SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 — Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) workers struck today and shut the rail system tight. They’re demanding a 23 percent wage hike while the bosses want workers to pay more for their healthcare and pensions. Oakland City workers also had a one-day strike, shutting Oakland’s downtown (see photo). Bart carries over 400,000 people daily and mainly serves to bring the workforce from outlying areas to Wall Street West — corporations, banks, government offices, retail stores and education buildings concentrated in downtown San Francisco.
Bart is part of eight major unionized transit systems in the Bay Area. Its workers belong to Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555. AC transit workers’ contract (East Bay bus system, ATU Local 192) expired the same day as Bart. So far the leadership of Local 192 and the ATU International have succeeded in dampening the sentiment of many AC workers to strike in solidarity and for their own issues.
Corporate think tanks let the cat out of the bag when they estimated the strike would cost $73 million a day in lost worker productivity. PLP members point to this as a real example of the potential of workers’ power and the bosses’ need of workers’ labor for their profits.
PLP members are building transit solidarity, particularity at AC Transit and MUNI (San Francisco public transit), where we have a long history of organizing. We’re circulating a solidarity pledge for passengers and workers.
Some workers, have taken matters into their own hands by calling in sick, refusing to do extra service or overtime. In contrast, the union leadership has refused to organize anything, leaving members to their own individual decisions. Some passenger groups and non-profits have come forward to unite with transit workers against  fare hikes and service cuts. (More next issue.)

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL, June 30 — Since mid-June hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in Brazil’s main streets, many inspired by the recent rebellions in Turkey and Egypt. The trigger was a bus and metro fare hike of US25¢ but (as in Turkey) the overall causes are the ever-growing worldwide capitalist crisis. A third of the population of this “emergent world power” lives in extreme poverty.
Feeding the flames of the rebellion, the government is wasting more than 12 million dollars on the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. “We don’t need the World Cup,” reads a banner in a Sao Paulo march. “We need money for hospitals and education.”
When the communist movement advances anywhere, when we fight  the bosses — transit workers in Washington, Oakland and Los Angeles, or the textile workers in El Salvador, Mexico and Bangladesh, or against racist police brutality murdering our youth in New York — the workers and youth worldwide draw important lessons.
After weeks of protests in Brazil’s main cities, thousands of people continue to take to the street demanding better social services. After the new fare hikes were rescinded, new demands have emerged. The main struggle now is against the military and political repression of the working class, especially the evictions of workers because of the construction of the stadiums, sports centers and related infrastructures.
Mass Organization
Workers and students are tired of the pseudo-radical opportunist speeches of the Worker’s Party (PT) which claims to represent them. They’ve taken to the streets against the insufferable exploitation and repression heaped upon them during this last decade by the so-called leftist government led by Lula and now by Dilma Rousseff under which the rich have become richer.
This is the world’s eighth largest economic power, produced by increased worker exploitation while in the favelas (slums) poverty grows, children are trained by mafia gangs, opportunities for the unemployed are lacking and there’s no access to health services or education. As PLP maintains, the tiny reforms of the Brazilian “left” won’t change the real situation for workers.
The creation in 2005 of the Free Fare Movement (MPL) during the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre began as a small group of a few hundred but has grown into the tens of thousands. They are no longer willing to put up with hunger and terrible living conditions but are willing to fight. In many places these battles have been guided by small organizations with specific aims such as obtaining food from big supermarkets that have been looted, disobeying the orders of the politicians.
On June 25, the Homeless Workers and Free Fair Movements marched on the outskirts of Sao Paulo for demilitarization and against police violence; for control over rents; for better healthcare and education services and free public transportation. The rebelliousness has moved quite rapidly.
Fascist Cops Attack Protests
Brazil’s military and police have been trained by MINUSTAH, the UN troops in Haiti, for these kinds of events. CHALLENGE (6/13/2012) reported these troop actions when more than 10,000 people had gone into the streets, at that time the biggest mobilization achieved by the MPL here. The cops jailed 234 protesters, saying it was a crime to carry vinegar, which combats the effects of tear gas. Over 100 people were injured — including many who had nothing to do with the protest — on orders of the “left” to put down the protest.
As always, the media — the TV channel Globo and the newspaper Folha — depicted the protesters as bandits and called on the cops to repress them.
President Rousseff admitted the inferior quality of public services and cynically announced a “national pact” with congressmen, judges, mayors and governors to improve the schools and hospitals. She repeated her plan to bring in foreign doctors and repeated her proposal — already dismissed by Parliament — of investing 100% of the profits of the new oil fields in education.
Communism, Yes! ‘Democracy’ No!
Brazil has been praised as an economic success and a stable democracy, what presidents Lula and Rousseff called socialism. Many in Latin America view them as models. But many youth and workers in Brazil now see they have no freedom, with their job opportunities, education and health continuing to worsen. The capitalist attacks on workers are brutal, no matter who is in power. They’re all enemies of our class. Their democracy hides their capitalist dictatorship. By participating in elections, we elect our own executioners. They name the candidates, all of whom represent the bosses.
We need to aggressively organize our working-class youth so they don’t become the soldiers of the imperialist armies. We, the workers, don’t need a World Cup, new stadiums, “heroes” who reap millions while we starve to death. They are capitalist pawns who help maintain their system. We need to mobilize our Party for a communist revolution, distribute our paper to the masses and use study groups to win all these potential workers. We must direct this anger against the profit system and organize a communist world.

One year. And what is a year? A year is something that can be added on, but can never be taken away… A year is that nervous craving to do your good job and to draw down your good pay, and to join your good union… And a year of work is three hundred and sixty-four, or –five, or –six days of the run, the hurry, the walking, the bouncing, and the jumping up and down, the arguments, fights, the liquor brawls, hangovers, headaches, and all.

Such is the beautifully evocative earthy prose of House of Earth, Woody Guthrie’s only novel. Written in 1947 by the radical organizer, poet, singer, and songwriter, just published now. Guthrie writes of one young hardworking family — Tike and Ella Mae Hamlin — during the Depression and their struggle to make a living off the land, keep body and soul together and have a child in a shack that can barely stand up to the beating of the Texas Panhandle. He paints a sympathetic but clear-eyed and honest portrayal of working people — real people, not the noble, but often one-dimensional, portrayals of workers that can be found in some other works, or the sneering condescension George Orwell shows toward the simplistic “proles” in 1984.
The Hamlins rent a rickety house on decent farmland, but it’s an endless struggle to keep the crops coming up and food on the table, especially with their first child on the way and the bank breathing down their necks. Tike’s dream is an adobe house. Not the cheap wooden houses built by the tight-fisted landowners that leak and creak and rattle in the wind, but a mud brick house literally made of earth that stands up to the climate and can’t be blown down, burned down, or repossessed by the bank. Tike sends away for a pamphlet from the government on how to build one, and he keeps it in his pocket at all times, almost like a latter-day bible, drawing an almost religious hope from his goal of living in an earthen house.
It’s a book about struggle, but not a book about strikes and picket lines. This is the day-to-day struggle to raise kids, stay fed, clothed, housed and sane with only the barest of tools to make it happen. But most workers, even in the 1930s, didn’t spend the majority of their time organizing, however heroic the efforts of the Communist Party and other organizers in fighting the ravages of capitalism. It was mostly a constant struggle just to hold on, even with faith in a dream like an adobe house. It’s hard to know if Guthrie really thought that was a solution, or was just using the vision to show that even something as basic as a solid roof is unattainable under capitalism, because if it doesn’t generate profits, it doesn’t get built.
As the son of hardscrabble Oklahoma farmers, Guthrie wasn’t at all afraid to show both the strengths and flaws in his characters, from the diligent workers to their sometimes not-so-diligent neighbors, their tenderness and their less admirable traits, like Tike’s occasional sexism. They need each other to survive. Ella Mae works every bit as hard, if not harder, than Tike, acting as the real anchor to the family. It’s to Guthrie’s credit, incredibly for a book written over 65 years ago, that he doesn’t shy away from straightforward dealings of relationships and sexual relations between a working-class man and wife as a real part of their life on the plains.
Aside from their conversations, sex, occasional interactions with the neighbors, and a very faulty radio, there’s not a lot to distract from the constant work. But the lyrical and honest descriptions of life on the farm during the Depression, of life in general, the nuances of the characters and the tense, desperate scenes of childbirth on the open plains in the midst of a blizzard are gripping. They take the place of the more elaborate stories and plots in other fiction. For the most part, Tike and Ella Mae don’t succumb to defeatism. But that, too, is a constant effort, with the ever-present threat of foreclosure a dark cloud over them and thousands of others, no matter how bright the real sky might be.
For communists and anyone who opposes the profit system, this is an important book, and well worth reading and discussing. It’s a great read, but that’s not the point — it’s best used to discuss the depictions of working-class people and life, their strengths and weaknesses, and the choices — however limited — people without money make under capitalism. As so graphically portrayed in House of Earth, the dream of something as basic as a house of earth will remain just that, a dream, as long as the bankers own the land, until we take it away and return it to the people who work it.

The vast homeland spying schemes by the National Security Agency (NSA) have little or nothing to do with protecting the U.S. against terrorists. Their real purpose is to help U.S. bosses build a domestic police state to wage wider imperialist wars. The idea that spying on telephone calls or e-mails in the U.S. is “for our own good” is linked to the idea of supporting wars and interventions for “humanitarian” reasons. It’s a mask for the imperialist drive for maximum profit, which requires the control of energy supplies and cheap labor.
The primary aim of the bosses’ spying is to get people accustomed to accepting terror in their daily lives, from racist stop-and-frisk policies and murders by the police to the mass incarceration of mostly black and Latino prisoners. The militarization of public schools — in the name of protecting us against another Newtown slaughter — is in the same vein.
Internationally, our class sisters and brothers in the war-torn Middle East and South Asia are subjected to even worse. Every U.S. consulate masks a CIA station agent ready to instigate attacks against any group opposing U.S. imperialist policies.
In fact, the FBI and big-city police forces have made a routine out of the racist surveillance of mosques and people from targeted countries. There is no such thing as privacy under capitalism. The rulers have been spying on workers for 150 years, going back to the Pinkerton strikebreakers of the 19th century.  In the 1950s and ‘60s, it was the FBI’s Cointelpro and police force Red Squads. In the current Bush-Obama era, it’s the “war on terror” that has used advanced technology to create a more efficient surveillance state.
This spying signals a decisive move towards fascism. It is designed to scare the masses from fighting back against the rulers’ attacks and fascist conditions. All workers are vulnerable, regardless of whether they are “guilty” of any crime. It’s not much of a leap to foresee protesters or strike organizers arrested for “suspicious” e-mails or phone calls.
Liberals Playing Both Sides
On the surface, it seems that liberals are split into two camps over Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA schemes. Al Gore and “grass roots” liberal groups are cheering on the whistleblowing. They claim to challenge Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who contend that terrorists can be foiled only by monitoring everyone’s electronic communications. But in reality, both camps work toward the same goal: building the domestic police state needed by U.S. bosses to carry out their war plans.
Snowden, Gore & Co. actually help advance the warmakers’ fascist agenda. By apparently exposing the NSA, they enable U.S. rulers to gauge — and respond to — working-class support, acquiescence or opposition to the spying. Immediately after the NSA disclosures, the bosses’ attention focused more on opinion surveys than on Congress. The polls came fast and furious, as CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox rushed to learn just how workers felt about government eavesdropping. But it was the liberal Washington Post, the first U.S. organ to publish the leaks, that hailed a fascist triumph in public opinion, especially among mainly working-class Democrats:
According to a Washington Post-Pew Research poll, 56 percent in the U.S. consider the NSA accessing telephone records of millions of people “acceptable,” while 41 percent call the practice “unacceptable.” What has changed is the partisan makeup of who holds which position. In this poll, 69 percent of Democrats say terrorism investigations, not privacy, should be the government’s main concern, an 18-percentage-point jump from early January 2006, when the NSA’s activity under the George W. Bush administration was first reported. Compared with that time, Republicans’ focus on privacy has increased 22 points (Slate, 6/11/13).
These results were just what the imperialist-backed, “anti-war” outfits expected, even as they feigned dismay. National Public Radio (6/11/1-3) quoted Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the anti-nuke Federation of American Scientists, which is funded by multi-billionaire George Soros and the Carnegie Foundation: “Snowden’s efforts to alert the public to the dangers of such wide surveillance could ultimately backfire. The intelligence community can say we didn’t want this to be made public, but it was, and people shrugged, and now we take it as an explicit endorsement. That would be an ironic outcome.”
Who’s Behind It All?
Other liberal U.S. imperialists played a big role in engineering the NSA exposé. Consider Laura Poitras, whom the New York Times calls “the pivotal connection between the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden and writers for The Guardian and The Washington Post which published his leaked documents” (6/15/13). Last year, “independent” documentary filmmaker Poitras received a half-million dollar “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation while working for the Times on a video about another NSA whistleblower. MacArthur’s president, Robert Gallucci, is a lifelong servant of U.S. imperialism. He taught at the National War College and most recently served as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. In addition to the fat check from war planner Gallucci, Poitras appears to have gotten essential spycraft training: “[S]he had the technical ability to hold an encrypted online conversation with Mr. Snowden ... which he insisted on” (Times article).
Another fake “voice of the people,” this one calling itself the “Government Accountability Project” (GAP), ardently defends Snowden. In line with its motto, “Protecting Corporate, Government, & International Whistleblowers Since 1977,” the organization says, “Snowden disclosed information about a secret program that he reasonably believed to be illegal. Consequently, he meets the legal definition of a whistleblower” (GAP website, 6/14/13). Among the sources of “the vast majority of our funds,” according to the GAP site, is the ultra-imperialist Rockefeller Family Fund.
Hypocrisy, Inc.
“Outraged” ex-Clinton Vice President Al Gore added his voice to the chorus of hypocrites denouncing the NSA program: “This in my view violates the constitution. The fourth amendment and the first amendment — and the fourth amendment language is crystal clear” (Guardian, 8/14/13).  Never mind that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed slavery. Gore is a board member for Apple and senior adviser at Google, two firms that willingly funnel their customers’ messages and information to the NSA.
Gore is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that boasts Colin Powell, Iraq genocide war criminal and advocate of massive force warfare, as a strategic partner. In the same spirit as the NSA, Kleiner proposes buying into “internet, wireless, and media” for use against a potential World War III foe China.
Liberals’ phony soul-searching over the limits of home-front spying mirrors the new fake debate over New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy. If either Obama or Bloomberg wanted to, they could end such racist searches with the stroke of a pen. But deliberately feeble federal and state litigation allows Bloomberg to lecture, “It’s for your own good” to an increasingly accepting audience. These capitalist liberals are fundamentally imperialist. They mislead people by seeming to critique injustice while they pave U.S. imperialism’s path to war — and to the domestic crackdowns that war requires.
What Is To Be Done?
But the working class, led by communists in the Progressive Labor Party, cannot take these attacks lying down. We must step up our efforts on the job, in the military and in the schools, communities and churches to organize against fascist terror. We must point out that capitalism cannot be reformed. Under the laws of imperialism, rival national groups of capitalist bosses will inevitably escalate their oppression of the working class worldwide.
Only a communist revolution — eliminating the bosses and the racism, sexism, mass unemployment and poverty that flow from their profit system — can solve workers’ problems. A mass PLP is needed to achieve that goal. Join us!