Transit Authority forced to meet with students

The dynamic New York City youth movement against the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s subway cutbacks and layoffs reached a new level in March, when Bronx students forced a meeting with MTA head Jay Walder.

The MTA’s hopes to get through the week of public hearings unscathed were dashed when, at the Manhattan public hearing on March 4, high school senior Adolfo Abreu confronted Walder and demanded he hold an additional hearing with students.

Walder attempted to brush off the question, but Abreu wouldn’t back down. Hundreds of audience members supported Abreu, telling Walder, “Answer him!” Outside the hearing, police strained to keep out hundreds of protesting students and members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 at the end rally of the March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education.

The MTA chairperson was forced to give in, and agreed to meet with the students on March 17. The meeting itself, between Abreu’s group, the Urban Youth Collaborative, and Walder, produced a partial victory: an MTA vote on eliminating free student Metrocards, originally scheduled for March 24, is now postponed to June.

The movement is now in a position to make further demands — and especially to challenge the idea that the MTA is forced to make cuts because it is out of money.

This agency that is supposedly out of money — “cash-strapped,” as the media describe it — pays hundreds of millions of dollars a month to banks and Wall Street firms for debt service. Debt service is the part of the MTA’s budget that goes to making payments on the money it owes to these companies.

The MTA’s total debt service obligation — meaning the money it owes but hasn’t paid back yet — is reportedly $28 billion. Most of what it is paying is just interest on this debt, which means that the banks get hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing.

To explain this obscene transfer of wealth — all the more outrageous in the wake of the bank bailouts — the MTA has put out a cover story that has been picked up by the media and repeated by some transit advocates.

The MTA has been forced to take out billions in loans, the story goes, because the city and state have drastically reduced contributions to public transportation. While it is true that the city and state have reduced their contributions to public transit, this fact has intensified the MTA’s domination by the banks. It didn’t cause it.

Back in the 1920s, banks were impatient with the bonds they bought from city and state governments, which were limited by their constitutions in how much debt they could carry. So under pressure from Wall Street, in 1927 New York state began to create “authorities.” Authorities could owe unlimited amounts of money to Wall Street. The banks liked that. In 1953, the New York City Transit Authority, now known as the MTA, was formed.

So the MTA has been a servant to Wall Street for decades. The debt service that gets bigger every year goes back that far as well.

Some transit advocates embrace the false argument that the MTA’s cutbacks stem from chronic underfunding by the city and state because it appears to provide a target for making demands on these governments, which are, after all, supposed to serve us.

But city and state budgets are also being looted by the banks. Last year, New York City paid $13 billion in debt service. When the MTA demands that the mayor or governor save them, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. David Paterson just shrug.

This is another reason that Wall Street prefers to deal with authorities. They’re one step removed from the politicians, who are supposed to be accountable to the people.

But against all of these shell games, the students have broken through. Now that the banks have been bailed out and Wall Street executives have received their bonuses, it’s obvious that the money is there. The only question now is who is going to get it.