The Provocateur in the Park: a Lament for USian Freedom

Kids playing on East 5th Street, Manhattan, 1967. Speculative work – unassigned random pictures such as this image, made for potential sale or inclusion in a portfolio – is a big part of photojournalism. I've photographed in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, Canada, parts of South Korea and probably some other locales I don't remember, but the only hostile reactions to my spec-photo efforts came from Seattleites, who in their well-documented xenophobia seem to regard “photographer” as synonymous with “interloper” if not “intruder.” Yet even in Seattle, where the sorts of street photography I had routinely done in Manhattan provoked so much anger I gave it up entirely, I was never hassled for photographing in public parks, even when the subject was children at play – pictures that often, though not always, were later published in The Seattle Sun. But earlier this week, when I attempted to shoot a mere three frames of spec work I thought might interest the Tacoma Metropolitan Parks District, I discovered that if you're an elderly, crippled male, merely pointing a camera at kids on a playground can put you in real danger of being lynched. Data: I used Bic Wite-Out and a red Marks-A-Lot, the only suitable paint-like materials I had on hand, to deface the print. The film is Tri-X; its grain structure says it was processed in Microdol-X at 400 ASA, but the rest of the information was lost in the 1983 fire. Because I snapped only one frame on East 5th Street before these attentive kids spotted me and started mugging for the camera, I was obviously not using one of the VT Canons on which I then normally relied, which means I was shooting with a Pentax H1A and probably its 55mm f/2 Super-Takumar – the choice of lenses indicating it may well have been that camera's maiden voyage. Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 1967, 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

 

 

*

THE POST-TRAUMATIC atrial fibrillation that made this piece so tardy has finally stopped, and now I can tell the story as it deserves to be told rather than as a narrative disjointed by bitterness and anticipation of death, but to put everything in sharp focus, I should preface all that follows by the mundane admission I cling to film cameras because I cannot afford the approximately $1000 it costs to convert to a digital single-lens reflex. The realities of Social Security, Medicare and the post-American-Dream economy make it clear I will never have that sort of money in whatever remains of this lifetime. Thus to any onlooker even the least bit camera-savvy it is obvious I remain the technological equivalent of an ignoramus or a bum or a weirdo and possibly all three. True, M Leicas were the best and therefore most prestigious 35mm cameras on this planet, but the retirement of the last factory-trained Leica repairman in the United States mandated their return to Germany even for routine cleaning and lubrication, which I was authoritatively told would take a year or more, not to mention the prohibitive costs of shipping plus the near certainty of huge hassles with our ever-more-tyrannical customs officials. Hence last year I sadly realized I had no choice but to to sell these beloved machines while they were still operational, and with funereal sadness I did just that. Since then my only 35mm cameras are relatively low-end SLRs, specifically Pentax MXs and K-1000s, which I formerly employed only as bodies for long lenses. They are certainly durable, and the associated optics are superb, but they are not Leicas, they are at least 30 years old, and I fear they'll die before I do. 

Because I am also fond of the 120 format, I've likewise kept a 1953-vintage Rolleicord III. For those unfamiliar with the wonderful machines formerly made by Franke & Heidecke, Rolleicord is to Rolleflex as Volkswagen is to Porsche. This means the 'Cord is mechanically simple enough it need not be returned to Deutschland for repairs – that even given the notorious ineptitude characteristic of too many USian camera mechanics, with careful shopping I can (probably) find someone stateside to clean, lubricate, adjust and – assuming the continued availability of spare parts – even fix it if it goes Tango Uniform. And I love what can be done with medium-format negatives. There is also the fact I am inordinately fond of twin-lens reflexes. My first camera, which my father gave me for my 12th birthday, was a TLR, a Kodak Brownie Reflex that used 127 film, and I learned my first (self-taught) grab-shooting lessons with its eye-level sports viewfinder. The first newspaper-issue camera with which I worked – this at age 16 for The Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan – was a Zeiss Ikoflex, a Rolleflex competitor. The second, during my 18th year, was a Rolleiflex itself; it was issued by The Fountain Citizen, for which (if memory serves), my first picture assignment produced a rather pedestrian but nevertheless Page-One-worthy image of U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver braving a torrential East Tennessee summer thunderstorm as he campaigned for re-election in 1958. Then maybe four decades later I realized the tacit bowing of one's head to the subject – the gesture mandated by the waist-level finder that defines all TLRs – evokes a response that is entirely different from the what obtains during eye-level photographic encounters, especially amidst the Cyclopean intrusiveness of SLRs. At about the same time it dawned on me one of the great but mostly unacknowledged attributes of M Leicas, VT Canons and I guess all other 35mm rangefinder cameras is how they enhance photographer-subject intimacy because the machine never completely masks the photographer's face. Hence I concluded a TLR operated at waist-level appears safe, compliant, respectful, even reassuring, to the person or persons on the other end of the lens, which makes it a very useful tool indeed – except of course in the Land of Omnipresent Hatefulness the U.S. has become since 9/11 – or more accurately since 11/22/1963. 

*** 

The senior housing project in which I reside is not far from Wright Park, one of Tacoma's better recreational facilities. The park's 27 acres is especially convenient for walkers and joggers because a single circuit of its perimeter path measures exactly one mile. It was also a primary beneficiary of the $84.3 million improvement bond the Tacoma Metropolitan Park District convinced the voters to approve in 2005 – fortuitous timing indeed, as two years later the One Percenters began their deliberate downsizing of the USian economy and thereby ended forever any electoral willingness to invest in expanded government services. But the park is in a high crime area, and its interior was ruled by criminals even in daylight until it was reclaimed about four years ago through the cooperative efforts of the local neighborhood association and the Tacoma Police Department. The park is now not only attractive and well maintained, it is also notably safe, and it has become a favorite spot for mothers with children. But when I walked there Wednesday, children were not on my agenda. I was intent on photographing only a huge paper-birch – a tree so big it probably predates the park's 1886 founding by as much as a century. Though I soon realized my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC had finally died of old age – had I followed its reading I would have over-exposed my negatives by five stops – the light meter in my head seemed as good as ever, and nine frames later I had what I wanted – textural studies I intend to use in some new sandwiches. 

As I walked back toward my apartment I passed one of the more notable improvements the bond issue had funded: a water-playground for children. Called the Sprayground, it was built to replace a conventional wading pool. It features a number of fountains, shower-head devices, stationary hoops and exercise bars, many of them distinctly sculptural and therefore visually interesting, all designed to allow kids plenty of room to run and play while granting them the pleasure of a thorough soaking on a hot summer's day. And now watching the girls and boys joyfully dart around and through the gleaming columns of sun-bright water, I understood why some of my neighbors here in geezer manor had been urging me to visit the Sprayground with a camera. I also saw immediately how much safer it is for children than playing in streets doused by sprinkler-headed fire hydrants, a summertime sight so common in the urban neighborhoods of New York City, it long ago became a journalistic cliché – one to which I surely contributed my own share of hackneyed images during those halcyon years before gentrification exiled me forever from my home. Now, knowing I had three frames left on the Rolleicord's 12-exposure roll of Kodak T-Max 100, I wondered if I might get a non-cliché image I could peddle to the park district. What better than the Sprayground to illustrate the reclamation of the park from its former criminal masters? The pictures would be all the more telling because the kids I was now watching – a dozen children ages five through 10 – were of such obvious ethnic diversity.

 

It is relevant at this point to note I was casually but reasonably well dressed – blue-gray flower-patterned shirt, khaki bush jacket, navy blue slacks, tan straw hat. My shirt collar was neatly folded over the collar of the bush jacket. The Van Dyke that in 2005 or so replaced the full beard I had worn since the 1980s was freshly trimmed, and I was wearing new dark brown leather sandals over black wool socks. I bore a tan canvas shoulder bag with a medium-sized matte-gray aluminum tripod collapsed and hooked to its top, the strap slung diagonally over my right shoulder. As always – thanks to a knee injury from junior high school football and the spinal injuries inflicted on me by a habitual drunken driver in 1978 – I walked with a cane. In other words, I looked exactly like what I am – an elderly, obviously crippled but nevertheless dedicated photographer, most likely a resident of one of the multi-storey apartment complexes that abound near the park. 

As I usually do before I start exposing film – unless of course it is a riot or a fire or some other such emergency – I stood and watched, absorbing the possibilities of the scene, framing and otherwise previsualizing pictures. The visual geometry of the interactions between the romping children and the water and the hard bright circular and linear forms of the facility itself were fascinating, and the potential for transcending cliché – particularly since I was shooting black-and-white film – seemed uniquely promising. But the two-stop difference between sunlight and shadow was tricky, especially with all the added glare. My old Luna-Pro was now garbage, I no longer have a darkroom in which to manipulate an image, the burn-and-dodge capabilities of my Gimp photo software are minimal at best, and I learned long ago the over-priced local labs are less than adept at remedial custom printing. Hence it took me a couple of minutes to decide an exposure – f/11 at 1/500th, and to get the shadow detail just right I would bracket one stop each way, f/16 and f/8. But after I had shot only one carefully composed frame, a young white woman approached me – a pretty woman scarcely more than five feet tall, golden-brown hair to her shoulders, a seemingly intelligent face. Curiously enough I don't remember the color of her eyes, but she may have been wearing sunglasses; I know she was a few minutes later. I wasn't paying that much attention; I merely assumed she was going to do as so many other parents have done on nearly all the (relatively rare) occasions I've photographed children – that she would ask who I was and how she might get a print “if the pictures come out.” Instead she quietly asked if I had any children there in the Sprayground. 

“No,” I answered, instantly concerned yet another economically ruined parent had abandoned yet another hungry and heartbroken child and had chosen the park as the place of abandonment. “Why, is there some kid here missing a par...” 

Her response interrupted my question: “you're creeping us out. What are you doing photographing these children?” 

“I'm a professional photographer,” I said. I reached into my bush jacket for my black leather business card wallet, extracted a card, held it out for her. “I'm just...” 

She interrupted me again. She ignored my offering. Now her voice rose several decibels: “Who do you work for?” 

“I work for myself, anymore. I'm retired. Before that I worked for newspapers and magazines. But I still...” 

Her third interruption, and now she was yelling: “why are you here? Why are you even looking at these children?”

“Because...” 

Interruption number four: “we don't don't want you here. You don't have any right to be here.” 

“Ma'am, look, I'm trying to explain but you keep interrupting. Take my card...” 

“I don't want your damn card.” Her voice became a loud belligerent screech. “We don't care who you are or what you are. You're creeping us out. We” – her sweeping gesture indicated everyone within the Sprayground or just beyond its circular concrete perimeter – “want you out of here now, creep. Now! NOW!” 

The vehemence of her words bespoke an enmity I had not encountered since confrontations decades ago with segregationists in the Jim Crow South. Now she looked a “why-aren't-you-here-yet” look toward a group of white males who stood maybe 30 yards away at the perimeter's far side, four or five young shirtless men staring in my direction though not yet really glowering. And now I felt the first twinges of fright. The woman's facial expression and body language suggested the “sugarpie-that-man-just-insulted-me” combination of lust and sadistic yearning you see on southern belles and other female bloodhawks when they're trying to goad their beaux into making them wet by beating someone senseless or dead, and I realized the woman's tantrum – never mind it was utterly unjustified and unprovoked – might be putting me in real jeopardy. 

My muddle of emotions – vexation at how easily she had ambushed me, anger at her consummate unfairness, astonishment at the Ku Klux caliber of her hatred, growing fear of her now-obvious effort to instigate violence, profound shock at how such a fine productive day had been so suddenly and totally ruined – now coalesced into pure outrage, and I finally answered her as I should have answered her from the very beginning, as I would have answered her had I not been deceived by the deliberate lie of her falsely pleasant initial approach. 

“Look, lady,” I snarled in my most defiant basso, “I've been Working Press more'n 50 years, long before you were even born, so don't you imagine for a minute you and your band of thugs over there can tell me what I can and can't photograph. You're in a public place, you're fair game. You got a complaint, go call the cops.”

“I already have,” she shrilled, turning away, tossing her hair, literally stomping back around the concrete perimeter toward the men she obviously still hoped she could draw into the confrontation. 

“Good,” I growled. “You people ever hear of the First Amendment? Maybe the cops'll teach you what it really means.” 

By then of course the woman's malicious braying had metastasized her hatefulness throughout the Sprayground. It was clear she had intended to provoke the selfsame hysteria that spawns lynchings and pogroms and witch hunts, and now it seemed as if all the parents were glaring at me and herding their children out of the water. Recognizing I was potentially in harm's way, realizing the severe penalties by which Washington state punishes assault on the working press might no longer protect me in retirement, knowing I would have no allies here until the cops arrived, remembering all the lynch-mob horrors vindictive southern white women have sadistically inflicted on southern black men, wondering if now in Tacoma I would be the first white male in the United States to be lynched by an interracial mob, I closed up the Rolleicord and hobbled away. Yet somewhere amidst all this madness I was also blessed with a single quick sympathetic glance from a young African-American woman. She was a mother seemingly no different from all the others, but her liquid-brown eyes surreptitiously met mine and seemed to grow huge with deep concern, as if she were saying “yes I've seen all this before and I pray you don't get hurt.” It was just a fleeting instant, an impression so ephemeral I later wondered if I had imagined it, but at the moment it assured me I was not totally alone after all – never mind this woman (very wisely, I thought afterward), dared not publicly defend me.

 

And now my own blood was up, boiling with an intensity I have not experienced since my years in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam-War and Back-to-the-Land and alternative press movements and my last long-ago encounter with violently Christian vigilantes, and though within hours I would be paying the geriatric price of such increased adrenalin – a night and a day and another night of scary cardiac arrhythmia – I now openly glared my own contempt and hatred in return. Meanwhile the hair-trigger white woman and her companions and the other parents she had provoked to tripwire hostility continued to regard me as a hate-object. Too bad I had never suspected my presence might evoke such a hostile response; otherwise I'd have had the proper equipment to photograph the provocateur in full rant, and we would get to see her nominally attractive features in all their hate-distorted ugliness, but the old Rolleicord with its baroque film-advance knob and its independently cocked shutter and its relatively shallow depth of field is entirely too genteel a machine for such high-intensity reportage. At least though my rising anger prompted me to hobble far more slowly in the defiant hope prolonging my departure would give the cops time to show up. I am known to the Tacoma Police Department not only as a retired journalist but as an outspoken member of the neighborhood association that helped liberate the park from its former gang-banger masters, and I relished the likelihood the cops would inform the provocateur – in terms she could understand even amidst her convulsions of paranoid loathing – that I had every right to be in the park and every right to photograph as I had intended. 

Once I was beyond the Sprayground, I paused on the adjacent hillside to shoot my last two frames of film, another act of defiance that wasted good emulsion on prosaic silhouette-images of a young couple talking under a big maple but nevertheless made the point I would not be driven from the park. By then I was probably 100 yards from the provocateur, but behind her sunglasses she continued to glare at me as if I had not moved a foot since her initial assault. Her malice remained palpable. For just a moment she seemed to scowl with obvious disgust at the bare backs of her male companions, who were now oblivious to my presence; again I sensed her fury she had not been able to provoke them into lynch-mob action. Then she resumed her glaring. I glared in return. I considered giving her the finger but dismissed that as too predictable, too likely to re-provoke her coterie of males and in any case insufficiently insulting to be worth the risk. Finally she averted her gaze. Maybe five minutes later I had hobbled out of the park. The cops never showed up. 

*** 

In all my years in journalism, whether as a photographer or reporter or both, I have never encountered anything quite like what happened in last Wednesday in Wright Park. Certainly I have been attacked, but always only by the usual suspects – Klansmen, Nazis, crooks whose scams I have exposed, perpetrators of police brutality, sundry other fascists, goons and thugs. But not since the horrors of my (involuntary) years in southern public schools have I been assaulted merely for being who I am. Though perhaps I should not be surprised; I have long noted the xenophobia, the conformity, the anti-intellectuality and all the other depressing qualities the present-day population of the Puget Sound area shares with the reflexively hostile public school students I encountered in Florida and East Tennessee as the Yankee son of a Yankee carpetbagger in the 1940s and 1950s. Swap the racism of the South for the socioeconomic bigotry of Pugetopolis, and you've a near-perfect match. But I never imagined I might someday again be confronted by a 21st Century version of the schoolyard psychodynamics that several times got me mauled by jocks – this to “put (me) in (my) place” for saying hello to somebody's prom-queen girlfriend and thereby crossing some forbidden caste line. Hence immediately after I returned to my dwelling from the park, I initially assumed what had happened there was merely another ugly dimension of the so-called Seattle Freeze, the defining element of Puget Sound regional culture that – especially since the death of the American Dream – has escalated into a war against lower-income people of all ages and ethnicities. But then I opened my email as I always do following a day afield whether good or bad, and the first item I read told me what a federal jury had just done to the Oak Ridge Three. 

Suddenly, realizing the news from Knoxville was of a kind with what happened to me in Wright Park, I was more frightened of my own nation than I have ever been. I realized the long-feared termination of USian pretend-democracy is upon us, its death signaled not just by the fate of the Oak Ridge Three but by the fatal persecution of Aaron Swartz and the de facto martial law imposed on Boston in the wake of the terrorist bombings. Indeed the house-to-house searches conducted by militarized police  in Watertown, where cell-phone and video footage clearly shows that to be a civilian was to be the enemy, reminded me of nothing so much as the documentary footage I have seen of the Nazis' rounding up the Jews of Poland and savaging all the diverse peoples of the western Soviet Union. Obviously the nominally mindless Right was eerily prescient when it characterized Obama as a new Hitler. But what neither Right nor Left dare acknowledge is the extent to which Obama's Hitlerishness is the true expression of this entire nation's malevolent will. As in Wright Park, as in Knoxville, as all across the land from coast to coast, from border to border – precisely as it was demonstrated to me personally by the Sprayground provocateur and the would-be goon-squad she nearly recruited to bolster her persecutorial zeal, exactly as if she were an official jeerleader at an Orwellian Five Minute Hate.

I cannot imagine any other rational explanation for her vindictively provocative tantrum. Did she think I was a terrorist? Did she imagine I was a Russian spy? (It is true many people say I look Eastern European, probably because of my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood or maybe because, as familial genetic studies have revealed, my most distant pre-Celtic ancestors were indeed people of the Steppe.) Perhaps she feared I was a private detective out to catch a parent in adulterous company or a child with a forbidden relative. Possibly she thought I was a Jew, as even now with my formerly coal-black beard and darkest brown hair gone mostly gray, I am occasionally assumed to be – and therefore automatically despised by a surprising number of allegedly “progressive” Puget Sounders, some of whom years ago in Bellingham and Seattle actually challenged my right to reside in Western Washington. Or maybe she felt her children weren't prettied up enough to be photographed. Perhaps she assumed because I did not have a shiny new digital camera, I was nothing more than a bum. Maybe she herself is on the lam and is running from an Amber Alert or fears her picture might show up on Most Wanted. Possibly – especially considering how she damned me as a “creep” – her private litany of bigotries convinced her my gender and age and disability and lack of digital equipment identified me as some sort of pervert. But that makes no sense either. If she believed me to be a sex criminal, why did she reject my effort to prove my identity? Besides, a real pervo would have been lurking in the bushes, clandestinely shooting from afar with a long telephoto lens, not obviously photographing in the open as I had been attempting to do.

All that said, it seems to me the most indicative elements of the confrontation are how the provocateur repeatedly interrupted my attempts to identify myself as a legitimate photojournalist and refused to allow me to explain my purpose. This suggests my photographic effort was hardly the issue, a probability further substantiated by the wording of some of her assaultive questions – especially “why are you here” and “why are you looking at these children.” Therefore my best guess is I was targeted because (a) I am elderly, (b) I am visibly disabled and (c) I am a male who conforms to no approved USian stereotype. I wear a fedora rather than the ubiquitous baseball cap that identifies the “American” jock-worshiper whether male or female as a conforming and therefore reliable citizen of the One Percent's de facto Fourth Reich. I wear Nike sandals, not Nike athletic shoes. Instead of a team jersey, I like nearly all photographers of my generation wear a bush jacket to compensate for the lack of pocket-space in modern shirts and trousers. But Puget Sounders do not wear bush jackets. Neither do they wear their shirt collars turned out over their jacket collars, nor do they wear fedoras. Though I never gave it much thought until now, my sartorial choices, shaped as they were by work and mostly in Manhattan, would probably say “outlander” nearly anywhere in the United States, bespeaking origins in (despised) realms like New York City or Europe. Mostly I suspect my lack of digital equipment plus my obvious age and disability suggested to the provocateur I am impoverished and – in the malevolent irrationality of present-day USian public opinion – therefore to blame for all the savagery that afflicts capitalist society, just as the Jews were allegedly to blame for all the afflictions of Weimar Germany. In any case I was clearly someone from Elsewhere, at the very least a Nonconformist, and given my age, disability and antique camera, obviously one of the hated poor – the 21st Century USian equivalent of the Weimar Jews. In the ever-more-Nazi-like atmosphere of today's zieg-heiled USA! USA! USA! with all its imperial self-righteousness and witch-hunt fervor, I might well have been similarly attacked had I merely lingered too long while walking through the Sprayground area, camera or not.

In this context, the fearsome magnitude of the provocateur's hatred is the predictable byproduct of a carefully structured process – another example of how ideas have consequences. The entire episode is therefore a teachable moment. It is bitter proof of the core toxicity that now characterizes not just the population of Puget Sound but the vast USian majority whether Democrat or Republican; its universality is confirmed by public acceptance (and therefore at least tacit support) of previously intolerable atrocities that range from assaults on the working press to the death-dealing consequences  of the Sequester and the pending cutbacks  in Social Security and Medicare. It is as common amongst so-called “progressives” as it is amongst alleged “conservatives,” its poison immediately recognizable by any of us who have witnessed the idiotic fanaticism of the Ku Klux Klan or the equally ignorant anti-gunowner frenzies of the forcible-disarmament cult or the rabidly moronic furies of the Nazis whether old or new. It exemplifies the mindset that facilitated the original Holocaust and now facilitates a new USian Holocaust based not on ethnicity or race but on age and health and socioeconomic status. Its earlier manifestation gave Hitler control of Germany; without 35 million human sacrifices by the soldiers of the Red Army and the men, women and children of the Soviet Union, it would have given him the world. Now 68 years later it is the reason a jury condemned three prisoners of conscience to potential 20-year prison sentences on the same day a provocateur tried to muster a lynch mob against me at the Sprayground in Wright Park. It also explains why there is not now (nor ever will be again) a viable USian resistance to capitalism – why resistance is pointless and ultimately suicidal and above all else simply not worth the effort to squander one's life however long or short in rebellion that will always suffer betrayal at the hands of provocateurs and their submissively lockstep followers. It is the hybrid venom of greed, ignorance and moral imbecility and – precisely because of how deftly its festering is concealed beneath new pathologies of celebrity and trinket materialism and the old Nazi pathology of the Big Lie – it has become the closest approximation to Absolute Evil our species has yet unleashed. And now it transforms this nation from the birthplace of constitutional democracy to the death house in which Liberty herself is being murdered and the grave in which she will soon be buried forever. 

LB/8-12 May 2013
 

-30-

Economics Below the Salt: Bad News, Better News

The two reports below warn of the ongoing destruction of essential government services. This information is especially relevant to those of us who live “below the salt,” a late medieval term for the 99 Percent. The first report describes the sequester's impacts on several vital programs. The second tells how a local transit authority – forced by anti-transit voters to radically downsize its operations – nevertheless managed to save a fraction of its weekend and nighttime bus service. Those who fear they might be potential victims are urged to contact the appropriate local agencies for more information.

 

***

How Sequester's Sword Slashes Programs for Lower-Income People 

 

ASKING THE POLITICIANS who perpetrated the sequester to acknowledge the devastating wounds they've inflicted on the people of the United States is like investigating a murder in a bad neighborhood: nobody knows nuttin' – and what's more, nobody seems to give a damn.

The best you'll get out of the elected officials who wielded the sword of sequestration – the Congressmen and the president who collaborated to put the service-slashing scheme together and impose it on the nation – is a spin-doctored variant of what street cops and prosecutors used to call the “SODDI” defense: “some other dude did it.” The Democrats blame the Republicans who are busy blaming the Democrats, each trying to hide the fact both parties are equally guilty.

But the politicians' game of hot potato and its accompaniment of journalistic jeering is no help to the millions of lower-and-middle-income people who now wait in fear to learn how badly they'll be hurt.

 

So here's a summary of just a few of the sequester's real-world consequences.

 

The sequester sword inflicts a $3.7 billion gash  on the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to one estimate,  at least 145,900 people are thus condemned to permanent homelessness. The members of least 417, 400 households will suffer other negative effects.

 

Part of the sequester-lacerated HUD budget is the housing-choice program more commonly known as Section Eight. It is a remnant of the many federal New Deal and Great Society programs that have been on bipartisan target lists since the Clinton Administration years, 1993-2001. (That's when the Democrats abandoned their longtime role as advocates for lower income people and joined with the Republicans in an ongoing campaign to shrink or eliminate social service expenditures.)

 

The money now routinely taken from all such services is typically diverted into various forms of so-called “corporate welfare” – taxpayer dollars doled out mostly to raise executive salaries and stockholder dividends at profit-making enterprises. Corporations that serve the world's largest and most expensive military establishment are especially favored by this upward redistribution of the nation's wealth.

 

But Section Eight – probably because of support from the powerful real estate industry – has somehow remained marginally functional despite decades of efforts to shut it down. Its vouchers provide access to privately owned, open-market housing. The associated subsidies ensure recipients' out-of-pocket expenditures for rent don't exceed 30 percent of their income.

 

Most of the applicants' needs are urgent. Many are disabled. Some are homeless or in danger of becoming so. But the sequester, by indiscriminately shrinking the Section Eight budget, imposes additional limits on the number of people it can serve.

 

Like other HUD programs, Section Eight is administered by local housing authorities. Sequestration's impact on the Tacoma Housing Authority, which serves a seaport city of about 200,000 persons, is typical.

 

Michael Mirra, THA's executive director, said the sequester downsized the group's $45 million annual budget by $2 million or 4 percent. It is, he acknowledged, a painful blow. But he and his colleagues, always attentive to political circumstances, had anticipated the cuts. Thus they reduced Section Eight expenditures accordingly, applying a policy Mirra describes as “thinning the soup, so we did not have to take any chairs away from the dinner table.”

 

Even so, the waiting list for Section Eight housing in Tacoma, already four or five years from application to approval, now becomes much longer.

 

Other local casualties of sequestration, Mirra said, include homeless college students and lower income people who were awaiting aid for first-time home purchases. The students were to have been participants in a new program that would have found them housing but was shut down by sequester's denial of funds.

 

Another cutback imposed by the sequester, this of $6.3 million,  has forced the nearby King County Housing Authority to suspend some of its Section Eight operations.

King County includes Seattle, which has its own housing authority. Excluding the people in Seattle, the county's population – that is, the number of persons potentially served by KCHA – is 1.3 million.

 

The sequester also slashes a number of education-related programs. These include work-study jobs and other forms of aid for college students as well as well as Head Start programs for pre-school children.

 

Though elderly and disabled people had been reassured Medicare was protected from sequestration, the reassurance may prove to have been misleading. Reimbursements to doctors, hospitals, health-insurance plans and drug companies are to be downsized by $2 billion over the next ten years. Whether these costs will be passed on to recipients is unknown at present, but the history of the health insurance business suggests they probably will be. An Associated Press analysis out of Washington D.C. says Medicare Advantage enrollees will be especially hard hit if the providers thus raise premiums, fees and prices.

 

Statewide, the sequester is hacking $1.05 million from nutrition assistance that provides meals for Washington seniors – some of whom would otherwise starve. It is the sort of cutback Rep. Alan Grayson says will kill people. Grayson, a Florida Democrat who is one of sequestration's few Congressional critics, calls it “a self-immolation,” adding it “will cause a lot of pain, a lot of hunger, a lot of disease, a lot of death.”

 

How severely will the shrunken funding wound Tacoma seniors? As of Friday, the relevant local officials didn't seem to know.

 

Nevertheless there's no doubt cuts similar to all those described above now afflict anyone who depends on federally funded programs. As is often the case, the circumstances in Washington state are a microcosm of what's happening throughout the nation.

Meanwhile Grayson is not the sequester's only outspoken adversary. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the feisty Democrat from Massachusetts, has denounced it as “irresponsible” and “just plain stupid.”

But it remains to be seen whether Grayson, Warren and their few like-minded colleagues can convince the bipartisan House and Senate majorities to sheath their metaphorical swords and undo the real-world damage they've already done. 

*****

Transit Board Backs Down on (Some) Service Reductions 

 

PERHAPS IN RESPONSE to increasingly bitter criticism by advocacy groups for lower-income people, the Pierce Transit Board of Commissioners has effectively defied its anti-transit constituents and discarded an already approved plan to abolish all weekend and nighttime bus service. 

Or perhaps – as an inside source implied last week – it was just too embarrassing to too many powerful people to think of a city as big and economically significant as Tacoma without any weekend or night-time buses.

In any case, the service reduction that goes into effect in September will be on the order of 25 percent rather than the 34 percent mandated by the board in January. Revoking its January decision, the besieged agency now says it will retain minimal night and weekend service. 

Even in their new and slightly revised form, the cutbacks will further shrink already radically-diminished bus service for the approximately 600,000 people who live in Pierce Transit's 292-square-mile service district. The area includes the seaport city of Tacoma, population about 200,000, which plays a significant role in the global economy.

Pierce Transit's downsizing, by nearly 70 percent since 2009, is mandated by local voters who damn public transport as welfare, denounce its users as bums and condemn its unionized employees as parasites.

But for once the “human decency” meme that emerged in reaction to last November's vote against transit and transit-users seems to have been paramount amongst the commissioners' considerations. The agency thus reshuffled its budgetary tarot cards and came up with an additional $6.2 million – $5.5 million from maintenance funds – to maintain (very limited) weekend and night-time bus operations.

“The risk,” said Pierce Transit's Lars Erickson, “is that we may have (unforeseen) maintenance problems.” The board is willing to gamble, the publicist says, “because we understand the effects of cutting weekend and nighttime service.” 

Nevertheless, Tacoma and its surrounding suburbs will still suffer from what – for a municipality of its size and economic importance – is probably most inadequate public transport in the industrial world.

At least one board member, Derek Young, says he fears Pierce Transit is “in a death spiral,” with the ongoing service reductions resulting in revenue losses and enough additional political antagonism to eventually terminate the agency's operations. Some transit opponents have already admitted this is precisely their intent.

In this context, the Polly Anna spin Pierce Transit attempts to put on the cutbacks – “extensive system redesign project, robust public outreach since 2009” – seems especially ironic.

The initial downsizing of the agency's operations, in 2009, was due to Washington state's notoriously regressive tax structure.

As a consequence, the state's transit authorities are funded almost entirely by sales tax revenue, which slumped radically during the Bush-Obama recession and has remained low ever since. In response, Pierce Transit reduced service by eight percent. It re-routed several bus lines and shortened operating hours but otherwise preserved pre-recession schedules.

In 2011, hoping to restore these cuts and expand existing service to accommodate growing ridership, the commissioners asked voters to approve a sales-tax increase of .03 percent, three cents on a $10 purchase.

But the far-right majority that dominates the suburbs, energized as they were by the success of the Tea Party, launched a nasty campaign based on spurious claims that transit is not a civil necessity but rather a means of placating lower-income people, pampering minorities and funding the Democratic Party via the Amalgamated Transit Union.

The transit opponents also tried to portray the agency as an exceptionally glaring example of government spending run amok – a bureaucracy that squandered taxpayer dollars at every opportunity.

Efforts at rebuttal – for example telling the story of how insightful planning gave Pierce Transit the first natural-gas-powered buses on the planet and locked in fuel prices that in today's market are equivalent to buying diesel at 71 cents per gallon – were either ignored or shouted down.

Thus the agency's 2011 special-election ballot measure, though narrowly approved in Tacoma proper, was overwhelming defeated in the suburbs, which contain about two-thirds of the population of the Pierce Transit service area.

The directors resubmitted the three-cents-on-$10 tax-hike to the voters in 2012, hoping the progressive majority expected to turn out for the November general election would at last rescue the system.

As expected, the transit opponents' responded with the same hateful rhetoric they had employed the previous year. But they became even more stridently anti-union after the agency's bus drivers and other workers represented by ATU Local 587 voted to give up their 2011-2014 raises and cost-of-living increases in a last-ditch effort to help save bus service.

The second vote thus went the same way as the first.

While the voters within the Tacoma city limits again approved the tax hike, an overwhelming number of suburbanites again voted against it. And even the Tacoma outcome was gravely disappointing to transit supporters. An unprecedented two-percent under-vote – about 15,400 ballots cast by people who declined to vote on the transit measure – suggests the presence of a decisive anti-transit plurality even inside the city limits.

Hence the Pierce Transit board's unannounced but obvious decision to abandon – at least for the foreseeable future – any further ventures in electoral politics.

LB/4 March 2013

-30-