Washington stokes Middle East bloodbath

Bill Van Auken

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chief of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional committee Wednesday that US troops may be sent into Syria to fight alongside so-called rebels who are seeking the overthrow of the Damascus government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“If the commander on the ground approaches either me or the secretary of defense and believes that the introduction of special operations forces to accompany Iraqis or the new Syrian forces ... if we believe that's necessary to achieve our objectives, we will make that recommendation,” Dempsey told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel.

Dempsey’s testimony was preceded by that of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who allowed that Washington’s strategy in relation to the “Syria piece” is to “create a third force that can combat ISIL [the administration’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-ISIS] and set the conditions for the eventual removal of Bashar Assad.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who was on Thursday in the midst of a trip to Saudi Arabia to reassure the Sunni potentates of the Persian Gulf that US nuclear negotiations with Shiite Iran would not erode Washington’s counterrevolutionary alliance with these monarchical oil states, spoke along similar lines.

Kerry reiterated Washington’s commitment to regime change in Syria. “Ultimately a combination of diplomacy and pressure will be needed to bring about a political transition,” he told reporters, adding that “military pressure may be needed.”

There is a growing sense that, six months after President Barack Obama announced the new US war in both Iraq and Syria, this intervention has reached a turning point that threatens to unleash yet another massive bloodletting on the peoples of the region.

In Iraq, this threat is imminent with the mounting of a major siege of the city of Tikrit, the former hometown of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was toppled by the US invasion of 2003 and executed by hanging under the American occupation.

Some 30,000 troops—reportedly two thirds of which are comprised of Iraqi Shia militias operating with Iranian support—have sought to encircle the predominantly Sunni city, which lies approximately 100 miles north of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The siege is preparation for an even bigger onslaught against Iraq’s second city, Mosul.

Roughly 30,000 civilians have reportedly fled Tikrit in fear for their lives, while tens of thousands more remain trapped in the face of mounting artillery bombardment. Shia militia leaders, meanwhile, have openly proclaimed that the assault will be the occasion for revenge for massacres carried out by ISIS.

The US military has stayed out of the Tikrit siege, claiming that the regime in Baghdad had not asked for its aid. In reality, Washington has ruled out any direct military collaboration with Iran, which itself is still a potential target for US intervention.

US officials have warned Iran and the Shia-dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi not to fuel sectarianism. “That would tear at the fabric of the country, and weaken the ability of the Iraqis to confront this threat to their country,” declared White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

What hypocrisy! The sectarian tensions are the direct product of the US war and occupation, which killed over a million Iraqis, tore the county’s social fabric to shreds and provoked internecine conflicts as part of a deliberate tactic of divide and rule.

ISIS, the purported target of the US intervention, is a Frankenstein’s monster spawned by both the Iraq intervention and US imperialism’s promotion of a war for regime change in neighboring Syria, where it and other Sunni Islamist militias received funding, arms and logistical support from Washington’s regional allies, all under the guiding hand of the CIA.

Washington’s stated policy of fostering, arming and training so-called moderate rebels to both combat ISIS and serve as a proxy force in the war to topple the Assad regime has become an increasingly criminal and cynical operation.

Last weekend, the last of the ostensible Syrian “moderates,” whose members were armed, equipped and even paid by the CIA—the Hazm, or “steadfastness” movement—officially disbanded after being routed in the northern province of Aleppo by the Al-Nusra front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. Advanced US weapons, including TOW missiles, were all surrendered to Al Nusra, while many of the surviving Hazm members joined it.

In the wake of this debacle, there are indications that Washington is preparing to seal a pact with Al Nusra, effectively allying with Al Qaeda itself in opposition to ISIS, a split-off from Al Qaeda. The government of Qatar, a key source of funding for Al Nusra, has reportedly been pressuring the group to drop its formal affiliation with Al Qaeda to facilitate this shift.

The sheer cynicism with which the military-intelligence apparatus and its front man, Barack Obama, wage their “war on terror” found the clearest expression in statements made by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this week.

“Moderate these days is increasingly becoming anyone who is not affiliated to ISIL,” he said. He indicated that US intelligence and military officials had “picked people that not only are moderate, whatever that is, but also we have to be sensitive to complying with the international rules of law, which in this environment is a pretty tough order.”

Of course US imperialism has operated for more than a decade in the Middle East—from Iraq, to Libya to Syria—in naked contempt for the bedrock provisions of international law, which, since the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, has banned aggressive war as an instrument for pursuing state interests.

What Clapper is referring to is the international prohibition against arming Al Qaeda, a provision that can be evaded by having Al Nusra drop its formal affiliation.

Anyone attempting to deduce the logic of US policy in the Middle East from the claims made by US officials runs into a mind-boggling maze of contradictions. In Iraq, Washington is effectively in alliance with Iran and Shia sectarian militias to defeat ISIS. In Syria, it is forging ties to Sunni Islamist militias to supposedly fight both ISIS and topple the Syrian government, which is backed by Iran. Nearly 14 years into the “war on terror,” the US military-intelligence apparatus is preparing to turn an affiliate of Al Qaeda into its frontline “anti-terror” and “pro-democracy” fighters.

To the extent that any coherent policy emerges, it is one of stoking the fires of war and political instability everywhere, promoting a struggle of each against all with the aim of weakening every country and government so as to facilitate the US drive to assert its hegemony over the energy-rich region. In turn, this regional policy is directed toward the preparation of even more horrific wars against the allies of Damascus—Iran and Russia.

For the people of the Middle East, this translates into another deadly and tragic phase in their drawn-out encounter with US imperialism. For American working people, this policy—developed behind their backs, with no real debate, much less popular support—also holds the threat of catastrophe.

Philip Levine (1928–2015): A poet of working class life and struggle

Dorota Niemitz & Matthew Brennan

The poet Philip Levine died on February 14, at the age of 87, in Fresno, California. Levine’s poetry is often associated with depictions of industrial working class life and struggle, particularly in and around Detroit.

Born in Detroit in 1928 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Levine himself was a factory worker for more than a decade, beginning at the age of 14. Among the factory and industrial jobs he held in the Detroit area were ones at the Cadillac Engine, Chevrolet Gear and Axle, and Wyandotte Chemical factories.

Phillip Levine, September 2006, photo by David Shankbone

In his early teens Levine was initially inspired by poetry after reading Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem Arms and the Boy. He later enrolled in the English department at Wayne State University, and became interested in Keats, Whitman, Hardy, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. He noted the connection between his work life and his growing artistic aspirations in an interview with Studs Terkel. “I was working in factories and also trying to write. I said to myself, ‘Nobody is writing the poetry of this world here; it doesn’t exist.’ And it didn’t. You couldn’t find it. And I sort of took a vow to myself … I was going to write the poetry of these people.”

In 1953 Levine enrolled in the University of Iowa Writing program, studying under the poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman. He considered Berryman his “one great mentor” in poetry, and speaks movingly of him in his autobiography The Bread of Time. Pursuing an academic career, he eventually became a professor of literature at Fresno State University in 1958, a position he held until he retired in 1992.

Levine’s published body of poetry spans from 1961 (On The Edge) to 2009 (News of the World). Some of his more well-known books of poetry includeNot This Pig (1963), They Feed They Lion (1974), The Names of the Lost(1976), A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988), and The Simple Truth (1995). He won a Pulitzer Prize for this last work. Capping a long list of literary awards received over his lifetime, he was named the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.

Levine’s poetry and poetic style, at its best, captured the complexity and beauty behind the harsh exterior of social life for working people. Often his poems depicted daily urban American life through both chaotic and mundane images—the factories, smog and soil, the smell of bread, eggs and butter, grease and sweat, fevered children, snowstorms, cluttered diesel truck cabins, an assembly press malfunction, a winter-beaten garden, or a mother’s work clothes. He could tell a genuinely moving story and evoke honest imagery without sliding into sentimentality.

Back-breaking work, dreams, drudgery and love could find sudden, unexpected intersection in his poems. Take for instance, parts of “What Work Is,” or “Of Love and Other Disasters:”

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
(…)The sad refusal to give in torain, the hours wasted waiting,to the knowledge that somewhere aheada man is waiting who will say ‘No,we’re not hiring today,’ for anyreason he wants. You love your brother,now suddenly you can hardly standthe love flooding for your brother,who’s not beside you or behind orahead because he’s home trying tosleep off a miserable night shiftat Cadillac so he can get upbefore noon to study his German (…)

- from “What Work Is”

The punch press operator from up northmet the assembler from West Virginiain a bar near the stadium(...)how the grease ate so deeply into her skin it becamea part of her, and she put her hand,palm up, on the bar and pointedwith her cigarette at the deep linesthe work had carved. “The lifeline,”he said, “which one is that?” “None,”she said (…)”

- from “Of Love and Other Disasters”

Levine’s appeal was also due in part to the accessibility and directness of his free-verse poems, which relied on familiar, accurate, and authentic language –all the more impressive in an era (the 1960s through early 1990s) when postmodernism and its impenetrable jargon began to find significant influence in literature and art.

Memory, nostalgia, grief and anger were central, for better and worse, to Levine’s narrative approach. Most often his characters live in all three spaces of time across a poem. People and places that no longer exist are brought back to life in the present, and their dreams are projected onto the future, or up against the lack of a discernible future.

His best poems often emphasize tension between visual motifs—such as everyday objects, people or well-known places—and the non-visual elements they evoke in the sounds or feelings of a place or time. In “Those Were The Days” he writes about young boys imagining a hearty breakfast served on silver plates on a sunny day, before being dragged back into reality by their mother, without the food, putting on their galoshes and heading off to school in freezing November rain.

In “Salt and Oil” the elements of the poem’s title become opposing symbols for capturing the “unwritten biography of your city … There is no/ photograph, no mystery/ only Salt and Oil/ in the daily round of the world,/ three young men in dirty work clothes/ on their way under a halo/ of torn clouds and famished city birds./ There is smoke and grease, there is/ the wrist’s exhaustion, there is laughter,/ there is the letter seized in the clock.”

His compassion and humane treatment of his subjects are Levine’s strongest qualities, with his sympathies almost always clearly directed toward the exploited, overworked and weary people of his poems. In the haunting “Detroit, Tomorrow” for instance, Levine describes a mother who contemplates “how she’ll go back to work today” after her only child has been killed (“You and I will see her just before four/ alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box/ of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a navel orange secured under her arm …”).

Or in “Among Children,” from a classroom of 4th grade schoolchildren in Flint, Michigan, he considers their fathers working in spark plug factories or water plants, their mothers waiting in old coats, and worries what the future brings (“You can see already how their backs have thickened, how their small hands, soiled by pig iron, leap and stutter even in dreams”).

One could easily list a dozen other poems evoking very human qualities in Levine’s poetry.

However, while his ability to movingly render the lives of “everyday people” and the grinding nature of work is admirable, those of his poems that move onto political and historical terrain point to some of Levine’s weaknesses. Here a tendency toward pessimism and resignation emerges most clearly.

Some of his most well-known poems—“They Feed They Lion” and “Animals Are Passing From Our Lives,” about racial tensions and the 1967 Detroit Riots, or “Francisco, I’ll Bring You Red Carnations” about events in the Spanish Civil War—are among his least effective.

Some of this can be explained in Levine’s world outlook. Throughout most of his life he identified himself as an anarchist. He dedicates numerous poems and essays to vignettes and to anarchist figures of the Spanish Civil War—a struggle he considered the most important of the 20th century. Many of these are captured in The Names of the Lost and in a chapter of his autobiography (“The Holy Cities”).

The themes of the more “political poems”—heroic individualism, defiance in the face of long odds, idealist notions of a better world—are generally passive and even demoralized. They lack a conception of the material and social basis of the revolutionary struggle. The poem “To Cipriano, In The Wind” is an apt illustration. Cipriano is the name of the Italian dry cleaner who inspired Levine’s turn toward anarchism as a youth. The poem is a discouraged longing for that particular idealism as it fades away in old age. Another poem, “The Communist Party,” about a CP meeting in Detroit in the late 1940s, illustrates a certain lack of seriousness with which he approached questions of history.

“Were we simply idealists?What I’m certain of is something essentialwas missing from our lives, and it wasn’tin that sad little clubhouse for college kids,it wasn’t in the vague talk, the awful wordsthat spun their own monotonous music:“proletariat,” “bourgeoisie ,” “Trotskyist.”

There is an underlying element of retreat and defeat—of an individual “screaming in the wind”—in many of Levine’s poems, even in some of the warmer compositions. In a Paris Review interview towards the end of his life he stated as much, despite his hatred of imperialist oppression. “Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire,” he said, “subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I’m not doing a thing about it. I’m not a man of action; it finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do?”

Large historical issues of the 20th century—the significance of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent betrayals of Stalinism, the global crisis of capitalism, the transformation of the trade unions into adjuncts of big business and the capitalist state, the dead-end of nationalism—would be difficult to navigate for even the sharpest of artists. Levine’s anarchism left him virtually powerless to bring these issues to life in his poetry.

His focus on the details of life in and around working class neighborhoods led one cultural critic to dub Levine the “large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland.” This description is somewhat misleading, however. It is indisputable that over the course of a lifetime Levine captured the episodes, dreams, daily routines, tragedies, disputes and complex interactions of working class lives in moving fashion. But his overall outlook is often shrouded by the view that life will never get any better. He is less of a fighter and optimist than Whitman, but Levine was no less sympathetic to his subjects than that poetic giant who preceded him by more than a century. He should be read and remembered for trying to give voice to the largely “voiceless” in industrial America.

Australian workers denounce budget cuts and austerity drive

Our Correspondents

Workers from a variety of industries spoke to WSWS correspondents after yesterday’s trade union rallies in Sydney and Melbourne, explaining what issues led them to join the protests and discussing the political questions raised by the speakers’ promotion of the perspective of returning another Labor government.

Joel, an air-conditioning worker from the large Barangaroo building site in Sydney, said he was forced to shift from Queensland to Darwin, then to Sydney, to find work in the construction industry.

Joel

“I’m here because I want to defend my rights at work,” he said. “Most of the blokes had to travel halfway around Australia just to get work… But living away from home allowances have been scrapped and replaced by start-at-the-gate payments. I have travelled to my last three jobs at my own cost.”

Joel was incensed by the move by the Abbott government to increase the retirement pension age to 70, on top of the previous Labor government’s raising of the age from 65 to 67. “I can’t work to 70! Physically, I can’t. People will be dying at work and they’ll just take them out in wheelbarrows.”

Asked about the calls issued at the rally to oust the state and federal Liberal-National governments and, by implication, elect Labor governments, Joel replied: “Just get rid of the Liberals? That doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t work like that…

“We’ve traded one government for another for long enough now, and no one seems to be getting a better deal… It’s a vicious cycle. Eventually it will get to a stage when there will be no wage rises. The minimum wage will be what you get.”

When we said the Socialist Equality Party was standing in the New South Wales election to advance the fight for the working class to take power and establish a workers’ government that would implement a socialist program, Joel said: “I don’t know if Australian workers are ready for a total commitment, but maybe if someone showed a voice, if maybe the Socialist Equality Party could be the voice, then people could follow.”

When the discussion turned to the Abbott government’s commitment of 300 more troops to the US-led war in Iraq and Syria, and the wider danger of war, Joel commented on the use of terrorist-scare campaigns by governments around the world to stir up pretexts for military interventions and the victimisation of government opponents domestically.

“Terrorism is an easy script,” Joel noted. “You can circulate allegations against one little group and say, ‘they’re the terrorists, they’re their bad guys.’ It’s easy to do. Who’s to say that people who still earn a decent wage, like we do in construction, standing in the street defending our rights, aren’t the terrorists? Everyone can get bracketed like that.”

Joel voiced scepticism in the Abbott government’s response to last December’s Sydney café siege, which the government transformed into a national terrorist emergency. “They built it out of proportion. He [the hostage-taker Man Haron Monis] was just an angry guy who was about to go to prison and that was his day, so that he didn’t have to go to jail.”

Nut-Cea, a Filipino-Australian community services volunteer, was one of many community service workers and volunteers who joined the rallies to protest against the cutting of federal funding to their organisations, which was announced just before Christmas.

Nut-Cea

“We had our funding removed for this year, so we don’t know what is going to happen with us,” Nut-Cea explained. “We assist Filipinos who arrive to settle in Australia. We received $75,000 a year federal funding last year, but now nothing.

“It’s a bigger issue too. It’s all the community services. Services like ours provide English-language assistance to everyone through libraries. I blame the Liberals at the moment for this, because they are the government.”

A retired high school teacher who worked in schools for 35 years said she came to the rally because she was “most upset” by the Abbott government’s budget cuts which were targeted against the poor and disadvantaged. “Let’s have equality,” she said. Although she was a Labor supporter, she admitted: “I don’t know if putting Labor back in will make anything different.”

The retired teacher added that she had been outraged by the previous Labor government’s treatment of refugees. “Kevin Rudd came up with the worst thing in cruelty—sending people to Manus Island!”

The teacher condemned Labor Party leader Bill Shorten for giving bipartisan backing to the decision to dispatch 300 more troops to Iraq. “There should be a referendum on war,” she said. “Bill Shorten shouldn’t have supported the decision to send more troops. He should stand up and be counted. We shouldn’t be fighting along with America. It all started with George W. Bush and Tony Blair in England—that was his downfall.”

David, a bus driver from western Sydney, was angry about the pressure on workers by the private bus firms contracted by the state government. He gave the example of the Liverpool to Parramatta T80 route. “There is not enough time. Every single bus stop you pick up passengers. By the end of the trip you will always be 10–15 minutes late. When you come back for the next trip always the passengers complain. Some of them get aggressive or punch you. But it’s not our fault.”

David

“We tell the union, but unfortunately the Transport Workers Union is not like it was before. They are more friendly with the employers, honestly. This started under the Labor government. I always said that Labor and Liberals were the same.

“When it is Liberals in government, Labor comes to motivate the unions to come to have demonstration to win support for the Labor. But when Labor is in power you can’t see any more demonstrations.”

Discussing the threat of war, David said: “It is all the US, it’s about the economy, it’s about controlling the oil. Killing people is nothing for them.” He said ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] had originated from the Islamic fundamentalists that Washington had earlier supported in Afghanistan and Syria.

In Melbourne, Alistair, a shipyard worker, explained: “I will be out of work this month. Job losses have been going on for decades. The government is not giving people any work to do. I have been at BAE in Williamstown for 33 years. The shipyard employs about 400 people plus contractors... I am 63 years old and I don’t think I will get another job.”

Alistair

Alistair commented: “I think that BAE is one of the richest companies in the world. War is good business.”

Luke, a building worker for 22 years, said: “The government wants to take our conditions away, such as overtime and double time. Everything is going down. We work like donkeys in the rain and wind at the top of buildings.”

Luke expressed concern about what was happening to workers internationally, and about the future. “Look at what is happening in Greece,” he said. “There are no pensions there. Pensions here are very low already—$200 a week—and you can’t live on this. How many millions of dollars are going to the war in the Middle East, and how many children are going to cry because their fathers were killed?”

German Left Party backs Schäuble and European austerity policies

Johannes Stern

The Left Party voted overwhelmingly in favour of extending the so-called aid programme for Greece until the end of June. In the parliamentary vote, 41 members of the Left Party fraction voted yes, 10 abstained and only 3 voted no. All together, 542 members of parliament agreed, 32 voted no and 13 abstained.

The class character of the Left Party—at its core, it is a right-wing bourgeois party—has seldom been so apparent. By agreeing to “Greek aid,” the Left Party is backing the German government, the European Union (EU), the banks and their brutal austerity policies in Greece and Europe as a whole. It is openly providing its blessing to a policy it previously pretended to reject.

Two years ago, Gregor Gysi, chair of the Left fraction in parliament, gave a speech to parliament, in which he said: “The rescue packages are not for the Greeks, but exclusively for the banks, investors and hedge funds. They and no one else are receiving this money.”

He called the austerity measures attached to the package “so antisocial that it more than astonished me.” Then he warned of the consequences: “the minimum wage in Greece must be cut from 751 to 586 euros a month. Wages must be cut by 22 percent. Fifteen thousand public sector workers must be laid off this year and 150,000 must be laid off by 2014. Pensions will have to be reduced by 14 billion euros in the next three years.”

As recently as December of last year, the deputy fraction president of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, declared, “We do not want to let ourselves be ensnared by this strategy. This is not our policy.... Furthermore, this course is wrong because it will provide a breeding ground for resentments and hostility to foreigners. We reject it because it is essentially a Christmas bonus for the speculators. You will never see us participating in this.”

So much for the “never” of the Left Party! Though there has been no change of course in Greece—besides the fact that austerity is now being carried out by Syriza, the Left Party’s Greek affiliates, in coalition with the right-wing Independent Greeks—Gysi announced to the enthusiastic approval of the parties in government on Friday, “a large majority of us agree to Greece’s request for an extension of the aid programme by four months.”

To justify this course, Gysi fell back on the same propaganda lies frequently peddled by Greek minister president Tsipras and his finance minister, Varoufakis. “The left government in Greece is now breaking with the failed policies of cuts. This is changing Greece. It is changing Europe and us as well,” Gysi declared. Syriza’s programme is “the end of the dictatorship of the Troika,” he said, and “a clear declaration of war on the failed policies of neo-liberalism.”

In reality, the opposite is the case. After the capitulation of the Tsipras government to Schäuble and the EU a week ago on Friday, Varoufakis sent a list of proposals for new austerity measures to Brussels on Monday.

Gysi and the Left Party are just as conscious of the right-wing character of the programme for which they voted as their Greek affiliate, which worked it out. This point is underscored by a revealing document published by the Left Party-linked Junge Welt newspaper on Saturday. Two leaders of Syriza, Dimitris Belantis and Stathis Kouvelakis, “inform” the German Left Party members of parliament about the right-wing programme of their party in order to demand that they vote against the extension of the aid programme.

The letter reveals the cynicism and hostility to workers of the entire petty bourgeois milieu on which pseudo-left parties such as Syriza and the German Left Party base themselves.

The letter begins: “We want to inform you and your parties about the content of the provisional agreement between the Greek government and the leadership of the euro zone on February 20 2015—or at least how we understand it. At the same time we want to give you a brief assessment of the content of the reform list sent by our Finance Minister Gianis Varoufakis to the Eurogroup. Neither text corresponds to the main points of Syriza’s electoral program me. What is even worse, they make it impossible to implement the main points of that program me ” (emphasis added).

The letter goes into “a few examples”: “Increasing the minimum wage to 750 euros [that is, its 2009 level] cannot be in the short-term decided ‘unilaterally’ by our Parliament. It can only be a long-term perspective, subject to the condition that it doesn’t harm the country’s ‘competitiveness’. The privatisations that are already completed will be left untouched. For those that are still underway, the process should be completed ‘respecting their legality’. No objection of principle to privatisations is be found at any point in the text.”

Later, it says: “Almost no bill may pass in Parliament without prior consent of the Troïka, which has now been renamed the ‘Institutions’, and it can’t be introduced without measures compensating its financial cost. This means that even the measures for the solution of the humanitarian crisis should be designed so as to entail no net budgetary impact.”

It even admits, “We wish to stress that the extension of the financing agreement of 2012 for four months without complying to the Memoranda, and to all their legal implications, is politically and legally impossible. To separate the financing agreement from the Memoranda is simply impossible. This means that, in violation of Syriza’s central commitment to the Greek people, the Memoranda and the set of laws enforcing them will remain substantially in place.”

And then comes the climax: “For us, it is clear that the ratification of this agreement by the European parliaments, with the consent of the parties of the radical Left, goes against the interest of the Greek workers and of the Greek people.... In our opinion, a ‘no’ vote will help the Greek Left and in particular Syriza to realise its programme. Conversely, a ‘yes’ can only create illusions and future disappointments.”

Anyone still maintaining “false illusions” in the supposed “left” politics of Syriza or the Left Party should read the lines that conclude the letter. After these two leading Syriza members have declared that the right-wing programme of their party “goes against the interest of the Greek workers and of the Greek people,” they implore the Left Party to vote against it, so that they can “realise” it better!

The fact that the Left party voted in favour of the so-called aid programme by a large majority must serve as a warning to the working class. Amid a rapid intensification of the crisis of capitalism in Europe, the German Left Party is ready to take on the responsibility of leading the federal government in order to carry out austerity policies in Germany and all over Europe.

The ruling elites heard the message loud and clear. A comment in theSüddeutsche Zeitung declared, “Gysi’s people have accomplished a shift and—with a clear majority for the first time—agreed to an EU aid package. They are doing what has always been asked of them: instead of warming themselves with the dogma that Europe only stands for the power of the banks, they have ventured out into the frost of political realism for the good of Syriza. One should congratulate the Left Party on its self discipline.”

Saskatchewan Fire Department refuses to answer call; two children die

Ashley Tseng

Two First Nations children were killed in a house fire on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan on February 17, after the fire department in the neighbouring village of Loon Lake refused to respond to an emergency call because the reserve was behind on its firefighting services bill.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers were the only first responders to arrive, at 1:30 in the morning. By then, the house was already engulfed in flames. Two-year-old Harley Cheenanow and his one-year-old sister Haley were both pronounced dead at the scene, after being carried out of the burning house by their father. Their grandmother, who was also in the house, managed to escape the blaze.

The mayor of Loon Lake, Larry Heon, who doubles as the village’s fire chief, callously defended his decision not to dispatch a fire engine to the scene, arguing that the fire department’s resources needed to be rationed for those who paid their bills, and that a firefighting team would have been too late to save the children anyway.

The reserve’s firefighting services contract with Loon Lake expired in October 2012, with an outstanding balance of $3,380.89.

For their part, the reserve’s leaders, led by Band Chief Richard Ben, say they believed that the financial dispute between the reserve and the Loon Lake fire department was resolved and that payments were made. They went on to claim that they were not aware that an outstanding balance would prompt the Loon Lake fire hall not to respond to an emergency call from the reserve.

The dispute which cost the lives of two innocent children was over how much the band owed Loon Lake for firefighting costs. Until October 2012 the reserve was charged an annual $5,000 retainer fee, with an additional charge for every call the firefighters responded to. Since then, the band has been paying the volunteer fire hall on a per-fire basis.

According to letters between the Makwa First Nation and Loon Lake, the cost of fire services include: $400 per hour for a fire truck, $300 per hour for a water truck, $30 per hour for a fire chief, and $25 per hour for a fire fighter. Considering how all fires have a minimum three hour call out, one fire response call handled by two volunteers costs at least $1,350.

Although the reserve has had a working fire truck for five years, it lacks the proper hoses to connect to the reserve’s fire hydrants. There is also nobody on site trained to operate the vehicle. A metal shed that once served as the fire hall burned down 30 years ago. Due to a lack of infrastructure, fire trucks kept on reserves in unheated facilities often freeze up in the cold northern climate rendering them useless for emergency calls.

In each of the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 fiscal years, the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve received only $11,000 for fire protection from the federal government, which, under Canada’s colonial-style Indian Act, has constitutional authority over First Nation reservations.

In total, Ottawa spends a paltry $26.3 million a year on fire protection services for more than 600 First Nations reservations across Canada. The level of funding is so low that in the province of Ontario, no First Nation has been able to purchase fire equipment since 2012. In two notorious cases in Manitoba, residents on a reserve were forced to use snow to extinguish a blaze that killed a two-month-old girl and, in another fire, were forced to deploy potable water trucks in the absence of any fire equipment. Last year alone on Saskatchewan’s First Nation reserves, five children perished in house fires.

The Saskatchewan tragedy once again lays bare the horrific living conditions faced by Canada’s First Nations people. Aboriginal children living on a reserve die in house fires at a rate 10 times the national average. A large amount of housing stock on native reserves is built below standard building codes. Due to housing shortages and endemic poverty, many homes are greatly over-crowded.

An auditor general’s report found that 44 percent of existing housing units constructed with government funding need major renovations. In addition, standard fire regulation codes do not apply on reserve properties under conditions where many homes are heated by make-shift wood stoves.

Government neglect and under-funding extend into virtually every aspect of life on Canada’s native reserves. A 2013 United Nations report found that 96 of the lowest 100 Canadian communities rated on a “Well-Being Index” were First Nations communities. Life spans for native people fall far below the national average. Diseases such as tuberculosis are rampant in some communities. Education opportunities are deplorable—fewer than 50 percent of students on reserves graduate from high school. Boil water advisories are, on average, in effect at any given time on over 100 of the 631 native reserves. Suicide rates are astronomical. In one reserve that was evacuated because of a contaminated water supply, 21 youth between the ages of 9 and 23 killed themselves in one month alone. Incarceration rates for aboriginals are nine times the national average. A native youth is more likely to go to prison than to get a high school diploma.

Poverty conditions are not restricted to those living on reserves. Natives in urban centres, which comprise about half of the one million overall population, have the country’s highest unemployment rate, second only to the rate for native reserves. Nationwide, an estimated 48 percent of aboriginal people are unemployed.

Australian union rallies seek to divert anger over attacks on wages and services

Our Reporters

Amid the deepening crisis of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the country’s peak union body, staged a “National Day of Action” yesterday to try to head off and contain the intense hostility among workers to the mounting assault on their wages, working conditions and social services.

NSW nurses marching

About 10,000 workers marched through Melbourne, 5,000 rallied in Sydney, and 2,000 in Brisbane, with smaller events in Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Hobart, Darwin and numbers of regional centres. The trade unions called no stoppages for the rallies, but building workers walked off several major construction sites, despite threats of $10,400 fines by the federal government’s Fair Work Building and Construction agency for taking “unlawful industrial action.”

There were also sizeable contingents of nurses and other health workers, alarmed by budget cuts and threats to scrap penalty wage rates—which would amount to wage cuts of up to 30 percent—and community service workers and volunteers, who are fighting the de-funding and possible closure of emergency relief, welfare, health, educational and advisory services.

Banners and placards voiced outrage at an entire range of attacks on the working class, including cuts to health and education spending, and plans for sharp rises in medical and education fees. Others denounced the gutting of funding for hundreds of community services and the widening social inequality. Among the most prominent concerns were moves foreshadowed by the Abbott government’s Productivity Commission to abolish penalty rates and cut the minimum wage.

With key austerity measures from the Abbott government’s last budget—particularly medical fees, welfare cutoffs and tertiary education fees—still stalled in the Senate because of the widespread opposition to them, the ACTU bureaucrats called the rallies in the lead-up to this year’s budget in May in order to channel the anger back behind the return of yet another Labor government.

Speaking at a Gold Coast rally, ACTU president Ged Kearney said the unions were determined to kick the Liberal-National government out at the next federal election, which is due in 2016. She invoked the prospect of making the Abbott government a “one-term” government, following the recent defeats of the first-term Liberal-National state governments in Victoria and Queensland.

Socialist Equality Party (SEP) members and supporters campaigned at the rallies, explaining that any return to Labor governments would only deepen, not stop, the attacks taking place, and that the working class needed a new political perspective.

At the Sydney rally, SEP candidates in the March 28 New South Wales election, including SEP national secretary James Cogan, discussed with workers the need to take up the fight for a workers’ government and a socialist program. Supporters circulated copies of the party’s election manifesto and a statement by Cogan exposing the fraud of the Labor Party’s claim to oppose privatisation and austerity.

SEP candidate James Cogan speaking with workers

Significantly, there were no Labor Party speakers on the platforms in Melbourne and Sydney, for fear of reviving memories of previous Labor government attacks on jobs, welfare and the public sector.

At the Sydney rally, all the official slogans were directed against Abbott and the electricity grid privatisation plan of his New South Wales state counterpart, Premier Mike Baird. Speakers called on the participants to repeatedly chant “NSW not for sale” and “We say fight back.” There was no mention of the fact that the last state Labor government sold off most of the electricity network, let alone the long record of Labor government privatisations going back to the selloff of Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank by the Hawke government in the 1990s.

Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon declared: “We are here for one reason alone: to tell Baird and Abbott to leave our work rights alone.” Without once referring to the Labor Party, he and trade union leaders from the building, health, electrical and community services sectors urged workers to “defeat” the Liberal governments, just like they had been “defeated” in Victoria and Queensland.

Community service workers at Sydney rally

In Melbourne, ACTU secretary Dave Oliver likewise invoked the 2007 defeat of the previous Howard Liberal-National federal government, without mentioning the anti-working class record of the ensuing Labor government of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, which led to its landslide defeat in 2013. “Ten years ago John Howard and his government attacked us,” Oliver said. “We went on and kicked them out. We’re going to fight the Abbott government.”

One exception to the lack of any explicit mention of the Labor Party occurred in Brisbane, where Annastacia Palaszczuk, the new Queensland Labor premier, was called to the stage, where she pledged to “stand up to Abbott and his arrogance.” Palaszczuk claimed: “We now have a new era in Queensland, a government that will listen, a government that will deliver, a government that is focused on jobs—jobs for your family and jobs for future generations.”

In reality, her government has already foreshadowed stepped-up austerity measures because of the collapse of coal, gas and other mining export prices, which are leading to mine closures and thousands of job losses in the former “mining boom” state. Just the previous day, state Treasurer Curtis Pitt reported that during 2014 the state’s economy shrank by 3.4 percent and business investment fell by 20.3 percent.

Palaszczuk’s government is already moving to impose the burden of the slump on workers, just as its Labor predecessor, the government of Premier Anna Bligh, unleashed a $15 billion privatisation of rail, electricity and other services, destroying thousands of jobs, in 2009 after the financial markets stripped the state of its AAA credit rating amid the global economic breakdown.

As in Queensland, any return to Labor governments at the state or federal level will simply pave the way for even more brutal attacks on working people under conditions of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation in Australia and internationally.

German, Romanian officials plan further escalation against Russia

Markus Salzmann

Three months after his election victory, the new Romanian president, Klaus Johannis, visited the German capital last week. Following a conversation with President Joachim Gauck, he was received by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Topics discussed included the situation in Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, as well as trade relations between the two countries.

Merkel reiterated her support for the aggressive stance of many east European states against Russia. She assured Romania, a NATO and European Union (EU) member state bordering Ukraine and Moldova, of her support. It was important that “we direct our attention not only to the Baltic States and Poland,” explained Merkel after the meeting. Geographically, Romania was “in a prominent strategic position”, she said.

Johannis supports the agreement negotiated in Minsk by Merkel with the presidents of France, Russia and Ukraine. He said that the stability of Ukraine was “in the interests of all Europe”. However, he also advocated harsher sanctions against Moscow and blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin for the crisis in Ukraine.

In an interview with broadcaster ARD before meeting Merkel, he demanded a stronger NATO presence in Romania and the entire Black Sea region: “Romania does not feel threatened militarily and we do not expect the conflict to spill over to Romania. But we want to be prepared for any development. That means the support of NATO.”

Merkel responded cautiously, explaining that NATO had agreed on important steps at its summit in Wales. “We must first focus on implementing these steps. Then we should also talk about further requests by Romania.” In Wales, NATO had committed to increasing its troop levels in eastern Europe, but this does not go far enough for many eastern European governments.

The demand of the Romanian president coincided with remarks by NATO Commander in Chief-Europe General Philip Breedlove. He warned that Moscow could try to prevent a rapprochement with the West with the help of Russian troops stationed in the rebellious region of Transnistria. “In Moldova and other places,” Moscow is already pursuing “a broad information campaign,” Breedlove claimed.

Already last year, Breedlove came out in favour for stronger intervention in the Black Sea region. He said that Russia would “militarise” Crimea and so extend its control over almost the entire Black Sea region. Regional conflicts have massively intensified. The US is planning to establish a new rocket base in Romania this year, while Russia will increase the capacity of its Black Sea fleet.

The right-wing Romanian paper România Liberă expressed fear that Johannis’s close collaboration with Merkel could weaken the “Bucharest-London-Washington” axis. “The sole political axis in which Romania can be sure Russia will not exert its influence is the one connecting us with London and Washington. Berlin, by contrast, still wants to believe that it can engage in rational discussion with Putin”, the paper commented.

Nevertheless, Merkel promised Moldova her support. The country, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, will receive “considerable aid from the European Union,” she said. Merkel and Johannis declared unanimously they were “closely bound politically” with Moldova, and supported the new government of Chiril Gaburici.

Destitute Moldova confronts a deep political crisis, exacerbated by the aggressive course of the Western powers against Russia. Russian-speaking Transnistria split from Moldova in a short and bloody war in 1991. Russian troops are still stationed there today.

Merkel and Johannis also discussed economic relations between the two countries, saying that they wanted to strengthen economic collaboration. The EU and business circles constantly raise cynical demands that Bucharest fight against corruption and nepotism.

Since the collapse of the Stalinist Ceausescu regime and the restoration of capitalism at the beginning of the 1990s, a fierce struggle between rival cliques has raged in Romania over access to the levers of power and associated financial rewards. Whether they be ex-Stalinists of the former Ceausescu regime or advocates of the free market, they all share contempt for the working class and lust for money and influence.

According to the web site Clean Romania, more than 30 ministers who have served in the last three governments have either been charged with corruption or have already been given prison sentences. This involves the cabinet of the Socialist Democratic Party prime minister Adrian Năstase (2000-2004), who himself has served a term of imprisonment; liberal premier Câlin Tăriceanu (2005-2008); and Emil Boc (2009-2012), as well as the current government of Victor Ponta, five members of which face charges.

Moreover, hundreds of government officials, family members and establishment party members are deeply implicated in corruption. TV screens show politicians in handcuffs almost daily. The fight against corruption has long been used to eliminate political opponents. The different bourgeois political camps routinely hurl accusations of corruption against each other.

The conservative Johannis won the second round of the presidential election in November last year against social-democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta. He had previously been mayor of Sibiu in Transylvania since 2000. He has close ties to conservative circles across Europe.

He has received his marching orders from the imperialist powers, to put an end to the trench warfare in Romanian politics and implement radical austerity measures. On this basis, the Süddeutsche Zeitung called on him to “reform parties, politics and government” and change “the state’s modus operandi.... This applies particularly to budget planning.”

US-Iran nuclear talks hint at a possible deal

Peter Symonds

The latest round of talks in Montreux, Switzerland between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programs ended yesterday with signs that the framework of an agreement could emerge before the deadline of March 31.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, in remarks clearly aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that he would not allow politics or “external factors” to distract him from the ongoing negotiations. “No one has presented a more viable lasting alternative for how you actually prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said. “So folks, simply demanding that Iran capitulate is not a plan.”

On Tuesday, Netanyahu delivered an anti-Iran tirade to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress, denouncing what he called a “bad deal” that would lead to a “nuclear nightmare.” While he did not spell it out in his speech, the Israeli prime minister has repeatedly indicated what he regards as the alternative—military attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities if it refuses to agree to completely dismantle all its nuclear plants and programs.

In a Reuters interview on Monday, President Barack Obama outlined US demands that Iran agree to “double digit years of keeping their program where it is right now and, in fact, rolling back elements of it that currently exist.” Washington is also insisting on a highly intrusive UN inspection regime to ensure “we’ve got a way of verifying” any agreement.

According to the Wall Street Journal, US negotiators are pressing Tehran to substantially wind back its uranium enrichment plants and other facilities to ensure that it would take at least a year to produce enough nuclear fuel to construct a weapon. “While there is no explicit agreement on the 12-month break-out period, officials say there is a growing understanding on all sides that it must be part of a deal,” the newspaper reported.

Kerry is exploiting the harsh US-led economic sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy, as well as the implicit threat of military attack, to extort major concessions from Iranian negotiators. The unsubstantiated allegation that Iran is building nuclear weapons—repeatedly denied by Tehran—is particularly hypocritical, given Washington’s acceptance of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

For Iran, the crucial issue is to ensure the lifting of all sanctions—something that Washington is yet to accept. While Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was upbeat on the prospects for a deal, he bluntly declared on Monday that the US and its allies “must once and for all, come to the political understanding that sanctions and agreement don’t go together. If they want an agreement, sanctions must go.”

Any nuclear agreement with Iran would mark a significant shift in US foreign policy. As far as Washington is concerned, such a deal has never been primarily about Iran’s nuclear programs. It has always been bound up with broader geo-political considerations—in the first instance ensuring American domination in the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.

For more than a decade under the Bush and Obama administrations, the US has imposed economic sanctions and repeatedly threatened to wage war against Iran on the pretext of destroying its nuclear capabilities. Obama continues to insist that all options, including the military one, remain “on the table.”

Washington’s overriding aim has been to fashion a regime aligned with US economic and strategic interests. With the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, the Iranian regime signalled its willingness to make significant concessions to reach an accommodation with the US. Now Washington is seeking to pursue the same broad objectives through negotiations on the nuclear issue.

This orientation has provoked sharp divisions in Washington, particularly among Republicans and Democrats very closely aligned to Israel and other US allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, that are deeply hostile any rapprochement with Iran. Having organised this week’s speech by Netanyahu, Republican leaders are seeking to block an agreement by enacting legislation to ensure that any deal must have Congressional approval.

While well aware that a deal could damage relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration is no doubt looking for Iranian concessions on a range of strategic issues in the Middle East and beyond. In its new war in the Middle East, the US has already coordinated its military operations to some degree with Iran, which is supplying advisers and equipment to prop up the Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad.

At the same time, Washington is seeking to pacify existing allies. Kerry has flown to the Saudi Arabia to meet today with King Salman and Gulf State foreign ministers. Saudi Arabia, which has long regarded Iran as its chief regional rival, is deeply concerned that it will be marginalised if Washington ends sanctions and establishes closer relations with Iran.

However, the Obama administration’s pursuit of a deal with Iran is driven by considerations that go beyond the Middle East. Amid a deepening global economic breakdown and rising geo-political tensions, the US is engaged in an aggressive and reckless confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, while “rebalancing” its military forces to the Indo-Pacific region against China. As it prepares for possible war against two nuclear-armed powers, the US is seeking to enlist, or at least neutralise, Iran which occupies the strategic crossroads between the Middle East and Central Asia.

In a recent comment entitled, “The intersection of three crises,” Reva Bhalla, a Stratfor think tank analyst, commented that the worsening European economic crisis, tensions with Russia over Ukraine and talks with Iran were “inextricably linked.” Having foreshadowed a breakdown of the Minsk agreement over Ukraine, she argued that the US must prepare accordingly for conflict with Russia.

“But focusing on the Eurasia theatre entails first tying up loose ends in the Middle East, starting with Iran,” Bhalla wrote. “If the United States is to realistically game out scenarios in which US military forces confront Russia in Europe, it needs to be able to rapidly redeploy forces that have spent the past dozen years putting out fires ignited by sprouting jihadist emirates and preparing for a potential conflict in the Persian Gulf [with Iran].”

After noting that a US-Iranian understanding would go well beyond the nuclear issue, Bhalla suggests: “It will draw regional contours of an Iranian sphere of influence and allow room for Washington and Tehran to cooperate in areas where their interests align.” She concludes: “The United States, regardless of which party is controlling the White House, will rank the threat of a growing Eurasian conflict well ahead of de-escalating the conflict with Iran.”

The Obama administration’s ability to conclude a deal with Iran, in the face of open opposition from Israel and sections of Congress, remains to be seen. The next round of talks begins next week on March 15. Obama will review any framework agreement before proceeding to consider a full detailed agreement, scheduled to be concluded by June 30.

New York City mayor bids out final school bus routes without job protections

Sandy English

New York City’s Department of Education, now run by the city’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, has announced that it is accepting bids from companies to operate a number of school bus routes, mostly for children with special needs who cannot otherwise get to school. These bids will lack the Employee Protection Provision (EPP) that guaranteed workers’ seniority rights and wage scales for over 30 years.

The move is an unmitigated disaster for over 4,000 school bus drivers, attendants (matrons) and mechanics, who will either lose their jobs or be forced to accept substantially reduced wages and benefits in New York City, where the cost of living is among the highest in the US.

This is the third in three rounds of such bids. The previous two were conducted under the administration of the former mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. While his successor, de Blasio, allowed the bid awards that Bloomberg put into place to stand, and the resulting layoffs to unfold under his watch, this round will be the first entirely of de Blasio's own making.

De Blasio delayed the bid competition for over a year, all the while claiming to be open to some sort of resolution to protect workers’ jobs and wages. He passed the buck in calling on the state legislature in Albany to legislate the EPP back into city contracts. Issuing these bids has exposed the complete fraud of de Blasio’s attempt to posture as a friend of the school bus workers.

The performance period in the bids begins in 2016. With workers on the 4,000 routes in the final year of their current contract with carry-over EPP, it is unclear whether the companies will carry out immediate layoffs and wage reductions at the end of this year or whether they will be bound by the terms of the previous contract with the city. (There are rumors of a one-year contract among bus workers.)

On February 15, 2013, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 shut down a strike of 9,000 school bus workers against the administration of then-Mayor Bloomberg over the issue of eliminating the EPP from the bidding process. In an attempt to mask its betrayal, it solicited and received a letter from the five Democratic mayoral candidates that, if elected, they would “revisit” the guarantee of the EPP in the bidding process.

Drivers and matrons on strike in the Bronx in 2013

While the union has said nothing to the workers about this latest attack, the failure to include EPP in the new bids has not surprised many bus workers who have seen their living standards crash in the last two years.

One school bus worker, Jose, told the WSWS, “I lost my job at Atlantic Express shortly after the strike. A lot of workers lost their jobs because when the contract expired at the end of the school year, we lost our EPP. This is what Bloomberg wanted.

“I am now doing the same work as before, driving school children and certified by the Board of Education, at a company called L&M, for a little bit more than one half of my original pay. In order to survive I need to work the weekends.

“I thought de Blasio was more for the workers, for poor people, and that is what my fellow workers thought as well. A lot of them said that we should all vote for him, and they did. I don’t trust de Blasio anymore. The union told us to vote for him as well. The union is corrupt. They are making money.”

Renne, also a former driver for Atlantic, said, “De Blasio has turned his back on us. The union has turned its back on us. I heard there was a master pick yesterday, and I’m waiting to hear what happened. I’m lucky because I have 23 years, and I am working. But I worked with a woman for six years who had 10 years with the company. When her unemployment ran out after the strike, she was forced to return to work as a new-hire and start over. As a new-hire, she is now making $11 an hour.”

A driver for the Reliant bus company said, “This morning the union rep said it will be difficult to get the EPP back. I did not say anything because I know that means we will never get the EPP again. That is a big problem. We don’t have vacation or overtime, even if we come back seven or eight o’clock at night.”

Over the last two years over five thousand workers have faced a similar fate as bids were let out in a process that began under the Bloomberg administration. But the union continued to promote the lie that was the basis for stopping the 2013 strike—that the Democrats would be different than Bloomberg.

For over 30 years, the bids were taken with the EPP guarantees. Language mandating the EPP was written into the bids after the bus workers’ 1978 strike. When Bloomberg announced in 2012 that the protections would be removed, the union treated this as the whim of a selfish billionaire. It was unable to prevent a strike, but it systematically worked to isolate it from other workers in New York City and to limit the number of pickets at garages.

Worker at union meeting in 2013

After calling off he strike, Local 1181 Present Michael Cordiello showcased his meetings with de Blasio and other Democratic politicians, and bragged that the Democratic-dominated New York State Senate would pass a law enshrining the EPP protection. Small groups of his supporters rallied at City Hall to keep up the farce that pressure would restore the EPP.

Finally, last year the de Blasio administration added a one-time $42 million budget item for the bus workers, a fraction of the $400 million that the city is saving by cutting the EPP. Only about half of the money has been used by bus companies to rehire veteran drivers. Only one company, Reliant, is using the funds, and it refuses to pay drivers overtime. At least two or three thousand laid off workers are still unable to get jobs.

In October of last year Members for Change, an opposition slate in the union, organized a rally in front of City Hall to deliver a petition to the mayor demanding that laid off workers be included in the upcoming “master pick” to fill open positions based on established seniority. No representative from de Blasio came out to meet the demonstrators, but that did not discourage the leaders of Members for Change from exhorting the bus workers to “keep agitating” with de Blasio and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat.

The Members for Change slate has also appealed for support from the Federal government, and US Labor Secretary Thomas Perez is now suing to nullify the results of the last union election, which the Cordiello faction won.

The plan to destroy the rights of bus workers was first made public in a document of Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission, which is made up of billionaires, charter school operators and, significantly, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former president of the United Federation of Teachers, representing more than 100,000 teachers and paraprofessionals in New York City.

In a 2012 report, the Commission noted the need to reduce “the biggest cost drivers in education and areas where spending exceeds the rate of inflation, including special education, transportation, pension and benefits.” Several times, the report emphasized the need to “Identify ways to reduce transportation costs…”

In the last few years, conditions for the entire working class in New York City have deteriorated. Not only is the city rife with police violence, but new figures show that the cost of living has increased 20 percent in the last five years. The homeless population now tops 60,000, and the poverty rate has climbed steadily upwards, due, in part, to the conditions of unemployment and slave wages to which bus workers and former bus workers have been reduced.

Many school bus workers, aware that their enemies are not only in the corporate offices but also in the White House, City Hall and the union headquarters, have asked, “What do we do now?”