Democratic Party. Chants of “Eric Garner, Mike Brown — shut this racist system down!” and “NYPD, KKK, how many kids have you killed today?” resonated among hundreds of thousands of marchers who blocked traffic and subjected themselves to mass arrest.
The U.S. ruling class has a problem. The Black and Latin workers and youth who have taken to the streets are the very same people the bosses need to fill their military enlistment quotas.
The U.S. ruling class has been at it for a hundred years and more, but they still don’t have it figured out. Their weaknesses are our opportunities. The twentieth century taught us that workers will fight for communism. Now in the twenty-first century, we must carry the fight to the finish — from revolution to the final victory of communism. Join PLP!

The abominable racism that produced the fascistic attacks on Black workers and youth in Ferguso  by the rulers and their cops — as revealed in the actions detailed in Redeye (page 7) — is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the logical extension of the 400-year racist history of the U.S. that had its origin in slavery. The super-exploitation of Black workers has become the foundation of the economy of global capitalism without which the profit system would be on far shakier ground.
In the U.S., slavery was written into the constitution. The first eight presidents were slaveholders. After 400 slave revolts and the abolitionist movement that abolished slavery legally, the enslavement of Black workers took different forms.
From the Civil War on to World War II — Jim Crow segregation laws, over 5,000 lynchings, the rampant attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, and the bosses’ state power — all enforced racism on Black workers in all aspects of life. This includes lower wages, last hired/first fired producing double unemployment rates, second-class medical care and education, segregated slum housing and the indiscriminate arrests of Black people sending them to prisons to be used as slave labor on Southern plantations.
Even as the fight against racism by Black workers as part of a communist-led working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s brought temporary reforms, in the seven decades since the end of World War II the racist conditions continued. Racist police murders in the big cities, the rulers’ Drug Wars that helped imprison 1.2 million Black workers and youth — half of the 2.4 million total incarcerated in U.S. jails — and the maintenance of discrimination in all sectors of life combined to produce over $600 billion annually  in super-profits for the bosses. That is the difference in family income of Black and now Latin workers as compared to white workers. The assets of Black families are one-tenth that of white families.
So now comes Ferguson. Surprise? Hardly. As the incidents reported indicate, the Black working class of Ferguson is subject to the various racist attacks that U.S. bosses have imposed on Black workers for centuries. That city’s rulers, from the city manager to the mayor to the police chief to the city finance manager to the court’s judges, all have wielded their state power to enforce the bosses’ profits: arresting Black people at gunpoint, using stun guns, tasers, jailings for non-payment of fraudulent debts: a modern debtors’ prison.
This racism is not just limited to Ferguson or even to the St. Louis region. It exists in one form or another in cities throughout the U.S. to produce that $600 billion in extra profits.
It is against this racism that Ferguson’s Black workers and youth, along with anti-racist whites, have rebelled and will continue to rebel. It is in this ferment that Progressive Labor Party has participated and spread our communist ideas, in Ferguson, across the land and beyond U.S. shores. Communism is the only answer to this racism and its source in capitalist exploitation. Only a worker-run communist society can free our class from bosses, profits, racism, sexism, mass unemployment, poverty and the profit-driven wars that the ruling class imposes on us, using to kill our sister and brother workers worldwide. Truly, Ferguson means FIGHT BACK!

MEXICO, November 20 —  Tens of thousands of workers and youth demonstrated in several cities across the country and around the world on the anniversary of the 1912 nationalist Mexican Revolution, in what has been called the Fourth Global Day of Action for Ayotzinapa. This was one in a series of protests demanding the return of the 43 student teachers disappeared on September 26 in that city. The local police with the complicity of the government, who then handed them over to the drug cartels.
The largest demonstration took place in Mexico City, where students, trade unionists, and mass organizations marched in three caravans led by the parents of the disappeared students. Members of Progressive Labor Party participated in this march, distributing 2,000 leaflets to Guerrero teachers, electricians and other workers marching in their mass organizations. Our assertion that communism is the only answer to capitalist terror was important in this protest because nationalism was the predominant ideology. The dismissal of president Peña Nieto and his cabinet is considered a solution.
For decades, rural teachers have earned the sympathy of the working class because of their commitment to their communities. For this reason, the bosses of Mexicanos Primero and the capitalist media like Televisa and TV Azteca have publicly accused rural schools of being guerrilla training places that must be eliminated. However, these accusations are really a cover to ensure the approval of the lucrative education reform, which will generate huge profits from turning education into even more of a commodity and will benefit the bosses who promote it.
Guerrero is one of the poorest states in the country with a long tradition of insurgent movements. The ruling class in this state has set up a sophisticated repressive apparatus involving the police, the military and drug lords. These groups, some of them trained and financed by the U.S., are responsible for the murder and disappearance of our youth.
According to the World Bank, 60 percent of youth in the world lack education and job opportunities; in Mexico that number is 70 percent. Conditions for the remaining youth are not much better: existing jobs are precarious, offering miserable salaries, with little or no benefits. They work long, exhausting hours, with some working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Mexico is one of the countries were the working class works the most hours per year.
Under these conditions, some youth end up involved in organized crime, or the use of drugs or alcohol. The ruling class has used this to criminalize them all and justify their police and military apparatus that in collaboration with organized crime has been terrorizing the working class.
Destroy the Capitalist System that Kills and Disappears Our Youth!
Ayotzinapa is not an isolated case of police terror. Thousands of unarmed Black and Latin youth are killed by the police in the U.S. Even in those instances when those crimes were videotaped, the police always argued they feared for their lives, and were sure they were threatened by “a drug-dealing, Black rapper youth,” a racist caricature. On the other side of the world, immigrants in many European countries are massacred by the police, as was the case of the Brazilian murdered by the racist British police, because he “looked like an Arab attempting to commit a terrorist act” in the city subway.
The murder and disappearance of our student-teachers is the product of a capitalist system that has nothing to offer our youth. The massive protests in Mexico and condemnation around the world show how painful crime is for the international working class.
The electoral political parties will not lead the working class to overthrow the capitalist system. Instead, they’d try to make us believe that only a few “corrupt” politicians are the only ones responsible, and that if we get rid of them and elect different politicians, all our problems would be solved and we’ll get justice. That’s a lie! Capitalism systematically kills and disappears our youth.
A system that has nothing to offer youth must be destroyed through a revolution led by a communist party. We workers must organize more workers and youth to be organized in our international communist PLP to lead a communist revolution to put an end to capitalist oppression and imperialist war. We are organizing additional Party members and friends to participate in the upcoming protests. We are also organizing meetings in our work areas to put this brutal crime in the context of imperialist war and the crisis of the capitalist system.