ALBANY, NEW YORK, March 23 — Outside the Albany Capitol offices of Governor Andrew Cuomo, 200 City University of NY faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students picketed and loudly chanted “Tax the Rich, Not the Poor, Stop the War on CUNY!” and “Workers and Students Are Under Attack, What Do We Do?, Stand Up, Fight Back!” We were joined by parent and tenant activists.

The Professional Staff Congress (the CUNY faculty and staff union) organized this protest to demonstrate its anger at the Governor for cutting $95 million from the budget of the four-year colleges, and $17.5 million of the community colleges, to which NYC Mayor Bloomberg may cut an additional $35 million in NYC funding. Forty-six percent of community college students at CUNY come from households with incomes of $20,000 or less. Many of these students hold jobs in order to pay tuition and fees and buy textbooks.

Reducing funding for the community colleges will mean larger class sizes, less guidance, and further hikes in tuition, making it harder to graduate and forcing some to drop out. Slashing the funding of the community colleges is also racist, as 81% of the students are black, Latino, and Asian.

From Egypt to Wisconsin, workers and students are not accepting business-as-usual. This day was no different. Thirty-three of us sat down and blocked access to the Governor’s office. With the chants of 170 or so fellow demonstrators reverberating in the Capitol building, we were arrested. 

‘They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back’

The Governor’s slashing of billions from education and health care in a state with more billionaires than any other in the U.S. is outright class warfare. In NYC alone, there are 60 billionaires, and the wealthiest 1% of its residents receives an extraordinary 44% of all income. In NY State, there are 44,000 millionaires, who year after year increase their share of total income. Yet they object to extending a relatively small tax surcharge on high income, dubbed the “millionaire’s tax.”

The Governor claims there is a $10 billion “budget shortfall” and therefore social programs must be cut. However, this “shortfall” was created by decades of cutting corporate and high-income taxes while doling out billions in interest to the big banks. Without these give-aways, there would now be a budget surplus.

PLP members who organized for and took part in today’s protest believe it is necessary but not sufficient to demand that the rich pay higher taxes. When the politicians claim that “hard times” demand concessions and fewer services, we can expose this lie by revealing the tremendous wealth of the corporate owners and CEOs, and demand things like a tax on Wall Street stock transactions.

Taxing the Rich Is Not Enough

However, increased taxes on the rich will never be sufficient because it won’t change the reality of capitalism: 

Recessions and depressions are built-in, periodic features of capitalism. When they occur, state revenues decline, budget gaps develop and social programs and public jobs are cut.

In competition with foreign companies, U.S. capitalists inevitably seek to lower labor costs, both in the private and public sector, by lowering wages and reducing health and pension benefits. This has already occurred in the private sector (i.e., lower wages of GM workers), and now the plan is to impose it on public workers, who are far more unionized.

Since the creation of wealth (surplus value stolen from workers) is controlled by the owners of capital, they are in a position to amass greater and greater fortunes. They use a fraction of their wealth to control the Republican and the Democrat parties, by paying for their expensive election campaigns, by hiring lobbyists to write pro-business legislation, and by dangling high-paying jobs to politicians after they leave office.

Cuomo is a perfect example: after he left the Clinton administration, he earned millions working for Andrew Farkis, a real estate tycoon. When he later ran for Attorney General and then Governor, he received large sums from real estate magnates and Wall Street investors.

In order to maintain its supremacy and continue to control global natural resources (particularly oil and gas), markets and investment opportunities, the U.S. ruling class supports a huge network of 700 military bases around the world. A powerful military is necessary to control energy reserves and pipelines in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. But this is an expensive operation, and has led to a rising federal deficit. In response, corporate interests and their Democratic and Republican operatives support cuts in social spending, including Medicare and Social Security, so that spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, including wars of occupation, may continue.

Capitalism will always be a system of exploitation, in which workers are paid a fraction of what they cotribute to wealth creation. Millions of workers are stuck in jobs that are alienating, that are physically and mentally exhausting, and that stifle their creativity. 

We’re encouraging our fellow professors and students to think big and to join us as communists. Under the leadership of a communist party, workers can run society for the needs of our class, and kick out the Kochs and Rockefellers of this world.