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| Foggy night in Tacoma. Photo by KD, OAN copyright |
(Note: in the interest of clarity, some of the links below are used more than once in the text.)
***
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 Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater 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.
***
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.
***
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.”
***
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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