WASHINGTON, DC, February 5 — Today transit workers in Local 689, Amalgamated Transit Union, took a big step against the racist Metro system by opposing the bosses’ rule against hiring former prisoners. Thousands of workers are returning to the District of Columbia from incarceration every year, desperately needing jobs. Metro, like other bosses in the city, are blocking them. “I paid my debt to society,” one worker declared, “and now I need to work. I don’t want to be going back to prison anytime soon.” But background checks and former criminal convictions are keeping them jobless.
Recently, the city council refused the demands of masses of workers to pass a bill making it easier for such returnees to apply for and obtain employment. Initially the politicians acted like they were supporting them in their quest for jobs, but when the DC Chamber of Commerce launched a lobbying campaign against the bill, the councilors quickly remembered who they worked for and vetoed the bill.
The denial of job opportunities to these former prisoners is blatant racism. First, the bosses’ cops stop and frisk young black and Latino workers and send them to prison on weak and/or manufactured evidence. (See first item in Red Eye, page 7.) Then the bosses deny them jobs when they return. This creates a low-wage workforce, easily exploited by the bosses. A good exposé of this modern slavery is Michelle Alexander’s recent book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
For three decades, the Metro transit system here hired workers who reported their former jail time on their applications. Last year the Metro Board changed its policy and the traitorous transit union leadership fell into line, supporting the new policy of background checks to weed out applicants with records. Metro has even begun background checks on existing employees, firing them if an offense is found.
But this week workers at the union meeting overturned the union mis-leadership’s slavish support of Metro policy. Workers understood this policy is racist and were angry that their family members and friends were no longer eligible to work at the best-paying blue-collar job in the District. Many long-time workers told of encounters with racist police in an area where racial profiling was so prevalent that Amnesty International exposed it in their report entitled, “Driving While Black.”
This show of class solidarity against a racist system energized workers at Metro. It could lead to further pressure on transit bosses and the city to “Ban the Box” (on the job application where incarcerations have to be declared) and hire returnees so they can live independently and rebuild their lives.
Now is the time for the PLP club at Metro and the thousands of rank-and-file workers to fight the bosses’ onsalught of racism towards their workers and the community in general. For example, Metro has raised fares and cut bus service in predominantly African American areas, including Southeast DC/Anacostia.
By distributing CHALLENGES at this week’s union meeting, the Party was able to link the struggle here with that of New York City’s striking school bus workers. Solidarity with other transit workers and these returnees (who are brother and sister workers as well) must move front and center as the bosses’ crisis spurs increasing racist attacks on the working class.

BRONX, NY, February 2 — Three hundred people gathered outside the house of Ramarley Graham, the 18-year-old black youth who was murdered by the NYPD when they broke into his house one year ago.  The cops had no warrant and Ramarley had no gun.
Various politicians including city comptroller John Liu who is running for mayor spoke at the memorial rally.  They all tried to steer the masses into believing that electing better politicians and legislating more laws was the answer to the harassment that black and Latino youth face on a daily basis. 
However, as we left the house and marched towards the police precinct chants such as, “We don’t need those police, those racist police” rang out.   It is not just a few bad apples but the entire system that has to go. CHALLENGEs were sold and a PL flyer was distributed which explained that the role of the police is to protect the capitalist class’s profits stolen from the poverty and racist unemployment of black and Latino youth.  Justice for Ramarley Graham and all of the other victims of capitalism will only be achieved when we join together and revolt against capitalism and establish communism.
Because PLP has been active in building and sustaining the Ramarley’s Call movement during the last year, a comrade was invited to speak at the last stage of the day’s memorial inside the local church. He related the struggles of workers around the world against unemployment and war and explained how PL believes that capitalism was built on racism and used racism to maintain itself by dividing the working class.  He recounted how striking school bus workers had eagerly received leaflets about the  Ramarley Graham struggle  and understood that Bloomberg and the police were the common enemy. 
The Ramarley’s Call movement has made important steps in uniting several families who lost love ones due to police brutality.  PL members must step up their efforts to convince  these militant anti-racists to ally with communists, not politicians and capitalists. Together, we can challenge the entire system to build a better world devoid of racism and oppression.

MEXICO, February 12 —Workers living in the Lakes Xico-Tlahuac area, southeast of Mexico City, who are already threatened by flooding, now must fight the bosses’ plans for a grand-scale hydro project that will increase the danger. There are 120,000 families living in 12 residential colonies in the state of Mexico and the Federal District that could be affected.
Faced with the threat of flooding and later eviction from our homes, members and friends of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have begun to organize meetings with our neighbors to denounce these actions of bosses and politicians against workers. Over two years ago, we began discussing the problem of flooding that results from unrestrained over-extraction of underground water that is sinking the area.
Now the bosses want to start building their project, called Sierra Nevada, which they have already approved. They claim it will bring “Water for Everyone Forever,” by building a series of ponds to collect fresh water, mainly from the ice melting off the volcanoes Popocaltepetl and Iztacihuatl, as well as from rain sources. According to the plan, this water could supply the western zone of the Federal District.
With this project, the bosses are trying to placate the anger of residents who are almost permanently living without water — but it will be at the expense of other workers’ lives. But they are also planning an “eco-tourism” zone around the project showing that the true beneficiaries will be those bosses who own the land and resorts.
University Bosses Complicit
The National Autonomous University of  Mexico (UNAM) directed researchers to plan a project that in fact cannot guarantee workers’ safety. They failed to incorporate a back up plan to protect residents in case of flooding. And the threat is always present, as the researchers themselves have admitted, in case of strong rains or a malfunction of the system of drainage channels, given the decrepit and inadequate municipal infrastructure.
Through the use of CHALLENGE, we warned residents about the dangers and the need to organize ourselves to fight. We have distributed more than 6,000 flyers and newspapers in the two years of this struggle. These actions have given workers confidence in us, and the confidence that if the workers are organized, we could accomplish much.
The local government tried to derail the movement, arguing that it was a false alarm, but during the rainy season they chose to sacrifice the lives of workers of several other districts, such as Reyes, La Paz, Nezahualcoyotl y Ecatepec, flooding their homes with residual waters from the general drain.
Join the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. Come to the meetings and to the political education circles.

Tunis, Tunisia, the springboard of the Arab Spring in January, 2011, recently witnessed the eruption of mass demonstrations and a general strike to protest the assassination of a leader of the opposition party challenging the Islamist government. However, two of the key factors that led to the 2011 uprising, mass unemployment and poverty, are as prevalent as ever, essentially because their cause, capitalism, still rules. These conditions have sparked violent protests, which is why the government’s state of emergency remains in force.
All this exposes the hollowness of liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere labeling the Arab Spring a “revolution.” Revolutions occur when an oppressed class overthrows the oppressor class.
The General Union of Tunisian Workers called a one-day general strike on February 8, although the country’s universities were shut down until the 11th. However, the ruling class was taking no chances. Soldiers were deployed outside the main government buildings in Zarsis, Gafsa and Sidi Bouzid where masses of workers and youth marched, chanting “Assassins,” accusing the Islamist governing party of being behind the assassination.
Following the funeral at which tens of thousands assembled, taking “on the air of a demonstration against” the government (El Wonton newspaper, 2/9), army helicopters began overflying Tunis and military trucks were deployed on the city’s main avenue. But all of this did not prevent young demonstrators from occupying the street, clashing with police using riot clubs and tear gas.
CHALLENGE pointed out in 2011 when uprisings spread across the Middle East that they were limited to challenging the region’s dictatorships by calling for “free elections.” They weren’t aimed at overthrowing capitalism so the system’s exploitation of the working class would continue. No elections will change this, as workers and youth are discovering in  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere.
Capitalism’s ruling classes still hold state power and use it to clamp down on mass rebellions in Tunisia. Only the leadership of communist ideas aimed at completely destroying the profit system and its bosses can free the working class of the hell wrought by that system.