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Workers Deserve Reliable Transportation Now

After a full day of work, I begin the trek through the rain to find a way to get home. It’s the Saturday before Mardi Gras day and I am shuffling through the aftermath of the city’s and tourist’s elaborate celebration. There is so much garbage in the streets, so many beads littering the sidewalks as water builds up in the poorly pumped streets, that it is hard to walk through the Quarter.
I join my fellow workers waiting at the S. Rampart and Canal bus stop and lean against the building wall in hopes to find shelter from the rain. I am waiting for about 10 minutes while no bus arrives before I see city workers putting barricades on Canal. A woman comes over and laughs at us for thinking there would be bus service for us workers, despite the fact that we had just worked long days serving up the food, drink, and entertainment expected of Mardi Gras weekend. She points us a couple blocks over and says that “some” buses are waiting over there.

Since paying for a taxi or a Lyft/Uber would cost my day’s wages, I start swiftly walking. Random buses are scattered throughout Elk Pl. and Basin St., and from a distance I can almost make out the number 88 on one of them. Although the RTA’s timetable said the next bus (the previous never came) wasn’t due to leave for another 5 minutes, before I can get to it, the bus takes off. I am left stranded in the rain with my entire day’s cash earnings in my back pocket.

Tired, wet, and stranded, I feel so much frustration that this is not the first time the RTA has failed workers who hold up the city’s economy. Random detours, service disruptions, and buses or street cars that just never come are common.

On a typical day I wait up to 40 minutes for a street car on the St. Charles line, multiple times every month the Canal streetcar line has unwarranted service disruptions. Almost every day the 5 bus is 10-20 minutes late, resulting in me being late to work.

The feeling of anxiety and stress I felt when my feet couldn’t carry me fast enough to make the 88 at an unpredictable time is one I and thousands of workers feel everyday. Many buses don’t come often enough and if they decide to leave early, people are left stranded for another hour or more. In that hour’s time, you could be fired from your job, miss a class or an appointment, miss valuable time with your child, or be late to get home to cook a meal or help with homework.

This is not to mention that there are almost no shelters to cover us from the elements, and that there are less than half the amount of routes than we had pre-Katrina. We walk far distances at all hours of the day and night to get to a bus that just might not ever come. During hurricane warnings and floods, we are still expected to show up to work on time, without reliable transportation.
Yet the RTA funds $75 million streetcar projects like the Rampart Line that actually decrease bus service and access to jobs. They spend $20,000 on a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tell the workers that they don’t have money for more buses.

Hospitality workers generate $7.5 billion for the city, yet we spend hours every single day taking inefficient transit. We spend most of our time being exploited at our jobs where many of us cater to tourists, just to take “public” transportation that is not meant to serve the public. We are pushed out of the downtown area due to rising rents, yet we have no means of reliable transportation to-and-from our jobs. The workers of this city deserve free transportation. The time has come to organize and demand that the RTA serves the workers that hold up New Orleans.

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Hands Off Syria!

In early April, there was hope that the years-long occupation of Syria by the US military might be coming to a close when Trump told media he was ready to “get out.” By mid-April, however, Trump and the entire establishment reversed their position, and they started moving towards a new all-out war on Syria.

On April 7 the entire corporate media reported on a chemical attack on Syrian civilians. Immediately, they suggested that the Syrian government was responsible, even though James Mattis reported months ago that they had no evidence that the Syrian government ever used chemical weapons. Trump and his military cabinet jumped on board and used this as a pretext to threaten Syria with total invasion.

The Syrian government denied any responsibility. They reminded the world that they have always allowed chemical weapons investigations from international organizations, which have always cleared them of using or having chemical weapons. They invited the inspectors to come back once again to try to find some proof for these serious allegations. However, without any evidence, the US, UK and France attacked Syria with over 100 missiles before the inspectors could even arrive.

Most of the missiles were from the US. The attack was ultimately useless, and the Syrian military claimed victory for their defenses, though infrastructure and private research facilities were destroyed. The attack wasted $100 million of our taxes and pushed the world closer to nuclear war.

The Syrian military has emphasized that they had no reason to use chemical weapons. They have only needed traditional warfare to almost completely retake the territories held by the foreign-backed terrorist groups that have ravaged their country for six years.

The US is refusing to accept defeat in Syria. Their goal has always been to overthrow the government to secure oil profits, like they did in Iraq and Libya. And just like in those catastrophic wars for profit, they will gladly lie to us to justify the destruction.

It is ridiculous to believe that the US,UK and France are concerned about the human rights of Syrians. Firing missiles on civilian populations will not bring about peace. And all of these countries are silent when it comes to the long and brutal war on the people of Yemen by their close ally Saudi Arabia. They also supported Israel’s terrible repression of Palestinian protesters in April, where dozens were killed and thousands more wounded, some by chemical weapons.

The hypocrisy is even more evident when you recognize that the US has consistently been the number one user of chemical warfare. From napalm in Vietnam to white phosphorous in Iraq and Syria, not to mention the chemicals used on US protesters from Ferguson to Standing Rock, the US has no moral authority to attack anyone on that basis.

We workers must stand with the people of the world to stop an invasion of Syria that would block peace in the country for years. We should speak out against the war mongering of both Republicans and Democrats, and we should call for the military to leave Syria. A war against Syria would not only devastate that country, but it would also be a war on workers and oppressed communities in the US.

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For-Profit Immigrant Prisons Add to Mass Incarceration, Thousands of Children Jailed

by Joseph Rosen

U.S. immigrant detention prisons hold captive more than 40,000 men, women, and children daily.

Though most have never been charged with a crime, detainees are bound by shackles or handcuffs and forced to endure inhumane conditions including cavity searches, solitary confinement, physical and sexual abuse. By law, undocumented immigrants are denied a public legal defender. On average, a person will spend nearly a month in detention. Many individuals, torn from their family and friends, spend months and years awaiting freedom.

More than 37,000 immigrants are detained each year at sites across Louisiana. As is the case nationally, for-profit prisons handle the vast majority of this awful “business.” The GEO Group, the world’s largest for-profit prison company, runs major detention centers in Jena, Pine Prairie, Basile, and Alexandria, LA. The deplorable conditions at prisons run by the GEO Group have been met with prisoner uprisings and hunger strikes across the world, from Louisiana to South Africa.

Tens of millions of dollars in bribes by for-profit prison companies have been lavished on Congress. In return they get laws that actually say that ICE must meet “bed quotas.” And compared with other capitalist enterprises, GEO Group enjoys extraordinary profits, largely due to the unpaid labor of its detainees, 60,000 of whom are seeking damages for having been forced to work for free under the threat of solitary confinement. Last October, at an annual leadership conference held at Trump’s Miami-area golf resort, GEO Group executives celebrated an annual revenue of $2.26 billion, double that “earned” ten years ago.

Workers should recognize these racist concentration camps for what they are and demand full legalization for every one of our immigrant brothers and sisters; history will pardon nothing less.

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Ring the Alarm Bells of Global War!

CONDEMN DEMOCRATIC, REPUBLICAN COMPLICITY: BOTH PROFIT FROM WAR, TAKE MONEY FROM OUR CHILDREN! INDEPENDENT POLITICAL
ACTION IS NEEDED!

We hold the US presidents, generals and Wall Street responsible for the endless imperialist wars. After all, they make big money from it.
They carry out genocidal terror on people in other countries, creating millions of refugees and causing the starvation of more. They scapegoat immigrants and breed racism in this country. They lie to cover their deeds. They steal from the public treasury (our taxes) and cut our social programs to enrich themselves. Their bank vaults are overflowing with war profits, blood money. And whichever party is in the White house, Democrats or Republicans, both are parties of Wall Street who pursue profit above all else.

We expect more from progressives. Many people who should know better are following the Democratic Party in a blind stampede to hang their hats on anything that attacks Trump- including a dangerous and deceptive campaign of blaming everything on Russia.

There is no lack of REAL things to expose and attack Trump for (like his war mongering and his criminal budget-cuts that steal from the poor) that the masses of people can understand, as we are his victims. The Democrats have chosen this Russia-blaming path because it is a dead-end that will never lead to any real change.

Now a few Democrats are condemning Trump’s recent brutal bombing of Syria because of its illegality, but not the root-causes of the bombing. If Congress voted to approve the bombing (not done during Obama/Clinton bombings), would that make it OK?

These are all wars of U.S. aggression. Working people have no interest in them; only the rich do. The capitalists use them as an excuse to take away our rights of privacy and expression, in the name of a false “National Security”. Real security comes from having good healthcare, housing and education; all of which is threatened by increasing military spending. War is the greatest assault on the working class: THIS is what we must expose to the people of the U.S.

The U.S. capitalist ruling class has only one goal – maximizing profit at any cost. The system is standing on feet of clay only propped up by trillions of tax payer dollars to bailout banks, shamelessly looting the treasury to funnel profits to war corporations, and cutting taxes to the super-rich. Like a wounded beast it’s charging in every direction raining down destruction across the globe and at home. Congress is a millionaire’s club. Their campaign contributions are nothing but bribes. Some say go slow, others are for ripping the heart out of all benefits at once.

Many believe the hype that working class people are all for flag waving endless war. But if they were to stand on a street corner with a petition and talk to workers they would find there is no monolithic belief in any of it. If we ignore talking with, listening and organizing workers, putting faith instead in the other party of Wall Street and the Pentagon – the Democratic Party, we are doomed.

Even white workers who drank Trump’s Kool-Aid are mired in unpayable debt, low wages, and paying more for every basic need as well as education and health care and can be organized. Sitting in ivory towers and repeating wall street democratic party claptrap will not shake white workers from espousing racism, only organizing them against the capitalist system will.

Recently Trump signed the federal budget. The quick vote was solely for getting more billions to the military. With a few dissenters, Democrats voted for it eagerly as Republicans, (as they both have for decades which is the material basis for the rise of Trump and the right). Why? We all knew that following this would be amendments to the budget calling for sweeping cuts to Medicaid, social security and food stamps.

The government has declared war on the workers at home, seeking to extract every penny from us to put in their bank vaults. Workers can and will stop war and fascism. The Republican and Democratic Party politicians will do anything to prop up profits and their own personal gain. The working class has nothing to gain, and all to lose, from the rich mens imperialist wars.

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Big Tourism Companies Steal Tax Dollars

HOSPITALITY WORKERS ORGANIZE TO DEMAND FULL SERVICE MEDICAL CLINIC

$140 MILLION IN TAX MONEY IS BEING GIVEN TO THE BIGGEST TOURISM CORPORATIONS A YEAR, NOT OUR CITY BUDGET, NOT LOCAL BUSINESS AND NOTHING FOR THE WORKERS!

STATE LEGISLATURE, MAYOR AND COUNCIL DID THIS WITHOUT VOTERS’ FULL CONSENT.

By Marie Torres, Restaurant Server, Organizer Hospitality Workers Committee

In New Orleans the rich ruling class calls all the shots and chooses profit over people while workers are consistently denied basic rights. While the wealthy feast, the very workers who serve them their meals starve. We are expected to work doubles, clopenings, through hurricanes, with a smile on our face to make the rich man’s pocket fatter in hopes that we’ll be able to make rent this month, or get our babies fed. There are over 88,000 of us and without our labor the city’s tourism economy would crumble in the blink of their eye, yet the wealthy business owners and corporations think of us as disposable.

Ever wonder just how much money you have generated from all those plates you fixed, all those smiles you served, all those tourists asking you “where’s Bourbon Street?” Where does it all go? $7.5 Billion dollars are generated every single year by the tourism industry. Ever wonder why you literally cannot afford to get sick?

 

You know the feeling, fellow worker. As soon as you or your children start coughing, understand the struggle: buying some Emergen-C and NyQuil and calling it healthcare, waiting until the fever is way too high before you make the trek to the Urgent Care, worried the entire time about the cost because you don’t have insurance. If you do have insurance, you have to worry about what isn’t covered: those cavities you’ve tried ignoring, how you squint to see words on a page, maybe you’ve got a weak knee giving you trouble or some back pain you’d love to get checked out. You hear about more serious illness and just hope it doesn’t happen to you, you might already have some medical debt. Because your job doesn’t offer insurance, the city doesn’t help provide affordable insurance, and despite how hard you work, all you can afford just doesn’t cover it. Why? Isn’t the money there? The answer is: of course.

In 2015 alone, hotel taxes were $165 Million.

Local tax on all food and beverages (without voter approval) $11.2 Million.
All these taxes were turned over to private corporations that are called commissions that have been put into the city charter along with taxes dedicated to go directly to them.

Yes, over $140 Million every year goes to the Convention and Visitors Bureau ($17 Million), the LA Stadium and Exposition District ($57 Million), the Exhibition Hall Authority ($58 Million), and the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation ($12 Million).

This is money that does not go into the general budget, does not go towards bettering our communities, healthcare, or education. With all this money floating around, shouldn’t the workers at least have access to healthcare?
Money goes to white businesses, not Black local businesses.

Despite income inequality between Black and white residents growing wider, a recent report called the Disparity Study stated that only 2% of revenue generated by business in New Orleans goes to Black Businesses
The people in charge of these commissions, work hand-in-hand with the city council and the mayor to do this dirty work. For example, the Board members of the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation are from the biggest hotel and casino chains, real estate developers, and from other commissions such as the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the LA Restaurant Associations, as well as city council members and future mayor Latoya Cantrell, Stacy Head, Nadine Ramsey and Jason Williams.

Big business and government are working closely together to profit while the workers suffer. In 2013, the city was denied by the state legislature a proposal to increase hotel tax by 1.75% for the general budget. One year later, in 2014, the state legislature passed an increased hotel tax (by you guessed it: 1.75%!) dedicated to the Convention and Visitors Bureau and Tourism Marketing Corporation. Police of the French Quarter also got a piece: 0.25%. The Convention and Visitors Bureau alone is sitting on a $300 million surplus – all from tax money that should be used for recreation, jobs and fixing streets.
(*All data can be found from the Bureau of Governmental Research*)

THE SCANDAL IS DEEPER. WORKERS VOICE IS INVESTIGATING ALL TAX EXEMPTIONS AND ABATEMENTS THE RICH GET.

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Immigrant Rights Benefit U.S. Born Workers, No Rights = Lower Wages for All

With the non-renewal of Temporary Protected Status for some 300,000 immigrants (from Haiti, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump opens the door to deporting 1 million immigrants. That means ripping apart a million families, putting children in prison, and sending some to a country they have never seen. Immigrants don’t want to leave their homes and relatives but are forced to to survive. They come here, pay taxes, get no benefits, are often unpaid, and live in constant threat of ICE.

U.S. government trade agreements, policies and wars are the main causes for the displacement of so many men, women, and children. Death squads funded and trained by the U.S. military have been used to maintain the rule of business oligarchs in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Haiti while outright devastation has been wrought by US bombs in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

What then do the bosses hope to achieve by ratcheting up deportations and terror against immigrants to the U.S.? Their goal is to drive down the wages of all workers—immigrant and U.S. born. If any group of workers can be paid less, we all get paid less.

Undocumented immigrant workers live under the constant threat of detention or deportation and the devastating toll that this takes on their families. This insecurity is exploited by bosses who threaten to turn their workers in to immigration authorities if they bring attention to workplace safety violations or if workers decide to organize a union. Raids such as the one carried out by ICE at the Postville Agriprocessor Plant in 2008 (resulting in the arrest of 389 workers) have been instrumental in frustrating organizing efforts of unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. It is not the presence of immigrant workers in the workforce that drives down wages, it is that bosses can take advantage of their “illegal” status and fear to pay less. It’s bosses, not workers that bear the blame.

Likewise, it’s the legacy of legalized racial exclusion—Jim Crow—and current racism that’s to blame for low wages that prevail throughout the U.S. south. When Black and white workers unionized together both saw their wages rise. So, if immigrants had full rights, could no longer be threatened into accepting low wages, all workers wages would rise.

The very bosses and bankers who send run-away plants all over the world to pay pennies a day, who hoard their profits off shore, pay no taxes, oppose raising the minimum wage and all safety laws are telling us workers to blame immigrants. They scapegoat immigrants to disguise their greed and exploitation.

U.S.-born workers should call for the full legalization of the more than 11 million immigrants currently deprived of their full legal labor rights. As the central union, AFL-CIO writes, “history has shown, whenever one group of workers is denied access to workplace protections, all workers’ rights are in jeopardy.”

Workers of all nations must resist the global “race to the bottom” that the capitalists will never cease to egg on with their racist rhetoric. La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras: the workers struggle knows no borders!

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Celebrating 300 Years of New Orleans History? Working People Have Nothing to Celebrate!

By Malcolm Suber

The residents of New Orleans are being battered by the omnipresence of New Orleans’ ruling class promoting this city’s tricentennial. For the white supremacist ruling class it has been 300 years of consolidating their rule by every scheme available. They have grown fat, rich and comfortable in their mansion sized homes and glittering office towers. Vacations in the summer. Good education for their kids. Eating at the famous restaurants . Attending a constant round of balls and business luncheons. Clearly the rich white ruling class of New Orleans has much to celebrate.

But what do we working people, especially the Black working class people of New Orleans, have to celebrate? Not much! Although the working class does all the work and are the creators of New Orleans food and culture, the ruling class almost exclusively benefits from the culture we produce. We are assigned to the bottom rungs of society. We struggle to keep a roof over our heads. The city which fleeces us with sales taxes, parking fees and red light cameras provides little for us. Rent and daycare are too high; police terror and incarceration are too frequent We have little time for ourselves or our families.
The ruling class is salivating about the extra tens of thousands of tourists that will come to New Orleans to celebrate the tricentennial. Profits are anticipated to grow by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ask yourself, will New Orleans workers be better off?

The tricentennial celebrations reinforce the complete mastery of the racist white ruling class which has ruled New Orleans since its founding. The ruling class waged war to remove the indigenous peoples from this land and imported kidnapped Africans to come to the colony to do the heavy work of felling the cypress trees and draining the swamps. The plantation owners and the apparatus created to perpetuate the chattel slave system accumulated great wealth from the unpaid labor of the enslaved Africans.

When New Orleans and Louisiana experimented with a multi-racial democracy based on legal equality for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the planter class organized the White League to overthrow the reconstruction government. The terrorist atrocities include the 1866 massacre of hundreds at the Mechanics Institute and the September 1874 coup against the Reconstruction government. This counter revolution ushered in the Jim Crow period and the virtual re-enslavement of Black freedmen and women into the share cropping system.

Black people and their allies struggled to maintain the gains of emancipation but were overwhelmed by the forces of reaction and white supremacy. The US government withdrew federal troops from the south who had been there to guarantee the political rights of the freedmen. The state of Louisiana adopted a white supremacist state constitution and passed all types of laws curtailing the rights of Black people; especially their right to vote.

When the Civil Rights and the freedom struggle of the Black nation reemerged in the 1950s, the white supremacist ruling fomented a mass racist movement to support racial discrimination and segregation. This forced separation was entirely in the interest of the ruling class to keep all workers in the South poorly paid and super exploited.