03 November 2014

Tacoma: Microcosm of Capitalism and Class Struggle

Foggy night in Tacoma. Photo by KD, OAN copyright
2014. Click on image to view it full size.
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(Note: in the interest of clarity, some of the links below are used more than once in the text.)
 
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WHENEVER I FOCUS a critical eye on the operations of local government in my adopted home city of Tacoma, it seems I discover a new dimension of class warfare. 

Verily, I should not be surprised. A former investigative reporter, I witnessed the same dynamics in New York City, Seattle, Bellingham and various places in Michigan, Tennessee and New Jersey – literally every place I ever worked and even when I was a teenager covering sports not news. (I lasted 30 years in mainstream media, 1956-1986, only because I was able to hide my ever-more-emphatically confirmed recognition U.S. “democracy” is our species' ultimate Big Lie.) I had understood capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – long before Ayn Rand  gave me the vocabulary to express its true malice.

And, yes, capitalism is everywhere malicious. While the lessons of BhopalExxon ValdezDeepwater Horizon and Bangladesh are infinitely more grotesque than the back-room banalities of local betrayals by bureaucrats, legislators and municipal officials in lockstep service to the Ruling Class, capitalism's bloody history proves it has always, even in its most innocuous forms, been an economic system run by killers.  The photographs from Madhya Predesh  or Dhaka are themselves sufficient to define capitalism as serial murder. 

As if this damning evidence were yet inadequate – as if Nature in one last act of maternal mercy had decided her human children are such slow learners we yet need further proof of capitalism's innate maliciousness – there is the now-indisputable fact capitalism is fatally poisoning our planet.  Our world is dying, and its death wounds are inflicted by capitalism's relentless avarice, of which the local impact alone should be a constant goad to raise the red banner of resistance.

In the context of these present circumstances – the context of terminal climate change, of the atrocities of Bangladesh and Bhopal and of all the other too-awful-to-conceal demonstrations of capitalist truth – we scarcely notice many of the daily depredations of capitalism we typically encounter here in the USian homeland. That's because we have been conditioned to accept them as everyday realities, as irremediable as weather and therefore as moot as settled matters of law. 

But we should also recognize how capitalism's defining disasters – including all its greed-spawned horrors that will assail us in the years ahead – typically begin as lesser evils, the quashed traffic tickets and all the other apparently harmless examples of minor malfeasance that arise from the invariably chummy relationships between the local business executives and the politicians themselves. The wealthier the capitalist, the more deeply the politicians bow to his demands. That's why the case against the rich kid caught dealing cocaine to his private-school classmates vanishes before it gets to court, and the case against the impoverished black kid who got busted with a single marijuana cigarette results in a 10-year prison sentence.

And there's no relief. Eventually even the reformist politicians become capitalist puppets, a process that most often starts with a single act of petty graft, the capitalist buying a politician or a bureaucrat or maybe even a journalist an elaborately catered private-club dinner or giving him an expensive watch or guaranteeing the admission of his children to an exclusive private college. Sooner or later the capitalist con-man's newest mark is entrapped by outright bribes or perhaps – in the most extreme forms – a video-taped night amongst the Stepford courtesans,  female or male, of some unimaginably compliant executive whorehouse. The eventual result is total malfeasance – a government that is theoretically elected to represent the people but in fact represents only the capitalists – the realpolitik behind all the atrocities cited above. 

Ultimately – exactly as is said of USian politics – all corruption is local. Capitalism's ways and means are thus always the same, whether at Bhopal or in our own back yards. The capitalists' sole purpose is always identical: more for themselves, no matter the cost to us and our children and our Mother Earth. 

But even Ayn Rand, capitalism's most outspoken evangelist, dared not admit what capitalism truly is: that it is self-induced moral imbecility, the deliberate embrace of evil, the ethos of the serial killer shaped into global strategies and tactics that – once we discover how to look – are as obvious in the banalities of local governance as they are in the bodies of capitalism's victims


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BECAUSE I HAVE adopted the Pacific Northwest as my homeland, I tend to think of it as a place that is better than anywhere else. And though I have long been convinced neither our species nor our planet will survive the depredations of capitalism, it still disturbs me when I discover some new capitalist toxin poisoning my own back yard. Perhaps a tiny, eternally foolish part of me retains a vestige of hopefulness. 

But regardless of our perspective, and no matter how seemingly trivial the issue, once we have learned to recognize capitalism for what it is, we cannot escape the fact we are confronting absolute, absolutely intransigent evil. Even in the smallest examples of malfeasance we see the same ugly truth proven by the atrocities itemized above – that capitalists are sociopaths intent on victimizing all the rest of us. Thus the moral imbecility that defines capitalism is as evident in the everyday politics of the U.S. state of Washington  as it is in Bangladesh.

Note how, as a matter of official policy, Washington robs its taxpayers and gives the loot to the capitalists – sneering aristocrats  who are already so obscenely rich their wealth is inconceivable to those of us condemned to live our lives below the salt. Note how Washington politicians knowingly perpetuate the most deliberately regressive tax structure  in the nation. Note how they sadistically punish Washington's poorest peoples with the nation's highest state tax burden and simultaneously pamper its One Percenters with the nation's third lowest taxes. 

More to the point, note how Washington gives Boeing an $8.5 billion tax exemption – the largest such gift in U.S. history – even as it refuses to properly serve its citizens.  It is in (openly defiant) contempt of court for its refusal to provide its children with their educational needs. It cannot even maintain its physical infrastructure.  Yet in no other U.S. state are the politicians more generous to their capitalist puppet-masters. 

Though the gloating sadism of Washington state's capitalist overlords is not as brazenly obvious as that of the capitalist masters of Detroit,  we can be sure the only reason for the difference is racial. Washington state's population is 77 percent Caucasian, the USian homeland's favored majority. This means its politicians and bureaucrats have to be a bit more subtle about their primary job – extorting money from the people and giving it to the capitalists. By contrast, Detroit's population is 82 percent black, its majority the one USian people on whom it is always open season. Whether due to the greed of the board room, the carefully closeted but Ku-Klux-caustic bigotry of about 75 percent of the white majority or the conditioned murderousness of the (mostly white) federally militarized state and local police, blacks and their neighborhoods are always the prime targets.

But if we truly open our eyes, we see that in every domain against every race on every continent, capitalism's intent is always the same. Capitalist Bangladesh allows construction so shoddy it kills at least 1,129 people. Capitalist Detroit cuts off the drinking water to 27,000 households, inflicting the horrors of Third World poverty on entire neighborhoods. Capitalist Washington state commits the same atrocities, albeit more incrementally, with greater deviousness and more certain concealment beneath the Josef Goebbels cloak of near-total news blackout. The state denies health insurance  to 70,000 lower-income workers. It damns children to eternal ignorance by refusing to properly fund its public schools. It hikes tuition and slashes state support to ensure college is a privilege only the wealthiest families can afford. It guarantees its continued impoverishment by giving Boeing – a corporation that is unapologetically vicious in its treatment of its employees  – the biggest tax break in all U.S. history. And its politicians dutifully genuflect as Boeing moves another 2,000 jobs to the anti-union, low-wage, low-skill South.

All of this – families hurled into permanent destitution by downsizing and outsourcing, workers slain by production facilities so poorly built they become death traps, local environments poisoned beyond recovery, transit, schools and other vital services slashed or eliminated – is looting. And its obvious purpose wherever it obtains – Tacoma or Detroit or Bhopal or Dhaka or any other locale made infamous by capitalist atrocities – is pandering to the insatiable, unspeakably malevolent greed of the capitalists.
Such is class warfare, the quintessence of capitalism in action. 


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IN THE SEAPORT city of Tacoma, the most vivid example of class warfare is the white suburbanites' ongoing attack on mass transit

It is most often cleverly disguised as a spontaneous expression of racism.
But an obscure, state-funded think-tank report entitled “Identifying Redevelopable Lands” and revealingly subtitled “Application of a Land Value Potential (LVP) Approach in Urban Centers,” suggests the war against Tacoma transit-users is a clandestine form of the socioeconomic cleansing that's being openly imposed on Detroit. The Tacoma document,  completed in 2009 for city officials and their colleagues in adjacent local governments, is a deliberately confusing, carefully euphemistic textbook on the Ayn Rand economics of gentrification. As always under capitalism, its motivating principle is greed. Beyond a smokescreen of obfuscatory jargon, it shows how the demolition of lower-income housing could clear the way for luxury apartment complexes generating rentals as high as $2,170 per month and minimum profits of 10 percent (“Exhibit 9,” page 17). Given that rent control is illegal everywhere in Washington state – the politicians' response to a 1980 attempt by Seattleites to protect themselves against greedy landlords – the actual profits in a post-urban-renewal Tacoma would no doubt be much higher. 

In both cities – brazenly in Detroit, surreptitiously in Tacoma – the politicians and bureaucrats are undoubtedly fulfilling back-room promises to make land-use more profitablefor their capitalist benefactors. The war against Tacoma's transit users has already been denounced by some of its more savvy victims as the first phase of a campaign of socioeconomic cleansing or gentrification. That it began with an eight-percent service cutback in 2010 – the year following the “Land Value Potential” report – is thus unlikely to be coincidental.
 
Moreover – though it never quite states it in any quotable form –“Land Value Potential” obviously outlines the Ruling Class response to the fact (socioeconomically “undesirable”) lower-income people are the majority demographic in Tacoma  (see “Community Profile”). Though Tacoma officials are loathe to openly admit the city's poverty, it is proven by several statistics. The city's median annual household income, $47,862 per year, is nearly $10,000 a year less than the state median, The city's poverty rate – the percentage of the population the federal government officially defines as impoverished – is 17 percent; the state's is 12. This is underscored by the fact 45 percent percent of the local transit system's 36,000 daily riders have no other means of transportation. Perhaps the most telling fact of all is that 60 percent of Tacoma's school children come from families so poor they qualify for the federal free or reduced-price school lunches. And nearly 25 percent of Tacoma's population is black or Hispanic  – the perennially favorite targets of the gentrifiers. 

Detroit is much worse off.  Its median annual income is only $26,955, and its poverty rate is 38 percent. 

That Tacoma's ongoing transit crisis is the Ruling Class response to the barriers to gentrification posed by the city's lower-income majority is proven by two developments. One is the steadfast refusal of the allegedly “progressive” Tacoma City Council – which has both the requisite legal framework and taxing authority  – to come to the aid of mass-transit users. The other is the new, crisis-perpetuating policy adopted by Pierce Transit, the local transit authority, which denies long-promised service restorations to the (impoverished) city but radically increases service to the (far wealthier) suburbs. Thus it rewards the anti-transit suburbanites while punishing pro-transit city dwellers  (scroll down). It also serves notice the cutbacks in Tacoma bus service, which now total about 73 percent, are permanent. And it expresses the Marie Antoinette indifference of local politicians and bureaucrats – yes, even the so-called “progressives” – to the fact the radically reduced bus service has already denied an unknown number of families access to their jobs and forced them to move elsewhere. 

The downsizing, of course, was cleverly done, carefully structured – as it always is – to muffle public expressions of pain and anger. Even in Tacoma the politicians are superbly schooled in manipulation and deception. Public outcry was effectively stifled by the fact the cuts and the resultant life-ruining circumstances were rationalized by the so-called Great Recession. 

Meanwhile the use of the economic crisis by politicians everywhere as a cover for granting the Ruling Class long-demanded austerity measures lends further confirmation to the probability the entire economic contraction was engineered specifically to facilitate such devastating cutbacks

But gentrification is only one of the many weapons by which the Ruling Class assaults us. As always in capitalist governance – which is rule in accordance with the genocidal principles laid out by Ayn Rand – anything that helps sustain lower-income people is under attack. That's why there's a war against public education nationwide,  against potable water in Detroit, against public transport in Tacoma. That's why in the real (never publicized) state budget,  the capitalists rake off $50 billion even as the state's 1,045,453 million k-12 kids are deprived of adequate schools. That's why the Tacoma City Council won't salvage local bus service, makes a viciously dishonest pretense of considering mandatory paid sick leave  and is ignoring demands for a $15 minimum wage. In every case, it is targeted socioeconomic bigotry  intended to vindictively inflict maximum hardship on anyone of lesser means. Thus, by the imposition of ignorance and hopelessness, do the capitalists' wholly owned political servants repay their Wall Street masters. 

The underlying principle is simple. The more hardship the capitalists inflict on us, the more we are afraid – and the more we are likely to surrender to socioeconomic wretchedness. Note the 15,513 “under-votes”  – ballots in which the voter refused to indicate a choice – that killed the 2012 Pierce Transit service restoration measure.  Astoundingly, 4,443 of these under-votes came from inside the Tacoma city limits (the precincts prefixed by the number 27), where the proposal was nevertheless approved by nearly 56 percent. But the anti-transit-user majority in the suburbs nevertheless won by a final official tally of 704 votes. (The linked OAN piece was written before the results were finalized.) 

What the under-votes show depends on the locale. In the anti-transit areas they are undoubtedly gestures of contempt for those of us who are dependent on buses. But in pro-transit Tacoma they can only measure the extent to which the Working Class electorate is so psychologically demoralized, it will not even muster in support of its own obvious interest. Based on the city's demographics, at least half those 4,443 persons who wouldn't specify a choice were lower-income people for whom the transit issue was surely vital and probably personally decisive. In other words, the Working Class electorate inside the city cut its own metaphorical throat by refusing to vote. As a local Occupy activist said prophetically in 2011, “the 99 Percent is broken.”

USian “representative democracy” has thus obviously failed. And the voters' increasing disdain for elections is an index of the extent of their growing recognition the system is corrupted beyond any possibility of reform. Deceptions of the Elizabeth Warren sort  not withstanding, only the capitalists' most reliable puppets are allowed into U.S. political office. This is the gatekeeper-function function of the alleged “two-party” system, which is actually a single Ruling Class party, its monolithic nature disguised by carefully scripted public rivalries. It ensures the only interests represented in USian governance whether local, state or federal are exclusively those of the Ruling Class. A few exceptions, like socialist Kshama Sawant in Seattle,  are sometimes allowed locally, but only when the Ruling Class deems it necessary to bolster the greater Big Lie of USian “democracy.” 

Politicians who truly threaten the USian Empire's financial overlords are invariably removed from office.  Some are slain outright. Not even the officials of traditionally allied nations are safe from capitalist reprisals.  are safe from capitalist reprisals. 

As for Warren, her public disclosure file seems at first glance to suggest a substantial degree of independence from our capitalist overlords. But like all other Democrats, she is the political equivalent of the Trojan Horse. Her most generous funding source is Emily's List, which despite its feminist facade is fiercely committed to Ayn Rand economics.  And Warren is one of the group's most vocal supporters,  which tells us that behind her deceptive campaign rhetoric, she is as ruthlessly fanatical a capitalist  as Ayn Rand's disciple Alan Greenspan.  This tells us were Warren to win the White House, she would undoubtedly follow the example set by Barack Obama, the all-time champion Trojan Horse of U.S. political history, who ran for the presidency in 2008 as the candidate of “change we can believe in.” 


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AS MANY OF you know, I have several metaphorical dogs – personal and political alike – in the local fights for mass transit and a $15 minimum wage. 

A socialist with strong Marxian leanings, I also find it appalling (but infuriatingly typical of capitalist governance) the United States is the only developed nation that does not mandate paid sick leave for all workers. Therefore I volunteered my editorial skills to the local campaign for a paid-sick-leave ordinance. But my offer has been ignored, probably because the campaigners, who include the Tacoma City Councilman Anders Ibsen, are loathe to be associated with an outspoken socialist. 

There are no such fears amongst the local campaigners for a $15 minimum wage, a struggle begun by Socialist Alternative  and the Harry Bridges Club,  both of which are outspokenly Marxian organizations. Thus I have been active in Tacoma 15 Now since last February, and despite a two-month hiatus (September and October) due to a potentially fatal kidney infection, I will remain as active as other personal obligations and worsening physical disabilities allow. 

I will never personally benefit from a $15 minimum wage – I am 74 years old, and the USian job-market prejudice that regards old age as tantamount to terminal disability ensures I would never again be allowed to work for pay even if I were not permanently locked out of the workplace by the odium of my long-ago post-fire clinical depression. What prompts my involvement with Tacoma 15 Now is that USians are now the most viciously oppressed workers in the industrial world. Hence – however insignificant it might be – I will do whatever I can to combat this ever-worsening wretchedness the capitalists are knowingly inflicting on my Working Class sisters and brothers. The same spirit keeps me committed to the cause of organized labor through ongoing membership in the National Writers Union. 

The transit fight, however, is obviously a lost cause. As noted above, the local transit authority has made it clear there will be no improvement in bus service inside the city of Tacoma: not now, not ever. We who would benefit by such improvements have been damned as undesirables and are clearly being being targeted for socioeconomic banishment. 

Nevertheless, no doubt because I am a New Yorker by birth and was a Manhattanite by preference for much of my adulthood, I have always believed nationwide access to NYC-magnitude mass transport is a human right. In my years in the working press I advocated accordingly, and whenever possible I have done so in retirement as well. I therefore also understand why bus service inside Tacoma is maliciously kept at a prohibitively wretched minimum. In typically sadistic capitalist spirit, the transit authority's obvious intent is to inflict a perpetual transportation crisis on as many of us as possible. This is especially true for those of us who are chronically impoverished or are lower-income elderly or disabled people, of which I am all three.

What makes the crisis even more difficult for me personally is the financial atrocities of 2009 left me without a car. My meticulously maintained 1992 Ford Tempo V6 died in mid-2009 at 422,210.7 kilometers (262,349 miles), and I could not afford to repair or replace it. I was thus flung into permanent (and permanently embarrassing) dependency on vehicle-owning friends for any errands that cannot be accomplished via the vengefully downsized local bus service. 

The death of my automobile is also a kind of psychic death: it ended forever my ability to access alone the deep country solitude so essential to my spiritual wellbeing. 

Yet despite all this – despite the fact Tacoma now has by far the worst public transport of any comparable U.S. city – I am stranded here for the remainder of my life, with no possibility of ever moving to a less hatefully restricted environment. (Where does one go – and how does one get there – when one is 74 years old, physically disabled and damned by circumstance to an annual income of less than $15,000 per year?) 

The same questions afflict all of Tacoma's transit-dependent poor regardless of our age or physical condition. And in truth, there is no place we can go. Despite demographic trends elsewhere, the local suburbs remain prohibitively expensive bastions of white privilege. 

We are thus backed into the proverbial corner, our circumstances analogous to that of a wounded, once proud elk trapped in box canyon. We can either surrender or fight the predator who has entrapped us. If we surrender, we will surely lose. If we resist, our chances of winning are negligible, though at least we preserve our human dignity. 

But those 4,443 transit under-votes tell me the Tacoma Working Class has already surrendered. This puts the local $15 minimum wage effort gravely in doubt as well. If Tacoma's 99 Percenters wouldn't vote in 2012 for the transit restoration they themselves acknowledged they needed to get to work, why would they vote next year – or in any other year – to give themselves a raise? Locally at least, the revolution the aristocrats now openly fear  is undoubtedly more a creation of their guilt and paranoia than the result of any actual threat. 

LB/20 October-2 November 2014 

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