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 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. 

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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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“Seattle Process”: a Tool for Savaging the Working Class

TO UNDERSTAND HOW Seattle's campaign for a $15 minimum wage was stabbed in the back – how “15 Now” became “15 Maybe Someday” – it is essential to first understand a perversion of democracy called “the Seattle Process” which, for brevity's sake, we'll hereinafter call “TSP.”

TSP is occasionally lauded as representative democracy at its best, but it is more often damned  as endless debate that results in permanent “indecision” or – on the rare occasions it actually achieves consensus – an approach that succeeds only by inflicting “exhaustion” on the participating groups and individuals.

Probably the most glaring example of TSP legacy is the wretched state of public transport  in Seattle and the metropolitan area on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, the so-called Pugetopolis, which includes Tacoma and Olympia to the south and Everett and Bellingham to the north.

In terms of mass transit, the entire region is nearly a half-century behind Portland, Oregon, which is its southern just-across-the-Columbia-River neighbor. And – not only in transit but in terms of all public services and humanitarianism in general – Pugetopolis is at least a century behind its nearby northern neighbor, European-minded Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While Pugetopolis seemingly dithered – “seemingly” because behind the dithering was a carefully scripted Ruling Class campaign to torpedo mass transit – Portland applied for and received federal funding that, by today's miserly standards, seems astonishingly generous. 

The money was available to U.S. municipalities through the Urban Mass Transit Administration, part of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Such were the halcyon years before UMTA – and indeed nearly all federal support for local transit – was killed forever by President Ronald Reagan and his Ayn-Rand-minded successors, all of them, whether Republican or Democrat, the obedient servants of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

On its surface, TSP appears to be nothing more than a local example of self-destructive indecisiveness, and indeed that is how it is invariably portrayed by its mainstream critics, who point to the seemingly endless debates and neighborhood-versus-neighborhood/whites-versus-minorities squabbling that – once Seattle-area light-rail construction was finally approved by voters in 1996 – delayed it another 10 years.

But if you look at these results using the tools of objective analysis – that is, if you analyze the results in terms of class struggle (or in parlance of old-time investigative reporters, “who got rewarded and who got fucked”) – then it becomes obvious TSP is yet another of the deceptive weapons the One Percenters use to perpetuate their power and ensure the rest of us remain forever below the salt.

Again taking the example of mass transit, the (mostly-unacknowledged) fact is the Pugetopolis Ruling Class has vehemently opposed it since it became an issue – mainly because adequate mass transit (think of New York City, Chicago or Boston), is one of the major factors that determine whether an area is attractive to lower-income people. Washington state has long been deliberately gentrified by any number of policies – the nation's most viciously regressive tax structure is one; the closure of wilderness access roads to all but equestrians and bicyclists is another – and the aristocracy clearly intends to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Seattle Ruling Class opposition to adequate mass transit became most obvious when the availability of the requisite public funding was at an all-time high – that is, during the late 1960s. Emerging via the the editorial pages and news columns of The Seattle Times, the opposition was soon mainstreamed by a nasty grassroots whisper campaign that played on xenophobic fears the subway and light-rail system proposed by Forward Thrust would destroy forever the region's cherished but cleverly undefined “Pacific Northwest lifestyle.”

These whispers inflamed the bigotry characteristic of the city's Northern European majority, claiming subways would turn Seattle into “another Jew York” and attract “criminal” minorities to prey on the (white) citizenry. The outcome, which included a de facto 26-year moratorium on rail transit, is a particularly telling example of how the USian Working Class is convinced to vote against its own interests.

It is also significant for the likelihood – raised by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony Washington state is often used as a proving-ground by the Ruling Class to test and refine methods of oppression – the anti-transit campaign was a rat-lab experiment in voter manipulation. (My apology for the fact I cannot link to this testimony; all published references to it have seemingly vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, assuming Ehrlichman's admission was truthful, the strategy and tactics remain devastatingly effective. (See again the “wretched state” link above.) Note how the implicitly racist meme “transit is welfare” convinced voters in the Pierce Transit service area to viciously downsize their own barely adequate system – never mind most of Pierce Transit's ridership comes from the seaport city of Tacoma, where half the population is definitively lower income and nearly half of the approximately 36,000 daily bus riders have no other means of transportation.  (In its new policy of pandering to relatively wealthy suburbanites – mostly rabid Republicans who despise all lower-income people as “parasites” – Pierce Transit has purged from its website anything its newly favored riders might denounce as “sob-story” data. Thus the link is to OAN and ridership numbers PT released in 2012.)

But the point is not the Pugetopolis transit crisis per se. The point is acknowledging what the Seattle Process really is: a pseudo-democratic mechanism of negation and disempowerment that serves the One Percent and – exactly as intended – savages the rest of us.

Which is precisely what happened to Seattle's fight for a $15 minimum wage – how it was transmogrified from “15 Now” to “15 Maybe Someday.”

Before I continue, I need to stress two important facts. One is I am speaking here only for myself. Yes I am a member of the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, but the views expressed here are my own, only my own, and most assuredly not those of the group. Two – the second fact – is I have no inside knowledge of what obtained behind the scenes in Seattle. My one reliable inside-Seattle source is long dead. My divorcement from all things Seattle is permanent and so poisoned by its native-born residents' notorious hostility to outlanders,  it is unlikely I would visit there even if invited. Therefore the information I have comes only from the same sources available to us all.

That said, why I view the fate of 15 Now Seattle as a loss rather than a win – indeed a devastating loss – is my application of Marxian principles of objective analysis: specifically that any loss for the Working Class is a victory for the Ruling Class, and, by extension, that any victory for the Working Class is a defeat for the Ruling Class.

“Working Class” as used here is an accurately descriptive synonym for the 99 Percent – those of us who, whether our jobs are mental or physical, must work if we are to survive. “Ruling Class” in this context includes not only the One Percent – the aristocrats who own the United States and regard all the rest of us as real or potential slaves – but the cadre of military officers, police commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who serve the One Percenters by obedience to their orders in compliance with the Führerprinzip   that rules USian capitalism and capitalist governance just as it ruled German Nazism and Nazi Germany.

***

In the early days of Seattle's fight for a minimum wage, the 15 Now Seattle organization was, whether intentionally or not, virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Kshama Sawant's astoundingly successful campaign for a city council seat. Sawant is an outspoken member of Socialist Alternative, and she campaigned as such.

For those unfamiliar with present-day USian politics, Socialist Alternative is a Marxian party that like the Socialist Workers Party acknowledges Marxism's enormous debt to Leon Trotsky. But unlike SWP, which publishes the informative and often provocative Socialist Worker but otherwise functions as little more than a debating society, SA embodies the “think globally/act locally” strategy that emerged from the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its 15 Now campaign, which is spreading throughout the U.S. and is embraced by growing numbers of workers employed by U.S. Big Business abroad, is a textbook example of the global/local approach.

The Ruling Class response to Sawant's victory has been the co-optation effort she anticipated in her city council victory speech  (relevant videotape begins at 11:35 minutes). But it was first evidenced, as I noted last January, “by subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric” that indicated the electoral triumph of a revolutionary socialist was already frightening the capitalist Ruling Class back into aspects of its former, Soviet-era pretense of humanitarianism.

Seven months later the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a $15 minimum wage ordnance that transformed “15 Now” into what some 15 Now supporters elsewhere have sarcastically dubbed “15 Eventually.” A caustic statement on the Portland, Oregon 15 Now website, edited here only for brevity, tells the whole story: 

Even while we should acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment there are so many problems with the deal in Seattle that declarations of victory seem somewhat premature and have left many people feeling justifiably deflated.

• Corporations that make billions of dollars in annual profits don’t need years to phase in. While it is true that under this deal the minimum wage for many of Seattle’s low wage workers will rise to $11 per hour in less than one year, the fact is that large corporations can afford to pay $15 now, but they are not paying $15 for a few years.
• Tip credits and health care credits actually reduce workers’ real wages that can be used to buy food and pay rent. Even if eventually phased out, these credits mean that at first there are likely to be some workers who actually see a decrease in their monthly net pay.
• Lower “training wages” could encourage companies to move to a model of short-term temporary labor in order to take advantage of the lower short-term rate of pay, especially among large, low- wage-paying corporations that already have high employee turnover.
• The sub-minimum wage for teenagers fails to help the many teens in Seattle who work not for extra spending money, but because their family needs the income extra income to help pay the rent and the bills.
• Categorizing businesses with up to 500 employees as “small” for the purpose of the phase in schedule is ludicrous.

So while those of us within the $15 Now movement who have worked hard justifiably want to celebrate the accomplishment of getting a large city like Seattle to pass a bill for $15, we also need to be open and honest about the fact that the workers of Seattle themselves are not getting $15 Now, they are getting $15 Eventually, in about a decade. While we allow ourselves a moment to celebrate what we have accomplished so far, we also need to make certain we recognize the fact that even in Seattle, and certainly in the rest of the country, the Fight for $15 is far from over.

Predictably, Seattle's mainstream media – which is really Ruling Class Media (i.e., capitalist propaganda) – celebrated the reduction of 15 Now to 15 Eventually – or as I prefer to call it, (because Big Business is already moving to reverse the city council's decision), “15 Maybe Someday.”

Meanwhile Crosscut columnist Knute Berger proclaimed the nullification of 15 Now a significant victory for “incrementalism,” noting how the associated maneuvers “put out the potential fire of a populist rebellion.”

“As left-wingnutty as Seattle is sometimes caricatured,” wrote Berger, “it's still a town of business, big and small...Our capitalistic roots are strong and deep; radical activism has occasionally surged, but rarely gained power. Labor may score an occasional strategic victory, but workers never really run the show (ask Boeing's machinists).”

And since Berger proved the point with which this essay began – that Seattle Process is merely an especially devious method to ensure the Working Class remains disempowered – I'll also give him the last word. Applauding how 15 Now became 15 Pie-in-the-Sky, Berger called it “an example of Seattle process...”

I rest my case.

******

In Case You Missed It/Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because this was the first week of the month with all its snail-paced bus-errands and those vexations multiplied to the Nth power by a couple of emotionally wrenching household disasters – the sorts of undeserved misery that prompt me to sing my own personal variant of the Doxology (“Curse god from whom all misery flows/ curse him ye victims here below”) – I had little time for reading my daily deluge of email, much less for posting comments on other websites. Nevertheless I did manage a few forays into Internet Land.

Hence when The Guardian reported on the burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,  “White House Fights to Restore Veterans' Trust: 'It's Not Going to Be Quick or Easy',” I was quick to point out the easy back-story the Ruling Class Media dare not report:

The veterans' health-care scandal is a microcosm of the national health-care scandal, which can be explained in five words: the One Percent's genocidal greed. The One Percenters and the politicians and bureaucrats who serve them don't give a damn for the wellbeing of anyone outside the obscenely pampered Ruling Class. The result for ailing veterans is there is never enough money to give them the care they need. The result for the rest of us is health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Both are functions of Ruling Class miserliness. “Why bother to treat the poor,” the aristocrats sneer. “The poor are always sick, and they die accordingly. Besides, their lives are worthless...”

This is not hyperbole. A prominent Ayn Rander – a Marie Antoinette political theorist whose fortunes are rising as the United States becomes ever more like pre-guillotine France – publicly made such statements a couple of months ago. (Sorry I don't have time to ferret out her identity.)

And though the politicians and bureaucrats are doing everything in their power to cover it up, and though the veterans' organizations are too compromised to ever acknowledge these sorts of atrocities are intrinsic to capitalism, it is the Ruling Class hatred and contempt for the Working Class – that and nothing else – that is measured in the resultant deaths.

My only other contribution this miserable week was on the comment thread of a disturbing report on the rise of neo-Nazism in Greece,  “SS Songs and Antisemitism: The Week Golden Dawn Turned Openly Nazi”:

Three points:

(1)-Note that Golden Dawn attracts "ever-growing numbers of the middle class." That's because, in times of economic crisis, modern history proves the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie), will ALWAYS turn to fascism. (It's only members of the proletariat and peasantry who turn Left.)

(2)-That's why, when the One Percent decides its time to impose capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the workers (in other words unabashed fascism) – it's the middle class that's targeted for discomfiture and the poor who are scapegoated and targeted for extermination.

(3)-Greece did NOT “give birth” to democracy. It coined the word that describes the mode of governance that had been characteristic of all human society until the advent of patriarchy. (A state of being is not named when it is the norm; it is named only after it has become rare enough to require description.) Moreover, if Robert Graves' hypotheses are correct, the real Greek contribution was imposing democratic process on patriarchy – which may (though I'm increasingly doubtful), yet rescue our species not only from patriarchy but from patriarchy's direct descendants, capitalism, fascism and Nazism.

***

And this in response to another poster on the same thread:

You are, jsluka, partially correct. But what you describe as "mass support from 'workers'" was typically induced by terror: unabashed extermination of Marxians and indeed all representatives of any Left alternatives in Germany, Italy and Spain; the less violent but more permanently psychologically damaging purge of Leftists and intellectuals in the postwar United States; Pinochet's extermination of class-conscious workers in Chile, etc. ad nauseum.

In terms of innate tendencies – and I erred in my failure to make this clear, for which I apologize – I believe what I said obtains: the petit bourgeoisie turn right, the peasantry and proletariat turn Left. 

Again as a generalization, this is because for the petit bourgeoisie, who have no identity beyond their possessions, the destruction of the status quo is the loss of everything. But for proletarians and peasants, who have far more flexible identities, the destruction of the status quo may actually mean relief from oppression.

And yes, the USian Homeland does indeed have peasants and proletarians. The former are mostly agricultural workers – near-slaves, actually – while the latter are mostly the legions of minimum-wage workers employed by Big Business.

LB/8 June 2014

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OAN: Some Thoughts on Content and Direction

I'VE RECOVERED FROM the frantic and painful preparation for last week's surprise apartment inspection – one of the punishments inflicted on seniors and disabled people impoverished enough to qualify for publicly funded housing. Nor was I amongst the unfortunate 20 percent whose dwellings were chosen at random for de facto warrantless searches by state bureaucrats. But the aftermath of the mandatory house-cleaning left me abed for a couple of days while the grade-6-to-7 arthritis pain in my back, shoulders and right knee dwindled to its omnipresent norm, typically a grade 2 on the 1-to-10 medical-discomfort scale.

Because my gender exempts me from the agony of childbirth, I have two grade-10 pain significators. One is the legacy of a tooth that in 1969 became simultaneously impacted and abscessed at the beginning of what turned into the longest four-day holiday-weekend in human history. The other is the (literally) bite-a-hole-in-my-pillow-to-keep-from-screaming interlude that followed a radical meniscectomy in 1978 – the removal of all the cartilage from my right knee. The anesthesia wore off quite suddenly, and all at once I hurt so badly, it took me several eternities to focus enough to invoke the Nurse-Angel of Narcotic Salvation, though once I found the magic buzzer, she immediately blessed me with a syringe full of morphine.

But all that is something of an aside. The point here is my two post-inspection-recovery days of what-do-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up contemplation was mostly spent pondering whether to take OAN daily or continue it as as a weekly. Given my age, in either case it will undoubtedly remain my final expression of a truth I have known since The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a copyboy and sports stringer shortly before my 16th Christmas – that real journalism is a 24/7 way of life rather than a 35-hour-per-week job.

If I were to take OAN daily, it would mean posting material as events warrant and as frequently as my schedule permits. The idea was (and remains) powerfully attractive. But finally – with a bit of help from the I Ching (Wilhelm/Baynes translation, Princeton University Press: 1967) – I realized, somewhat bitterly I admit, I lack sufficient time, which is the prime requirement for daily blogging. Too many hours of my life are stolen by geriatric medical appointments and household-errands turned to day-long bus-odysseys because I can no longer afford an automobile but live in the most anti-mass-transit seaport in the entire anti-mass-transit United States.

Thus OAN will continue as before, its contents posted both here (thanks again to my benefactors at Typepad) and on my secondary website at Blogger.  Save for the fact I am going to spend more time covering local events – albeit always in a global context – its contents will be mostly unchanged. “In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere” will present its anthologies of recommended reading, including my often-sarcastic comments of course. And OAN's weekly single-topic columns, written by myself or by an occasional guest author, will focus as always on personal perspectives about major issues:   

• USian warmongering and the One Percent's escalating efforts at global conquest;
• The intensifying class war and the increasing savagery of capitalism;
• The stealthy but relentless imposition of Christian theocracy on the USian homeland;
• The bipartisan Big Lies that protect the Obamacare profiteers and victimize the rest of us;
• The unprecedented surveillance that sustains Ayn Rand plutocracy – the newest form of fascism – by clamping high-tech slave-collars around all our necks;
• The shock-doctrine schemes of the One Percenters, who are leveraging terminal climate change into a neo-Nazi restructuring of human society, ensuring their survival by enslaving or exterminating everyone else;
• Other such topics as they arise.

As before, these columns will include examples of how, in an economy and political system based on exploitation and oppression, the personal is always political, just as, for the same reasons, the political is always personal. Here though I hope to make a subtle change in approach, focusing less on the reality of our abject powerlessness – which I think we are at last beginning to acknowledge – and more on overcoming the challenges we face merely to survive.

 

Such is life and death amongst the 99 Percent in the United States of America, the former “sweet land of liberty” that capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation for all the rest of us – has transformed into the most unapologetically vicious nation in the industrial world.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

I seldom write about 9/11 simply because in my view there is nothing worthwhile to be said about this great atrocity unless one starts by acknowledging how it marks the end, forever, of constitutional governance in the United States. But I was intrigued by William Boardman's Reader Supported News piece, “Museum World Trade Center Evidence: No Plane Hit Pentagon?” And eventually I added my own remarks to its predictably contentious comment-thread:

What matters most about 9/11 is the use to which it has been put.

Just as the Reichstag Fire enabled Hitler to nullify the Weimar constitution and turn Germany into a Nazi dictatorship, so did 9/11 enable the One Percent and their political servants to nullify the U.S. Constitution and turn the United States into a plutocratic dictatorship.

In other words, just as the Reichstag Fire was the birth of the Third Reich, so was 9/11 the birth of the de facto Fourth Reich, the zero-tolerance global empire of the USian plutocracy.

Moreover, just as the truth of the Reichstag Fire is lost due to Nazi secrecy, so is the truth of 9/11 lost by USian secrecy. In either case, public knowledge of what truly happened will never be allowed.

But the debate is allowed because it serves two purposes. It distracts us from the use of 9/11 – the permanent nullification of our constitution (and our reduction to powerlessness thereby) – and it helps preserve the Big Lie of USian democracy.

Indeed, the fact the debate is tolerated tells us it can never unearth the truth. Were it otherwise, it would be suppressed as quickly and violently as the Occupy Movement was suppressed.

Given the influence of Nazi war criminals on the U.S. government after World War II, the Reichstag-Fire pattern is itself suggestive. So is the fact the Department of Homeland Security structurally duplicates the dread SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt.

***

My next comment on the thread was a response to a poster who seems to regard the quest for “9/11 truth” as the most important endeavor in human history:

While I surely agree “a great deal...has already come out,” the same can be said of the assassinations – JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK – that were the gateway to the road that ended at 9/11.

Again taking the Reichstag Fire example, Soviet intelligence (and the worldwide Communist Party) knew the truth within hours – that the Nazis set the fire and framed the halfwitted Marinus van der Lubbe and the Communists for the crime – but the official German version was never refuted, even after the war.

Much the same is true of 9/11: no matter how much contrary evidence is ferreted out, the official version will remain unchanged until the USian Empire is no more – which, given the givens – will probably not occur until our species itself is extinct.

To believe otherwise is to be in denial about not only about our own powerlessness but about the absolute determination of those who oppress us.

 

***

Later I elaborated:

To paraphrase Thomas Paine, these are indeed times that try our souls, infinitely more so than in 1776, when we had a seemingly endless future, while today the core truth of our lives is that we live on a dying planet.

 

In this context I see my own duty as mandated by the genocidal malevolence of the One Percent, which is transforming the survival of the 99 Percent into revolutionary defiance. My obligation is to aid that survival as best I can -- never mind I'm a crippled, impoverished old man.

That's why I give several hours each week to 15 Now Tacoma, the purpose of which is to make workers' lives a bit less wretched. It's why I edit and produce two journals, a local tenants' newsletter and (this) internationally read blog.

 

For the record, since early 2005 I have assumed 9/11 was either a Reichstag-Fire re-run or was deliberately allowed to happen.

After all, Nazi war criminals were the primary tactical and strategic influence in the postwar USian Empire, and false-flag aggression – Google “Operation Himmler” (no quotes) – was a standard Nazi tactic.

Given the morally imbecilic nature of capitalism, such atrocities are inevitable – and the tyranny of capitalist governance leaves us powerless to avenge them.

Hence I do not waste my time on causes – like the hunt for 9/11 truth – that offer no hope of easing the fear and misery in which we 99 Percenters increasingly live.

******

Cynic though I am, I was nevertheless taken aback when Reuters reported the notoriously brutal Seattle Police were filing a federal lawsuit to uphold their alleged right to maximum brutality.   Thus my contribution to the comment thread of “Seattle Police File Federal Lawsuit Over 'Use of Force' Policy”:

The fact the Seattle cops would file such a lawsuit – in essence demanding the right to inflict unlimited police brutality and generally behave as an army of occupation in a conquered land – tends to confirm what I have long suspected:

That the national epidemic of police brutality is the product of of very explicit post-9/11 federal policy and directives.

 

The (obviously intentional) result is a homeland in which the sole function of the police is to serve and protect the One Percent by savaging all the rest of us, just as the (imperial) military serves and protects the One Percent in exactly the same murderous manner abroad.

More specifically, because all local police units have been federalized and federally militarized, the Seattle lawsuit is essentially an appeal up the chain of command for judicial support – rather like the president obtaining judicial support for his alleged right to issue imperial death warrants.

 

Indeed, to understand this lawsuit any other way is to be in denial about what the United States has become, no longer the "sweet land of liberty" but rather the de facto Fourth Reich.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine blaming “neocons” for President Obama's warmongering  provoked me to reluctantly criticize a journalist whose bravery is beyond reproach and whose reporting is flawless save for his apparent inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the unprecedented magnitude of the chief executive's self-protective deceptiveness.

 

Hence on the comment-thread of “How Neocons Constrain Obama's Message,” I penned the following rejoinder:

The only flaw in Mr. Parry's courageous reporting is his assumption President Obama is himself a victim of neocon conspiracies.

The truth, made obvious by the president's shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, is that Barack Obama is ideologically a white Republican. His African/American heritage was never more than a prop by which the One Percent sought to bolster the Big Lie of U.S. “democracy.”

Indeed, apart from the color of his skin, Obama's implicitly fascist politics are indistinguishable from those of any other U.S. president, Republican or Democrat, for whom the One Percent has purchased the office since the coup of 22 November 1963.

But like President Johnson, whose clandestine purpose was obviously to provoke the Vietnam-related class-war that destroyed the New Deal Coalition and thereby thrust the nation permanently to the right, Obama too is obviously a dual-purpose president. That purpose is revealed by how domestic racists are parlaying his betrayals into re-segregationist bigotry that says minorities are untrustworthy.

Because minorities were the nation's only source of genuine radicalism, the suppression of their voices is another rightward thrust – this time all the way to a Fourth Reich of unabashed Ayn Rand fascism.

Thus do the One Percenters achieve the goal their fathers and grandfathers sought via the Bankers' Plot, which would have made the U.S. the leading partner in the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo axis.

 

***

As to (Mr. Parry's) often subtle but nevertheless implicitly apologetic portrayal of Barack the Betrayer as a victim of neocon manipulation, that unfortunate meme – probably the result of an understandable reluctance to admit the unprecedented magnitude of the president's deceptions – is evident throughout Mr. Parry's otherwise superb reporting.

 

Because I voted for Obama twice – the first time because I believed his Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” the second time because I was (just as the One Percent intended), terrified by the Romney-Ryan assault gun – I can surely understand the reluctance to acknowledge we are now ruled by a president who is truly more ill-intentioned, and infinitely more authoritarian, than Richard Milhous Nixon.

Indeed, Obama is undoubtedly the most brazenly dishonest and effectively tyrannical politician ever to inhabit the White House. Think “change we can believe in,” total surveillance, the war against undocumented immigrants and the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers.

And until we acknowledge Obama is indeed an obedient servant of the One Percent (and therefore a white Republican in disguise) – until we admit how he conned us and how it facilitates the permanent end of USian democracy – we will remain imprisoned in the very darkness Mr. Parry is otherwise working so diligently and courageously to overcome.

******

Carl Gibson, reporting for Reader Supported News, wrote a scathing denunciation of how capitalism has perverted the USian justice system – zero-tolerance prosecution of minorities, lifetime imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, perpetual above-the-law immunity and billion-dollar bonuses for the most malevolently greedy robber barons in human history. But in the end, “Our Fraudulent Two-Tiered Justice System” was just another call for reforms we now know will never be allowed, and I responded accordingly:

I was applauding Mr. Gibson's reportage, especially his description of the USian criminal injustice system as "two-tiered," which is absolutely correct.

 

But then I read his concluding paragraph and realized he is just another reformer – that his outrage is rendered meaningless by his deluded belief in the integrity of the USian electoral process and in the Big Lie of USian "democracy" in general.

Which, when you analyze his rhetoric, means he's blaming us – we the people – for oppression that was maliciously imposed on us by the One Percent and that under present conditions is hopelessly beyond our capability to abolish or even ameliorate.

That's because the oppression Mr. Gibson so rightfully deplores – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – is endemic to capitalism. Indeed it is the quintessence of capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism. 

And until we recognize the true extent of our powerlessness – until we acknowledge that capitalism by its predatory nature deliberately and methodically renders the 99 Percent as powerless as the masses of Tsarist Russia were before the revolutions of 1917 – we will remain enslaved.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine Crisis describes how its outcome is seemingly a huge loss for U.S. interests. But on second thought, it seems to me “The State Department's Ukraine Fiasco” was written from the (clearly obsolete) perspective the U.S. wants world peace and socioeconomic stability – this opposed to the chaos that furthers the USian Empire's goals of maximum profiteering, shock-doctrine global conquest and endless war to kill off the 99 Percent and justify ever-more-tyrannical oppression in the homeland. Therefore:

Mr. Parry's closing statement is indisputably true – there is no way the Ukraine Crisis has served U.S. national interests – but only if "national interests" are defined as what we the people need for our wellbeing.

More to the point, the interests of the neocons are always antithetical to our own. That's because the neocons' interests are those of their One Percent masters, whose goals are maximum short-term profits rather than long-term political stability.

From this perspective it is apparent the Ukraine Crisis is serving the One Percent's interests exactly as intended. The increasing military tensions are already boosting profits for military industries, while the socioeconomic chaos in Ukraine itself provides yet another opportunity for the imposition of shock-doctrine capitalism, which – as under Pinochet in Chile – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the rulers, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Moreover, the manufactured need for vastly increased U.S. military expenditures provides the One Percent and their servants in both parties with a perfect rationale for further slashing social services including Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Psychological preparation for these genocidal cutbacks is undoubtedly the purpose behind the otherwise inexplicable hate-Russia media campaign.

Such is the realpolitik of plutocracy – actually sociopathocracy (rule by moral imbeciles) – that defines today's United States.

***

In response to another poster's question, I wrote:

The “problem with Obama” is he is a white Republican in disguise, and now that he does not have to scam us into voting for him again, he is ever-more-defiantly revealing his true self.

(Yeah, I'm one of those useful idiots who voted for him twice. First time because I stupidly let myself be conned by his Big Lie of "change we can believe in," second time because the One Percent's Romney-Ryan assault-gun did just what it was intended to do and terrified me into voting for him again.)

***

And as I said to an anti-Parry poster on the same thread:

(For you to) liken the National Endowment for Democracy to Amnesty International is rather akin to likening Reinhard Heydrich to Albert Schweitzer. And that calls into question (your) entire analysis, particularly since the only Ukrianian "human rights" NED cares about are those of the One Percenters and their anointed oligarchs.

******

As if in follow-up to my own ongoing coverage of the war against mass transit in Pugetopolis,  the Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-Bellingham metropolis on the eastern shore of Washington state's Puget Sound, Seattle's on-line daily Crosscut published a disheartening update of the worsening transit crisis.

 

For me, the usefulness of Bill Lucia's report, “No silver bullets among last ditch efforts to stave off bus service cuts,” extended beyond its factual content, which gave me a rare opportunity to contrast the (seemingly) humanitarian concerns of Seattle politicians with the Ayn-Rand/Marie-Antoinette attitudes of the politicians who rule Tacoma and Pierce County:

From the perspective of Tacoma – specifically its local politicians' chilly indifference to the ruinous impact of Pierce Transit's wrenching cutbacks on the transit-dependent urban population – the role of Seattle and King County politicians in the fight to preserve Metro Transit bus service is laudable and exemplary.

Indeed, until now, and with the notable exception of Kshama Sawant and her election to office, I never imagined I would find myself admiring anything about Seattle or any of its residents. That's because, to me, Seattlites will always be the most relentlessly vicious xenophobes I have ever encountered anywhere at any time. That includes my years in the South as an involuntary court-decreed school-year dependent of my father and stepmother, 1950-1956 and 1957-1958, then later, after three years of military service, as an outspokenly pro-civil-rights journalist, 1962-1965, including the summer of 1963 as a civil-rights activist.

Yes, the Ku Klux Klan tried to kill me – three times in fact – but other Southerners were faithful friends, and two Southerners were long-term lovers. By contrast, my four years in Seattle were the loneliest of my life; Seattleites were without exception relentlessly hostile, constantly damning me as “a fucking New York intellectual,” repeatedly telling me I should “go back where (I) belong,” and their vindictive Seattle-Freeze tactics, which included nasty notes, slashed tires, physical assault, the kidnapping of a dog and even defiant thefts of published and unpublished works, eventually ran me out of town.

 

I left Seattle in 1976, and I will never return. But I remained in the Pacific Northwest – the back-country trout fishing was too good to abandon – and now I must confess I have at last encountered one thing (apart from the election of Ms. Sawant) that is compellingly positive about Seattle. At least some of its politicians actually represent – or at least pretend to represent – the people like myself who can no longer afford automobiles and who are therefore utterly dependent on mass transit.

The irony, of course, is that fully half the population of Tacoma – where the politicians have never lifted so much as the proverbial finger to preserve Pierce Transit service – is officially lower income, and a substantial percentage, as I remember about 25 percent of the city's approximately 100,000 lower-income residents, have no other means of transportation. (The no-option-save-buses figure is deftly concealed by the local bureaucracy, but it is available via a bit of research, and I apologize for the fact I do not have time to ferret it out today.)

More to the point, the refusal of the local politicians to protect the bus service vital to our survival proves that, in Tacoma and Pierce County, we lower-income people have no political representation at all. Not only is there the politicians' total indifference to the consequences of PT downsizing. Now – as if to clear up any misunderstanding about whose side the politicians are on – these same politicos, Democrats and Republicans alike, have approved PT's shift to a new policy of penalizing pro-transit Tacomans by withholding intra-city service even as service to the (notably wealthier) anti-transit suburbs is radically expanded. The contempt and hatefulness in the message this new policy sends the urban poor is unmistakable.

Hence – much as it grieves me to admit it – for purposes of transit, and more generally for politicians who will at least publicly acknowledge the existence of lower-income people and the pressing reality of our needs, anyone who like myself is now a member of the urban underclass is probably better off living in Seattle.

Such was the output of a week in which – theoretically speaking – I had no time to write. I guess it's true: journalism is like organized crime – you never get to retire. And never want to, either...

LB/1 June 2014

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