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Indybay Feature

Stop All MUNI Cutbacks and Fare Hikes! Come Speak Out at the MTA Hearing!

Date:
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Time:
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Event Type:
Other
Organizer/Author:
ANSWER Coalition
Email:
Phone:
415-821-6545
Address:
ANSWER Office: 2489 Mission St. #24
Location Details:
SF City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 400

Since the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA) announced its plans to explore potential areas of revenue in September of 2009, the agency has played a political game, which pits different community groups against each other for their own benefit. They have attacked car drivers who can no longer afford MUNI; they have attacked MUNI janitorial workers who maintain MUNI. The MTA has attacked seniors, the youth, and the disabled who are the most vulnerable during these hard economic times by threatening to double their Fast Passes. They have vastly increased police harassment on MUNI – at great cost. Last year, the SFPD billed MUNI $18 million for “services.” All in all, the MTA continues to attack poor and working families who are experiencing cuts, not only at the city level, but at the state and federal level as well.

The MTA has claimed to be sympathetic to the San Francisco community. They claim to understand these measures are “tough decisions,” for the poor and working families. But not once has the board proposed a cut to their own bloated salaries and those of other MUNI and MTA management in order to show that their “understanding” has true meaning. The top heavy cost to maintain public services in San Francisco is just one of the symptoms of the larger problem with the City as a whole that avoids taxing those who have benefited from this economic crisis, the rich! We say it is time to stop making cuts and ratcheting up fares, meter hours and parking tickets and instead TAX THE RICH!

The current patchwork on the deficits in the MTA will not be solved by more cutbacks and more fare hikes. It is important to know that even if the MTA approves these devastating cuts to “solve” this year’s $16.9 million deficit, next year’s deficit amounts to $52.7 million! This means that we can expect the approved cuts to be added to a long list of new service and job cuts and new fare hikes.

This crisis cannot be solved on the backs of poor and working people. It is time to start cutting from the top! We call on community organizations, activists, MUNI riders, and the people of San Francisco who have had enough with the City’s non-stop cuts to our salaries and services to demand that the rich pay instead!

Join us on Feb. 16, 9am to make our voices heard in the MTA hearing. Call 415-821-6545 for more information or to get involved in the campaign.
!
Added to the calendar on Thu, Feb 11, 2010 10:10PM

Comments (Hide Comments)
by Direct action advocate
Since the early 1990's, actions in the San Francisco Bay Area around mass transit, described here,

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love2.html

the initial impetus behind this,

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_ strikeout.html

and critically analyzed here as well:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_farestrike.html


have been part of an ongoing effort to establish a new kind of anti-state/anti- market, autonomous class struggle praxis relevant to the times we live in.

Each of these action was initiated and pursued based on an understanding that --

1. These efforts take place "on the terrain of everyday life" of the wage-earning class, where contemporary working people confront what market relations do to our lives, and where the market system's antagonism to human needs gives rise to some possibility of an organized, conscious, mass collective response. These efforts haven't been directed towards the left-liberal protest ghetto, or toward academic, anarchist or Marxist subcultures.

2. Mass collective class struggle includes the fight against the boss in the workplace, but is not limited to the workplace.

3. In both form and substance the methods used to help catalyze a new politics of working class resistance to capitalism and it's political apparatus have to be qualitatively different from the politics of failure, the politics of the left -- the left-wing of capital.

4. Authentic enemies of capitalism in the 21st century cannot use the strategies, tactics or communication methods used by pro-wage labor leftists in the 20th century.

5. With the virtual disappearance of the conventional left, and the accelerating decline of the United States as a world power, the way is now open for the creation of a new type of autonomous working class oppositional praxis. This praxis freely takes from the best insights that grew out of the old revolutionary movement of the past two hundred years and uses these insights as a point of departure, and not as an end-point. Anarcho-syndicalism and council communism were both useful in their day. That day has passed.

UNDER THE RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES, he efforts around mass transit described in the articles can also have a "bleed-through" effect that may help spread resistance in other areas of contemporary life.

What's being examined here is mostly a method of communication. These methods can be a template for similar anti-state/anti- capitalist prole actions elsewhere, including but not limited to fights around housing, social space and against austerity measures that target employees and passengers of mass transit systems.

ONLY MASS COLLECTIVE DIRECT ACTION, NOT GROVELLING TO CORPORATE-BACKED GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE HERE.




by plebe
Via SF Gray Panthers:

"The meeting on MUNI fare increases and service cuts scheduled for Tuesday, Feb 16, has been postponed to Friday, 26th at 9 AM. This has been listed as the meeting where they would decide on these matters, but the City is getting more push back than they expected, so hearing times have been changing fast. Read http://tinyurl.com/ybcgt4d and http://tinyurl.com/ybc6os7 for more information.

"Also, there is the MUNI Summit, Saturday, March 6, 9 AM, at the Women's Building, 3543 18th St. (betw. Valencia & Guerrero). Read more about the MUNI Summit at http://tinyurl.com/yzuwbsy."
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