Every rail union is officially involved in these actions and is working to get out its membership.

The purpose of the demonstrations is to stop the government’s attempt to wreck Conrail and Amtrak and in the process bankrupt the Railroad Retirement Fund.

Tens of thousands of jobs and the welfare of hundreds of thousands of workers are involved.

Several unions organizing the demonstrations have suggested calling a strike of rail workers later.

The response to the call for April 29 indicates that rail workers feel very strongly about the attacks against them.
 
April 30, 1956
The Kremlin magazine Soviet State and Law has denounced the practice, prevalent in the Soviet Union under Stalin, of basing convictions in court on mere confessions. In the issue that appeared April 22 it singled out Andrei Y. Vishinksy, main prosecutor in the Moscow Frame-Up Trials, for attack, accusing him of having developed the infamous system of “proving” guilt by confession.

This course seems indicated by the number of Old Bolshevik victims of Stalin already rehabilitated, by the admission that Tukhachevsky and some 5,000 top Red Army officers were shot on frame-up charges, and the public recognition by Kremlin officials that Stalin undermined the defense of the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II and actually paved the way for the onslaught of the German imperialist armies.  
 
May 1, 1931
For nearly two years, the most important countries of the capitalist world have been writhing in the grip of an unprecedented economic crisis. In the United States, as in the most other lands, industry had been prostrated, trade clogged up, agriculture driven into a chaotic position. All of its unexampled power, its enormous resources, its dominant position in world economics and politics, its lavish wealth, has not prevented the United States from being drawn into the deepest crisis it has ever known.

Who is suffering most acutely the effects of the crisis? The millions upon millions of workers tramping the streets in vain search for work, their hungry, desperate families, the ever-lengthening breadlines are an eloquent reply to the question. The plan of the capitalist class, driven into a corner by the crisis that has overwhelmed it, is to put the burden of the difficulties upon the shoulders of the working class.  
 
 
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