SAN FRANCISCO-OAKLAND BAY AREA, April 9 — “I really don’t have a problem raising the price of the youth pass.” These were the words of one of the AC Transit Board of Directors last month, as they discussed a range of plans to raise bus fares. How insulting! These are the bus passes that kids need to get to school!

The bus already costs $2 a ride, plus 25 cents for a 1-use transfer. On top of that, service was cut 15 percent in 2010, stranding many passengers and leading to longer waits and crowded buses. Where else but public transit can you get away with charging much more for less and worse service?

Several transit activists and transit workers attended the meeting and spoke out against the proposed fare increases: “You say there’s no money. Why don’t you go talk to Chevron?” said one speaker. Another commented, “It’s ironic that you talk about honoring Rosa Parks with a poster — if Rosa Parks were here, she would be disgusted by these proposals. It’s not about whether you sit in the front or back of the bus, but about whether there’s even a bus at all to catch!” These fare increases will have a racist and anti-working class effect as they hit our riders who are around 70% low income.

Unfortunately, there were very few in attendance (perhaps 15 passengers and nine transit workers). It will take much, much more pressure to slow down these major attacks on the ridership. Our union leadership says they are in favor of this type of activism, but they didn’t even put out a memo to the members, letting them know about this board meeting!

For those of us who did organize for the meeting, it was a positive start. Two drivers spoke at the union meeting, and passed out flyers at work for about five hours during the week. We also called around 15 drivers and texted about 50; this resulted in four drivers coming with us to the meeting.

Despite the fact that we just suffered a disastrous arbitration and currently pay back 6% of our check every week, many drivers are still hesitant to see themselves as activists. There was much more interest at the union meeting around the issue of whether to hold a special election for a new union president or to wait eight months for the scheduled election. Most drivers believe that the key is having a good leader (a “fighter,” someone “knowledgeable,” someone who “can’t be bought,” or all of the above). Also, most drivers are hanging on to the hope that things will get better once the economy starts to recover, and we can hold on to our standard of living. 

But these attacks seem likely to continue for the foreseeable future. As CHALLENGE frequently reports, the U.S. corporate class is in worldwide competition. Their main solution is squeezing the working class here in the U.S., and waging war abroad to maintain their stranglehold on oil and other resources. Once more drivers take a serious look at this “world situation,” they might conclude that we need many, many more rank-and-file leaders.

We invite all transit workers to Progressive Labor Party’s May Day celebration this year, where we will celebrate international working-class unity, discuss the rebellions in the Middle East and the Wisconsin fight-back, and look toward a world free of capitalism, where public services would come first, not last. 

BESANCON, FRANCE, April 6 — Riot police attacked 500 parents, teachers and high school students with riot clubs and tear gas during a peaceful demonstration outside the board of education protesting teaching staff layoffs in this city of 117,000.

The action was called by Federation of Councils of Parents of Pupils (equivalent to the Parent-Teacher Association [PTA] in the U.S.). The demonstrators chanted, blew on whistles and beat saucepans with wooden spoons. When a long-distance coach drove down the narrow street, the crowd was forced to surge towards the police, who immediately reacted violently.

Some parents had brought small children. One two-year-old child’s eyes went all red and was seized with a fit of trembling.

The demonstrators denounced the attack as proof of “the feverishness of a government which is attempting at all costs to force through the destruction of public services and whose only answer to our demands is force and obstinate silence.”

Since 2007, over 50,000 education jobs have been cut nationally, with another 16,000 slated for September. This is part of the government plan to reduce the budget deficit by 100 billion euros (US$136 billion) in order to satisfy “the financial markets.” The budget “deficit” is due mostly to the bailout of the banks.

According to Eurostat, the European Union’s (EU) statistics bureau, the EU bank bailout cost 15.4 billion euros (US$21 billion) and the EU’s total government debt in 2009 amounted to 8.7 trillion euros (nearly US$12 trillion). The interest on that debt goes straight into the pockets of the capitalists. To ensure they get their’s, the capitalists demand public service cuts.

Under capitalism, education is always run in the bosses’ interest. Only under communism can education be totally transformed into an activity that promotes both the development of the individual and the good of society. 

EAST CHICAGO, INDIANA, April 2 — Today, a large multi-racial group of nearly 1,000  people  marched against SB 590, the proposed state anti-immigrant law. This may have been the largest protest in this part of Indiana in decades, demonstrating that the working-class is ready to fight back.

The bill, similar to Arizona’s racist SB 1070, would allow local police to question and potentially detain individuals who they “suspect” to be “illegal.” In fact, the Indiana bill even exceeds the Arizona bill. Indiana’s bill would require that only English be used in a variety of public and formal settings. The bill also enables the state to maintain its independence of federal law, something that slowed the enactment of Arizona’s law.

The demonstration, named “La Gran Marcha (The Great March),” was organized mainly through numerous different churches and immigrant rights coalitions in northern Indiana and had a distinctly religious tone. Numerous bishops and religious leaders dominated the michrophones during the opening rally, leading chants with slogans such as “Somos el pueblo de Dios (We are the people of God).”

Though church leaders organized the bulk of  the demonstrators, the contingent of PL’ers and allies projected a communist perspective, countering the church leaders’ dead-end liberal reformist “solution.” Signs expressing the need for international working-class solidarity were proudly held high, in stark contrast to the few U.S. and Indiana state flags being waved. During lulls in the religious hymns, chants of “Obreros unidos jamas seran vencidos!” won a positive response.

Next time we will make an even more organized effort to distribute PLP’s literature with a solid communist  political line which would definitely have had an even more profound influence than our chants and signs.

We are making gains. Party members are active in several immigrant rights groups and are building strong personal and political ties as we deepen our involvement in this important fight against racist oppression. These struggles bring to life the lessons of the need for communist revolution in Indiana and all over the world.

With strong anti-racist, communist leadership these battles will inevitably expand beyond their current limitations en route to international working-class revolution. 

JAPAN, March 24 — The reaction of Japan’s capitalist government to the disaster unfolding in that country reflects the horrors of a system that puts profits before workers, a fact that has spurred Japan’s rail union into mass protests.

While the ensuing controversy over the possibility of a nuclear disaster continues to unfold, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) has confirmed that 27,000 people are dead or missing following the recent earthquake and tsunami that hit Northeast Japan on March 11. The  situation has become dire for over 200,000 living in temporary shelters (mostly in school gymnasiums) with limited access to hot meals, fresh water, adequate hygienic utilities or medicine, amid outbreaks of influenza and other contagious diseases. All this particularly affects the elderly who comprise a large percentage of the evacuee population.

NHK reports that many hospitals have had to move patients into shelters, which has also increased the risk of disease and death to those already housed there.

The most immediate threat is the continual decline of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which the Japanese government and the operators of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Corporation, (TEPCO) have been unable to control. A significant amount of radioactive material has leaked from the plant and into soil and drinking water within a large radius which has forced restrictions on local produce. NHK website reports, “Efforts to cool the plants are being hampered by the leakage of highly radioactive materials” which have forced rescue operators to abandon some of the reactors.

Shell Game Downplays Profit System’s Role

As local officials, the Japanese government and TEPCO play the blame shell game among each other about the possibility of a nuclear disaster little has been said about the system which has produced the problem in the first place: capitalism.

The Wall Street Journal (3/21) said the management of a nuclear meltdown was delayed to preserve “long-term investment” interests in the plants, a decision that clearly reveals the sickness of the profit-making system in which business interest is always put first, despite the possibility of mass destruction and loss of human life.

The parallel between the Japanese governments’ delayed response and capital interests is reiterated in statements by Yonekura Hiromasa, chairman of Nippon-Keidanren (Japan Business Federation). He praised the Japanese nuclear authorities, saying, “Japanese nuclear plants are tough enough to resist the greatest earthquake in a thousand years. It’s wonderful. Japanese nuclear agencies should be proud of it….The accident is going to be overcome. I’m not of the opinion that Japanese nuclear policy is coming to a corner.”

Additionally, Japan’s big banks have diverted billions of Yen to the re-financing of TEPCO, a decision sanctified by the Japanese government. The latter has also provided billions for rebuilding capitalist institutions most affected by the earthquake, rather than allotting them for building sufficient temporary housing and hospital facilities and sending adequate food, water and medicine to affected areas and shelters. This exactly mirrors the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Pakistan floods and basically anywhere profit is put far ahead of workers’ needs.

‘A man-made tragedy’

The Japanese Railway Workers’ union, Doro-Chiba, which has been the most critical of capitalism’s role in the current crisis, sharply condemned Yonekura’s statement and the insufficiency of the government’s response: “The reality before us is by no means a natural disaster but [is a] man-made tragedy, caused by a neo-liberal offensive on the basis of a capitalist market economy. Its real essence is nakedly exposed day by day.”

The Doro-Chiba also led a March 20 protest in Tokyo “to denounce the deceitful policy of the government and to demand disclosure of the facts on the whole development concerning the disaster.” This was to be followed by a national day of mobilization against war on March 27.

This anti-capitalist stance of Doro-Chiba needs to reverberate across Japan and the world. The international working class must fight the sickness of the profit system revamping itself in the wake of the disasters in Japan, Haiti, Southeast Asia, New Orleans — the list goes on. We need to organize workers everywhere to destroy capitalism and run the world for the benefit of all, not the select few!J

U.S. Rulers’ War Machine Outdoes Any Quake

On March 9, 1945, “100,000 to 200,00 men, women and children died…when the U.S. Air Force doused Tokyo with jellied gasoline; all told, in the months before Hiroshima, [conventional] bombs killed up to 500,000…Japanese…and left 13 million homeless.” (U.S. News & World Report, 7/13/95)

By June 1945, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”

Afterwards, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey noted, “Certainly…Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped.” (“Japan’s Struggle to End the War”)

The L.A. Times agreed: “The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary.” (8/5/05) President Harry Truman’s diary referred to a decoded Japanese cable indicating Japan was about to surrender unconditionally, as the “Japanese Emperor [was] asking for peace.”

Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur also agreed, the former later writing that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary” (“Mandate for Change”) and MacArthur also believed that A-bombing Japan was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view.” (James Clayton, “The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II”)

Yet, as most historians agree, Truman went ahead and dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima killing upwards of 150,000 civilians — three days before the Soviet Union had pledged to enter the war against Japan — as a “warning” to the Soviets that the U.S. had this hugely destructive weapon. And, to emphasize the “warning,” dropped still another one on Nagasaki three days later, killing perhaps another 100,000, as the Soviets entered Manchuria.

Secy. of State James Byrnes told A-Bomb Project scientist Leo Szilard, “Our…demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.” (Leo Szilard; “A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb”) So the U.S. “warning” to the Soviets killed a quarter million Japanese civilians.

Any doubt that U.S. rulers are the world’s most vicious terrorists?