DC Transit Put the Brakes on Budget Cuts & Fare Hikes

WASHINGTON, DC, January 30—Progressive Labor Party members protested with 25 other workers and riders outside the headquarters of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) as the transit bosses held a public hearing began on raising the fare and cutting service.
Over 300 workers and riders attended the hearing. Ninety workers spoke out, condemning the cutbacks in transit service and the proposed increase in fares. The next day, the transit bosses claimed to have found some money to reduce their estimated deficit.
The Metro transit bosses claim that they are facing a budget deficit of $290 million starting with the fiscal year July 1, 2017. We know that this deficit is artificial. It exists because the corporations and developers near Metro transit stations refuse to pay taxes for the services they receive from the transit system. All local politicians are united in opposing a business tax to cover Metro’s “deficit”, calling instead for a sales tax on workers to finance the system and for eliminating 300 jobs to save money.
In the days before the hearings, thousands of workers and students rallied and marched in response to Trump’s executive orders attacking immigrants and refugees and restarting the Keystone pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Trump attacks some of the most vulnerable people in the world with these orders while hastening global destruction associated with global warming by these orders.
Progressive Labor Party members have been involved in all these activities, trying to increase the militancy of those involved and make the struggle an attack on the capitalist ruling class as a whole, not just Trump.  We have reached hundreds of people with Challenge newspaper and many people have provided us with contact information for followup.
The Progressive Labor Party’s strategy is to unite these forces of resistance in a common struggle against racism, sexism, imperialism, and capitalism. Many of the workers and students at these events agree with this approach, but they do not yet see the need for a party, in particular the PLP, to make this happen.  Overcoming this barrier mainly by fighting anti-communism is our central task now. 
  We must be there to lead them into the streets and eventually into our party, which has a strategy of relying on the working class to destroy capitalism and replace it with a communist system of equality.