Class Struggle: the Forbidden Secret of USian Savagery

SOMETIMES SEVERAL TOPICS mesh into a single essay, a process to which I alluded, though only en passant, as I was writing and assembling last week's OAN. But that meshing was slap-in-the-face obvious this week, as Internet reporting on governmentally sanctioned persecution by Christian theocrats at the U.S. Air Force Academy shared indicative synchronicity with five other topics. These were the release of some new data on the forcible impoverishment of the 99 Percent; the smashing of a unionization campaign in the de facto Christian theocracy of the South; the methodical falsification of U.S. history (specifically about the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon's treason and President Johnson's humanitarianism); the judicial approval of religious profiling by the ever-more-ubiquitous secret police, and a provocative review of poetry as a medium for speaking truth to power, which Reader Supported News thoughtfully picked up from The New Yorker.

What ties all these pieces together is the fact they are each – even the poetry review – about class struggle. Though we USians are conditioned to reject class struggle – even to deny its existence – its reality becomes obvious whenever you focus on the increasingly unapologetic, might-makes-right savagery of capitalism. That's because what is called capitalism is at its Ayn Rand core nothing more complex than infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever established. Its individual, clinical state is called moral imbecility or sociopathy. When it's metastasized from economic theory into a defining national philosophy, as it has in the United States, what you get is capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – another name for which is fascism. 

The class-struggle common denominator of these stories is provided by new economic-inequality data,  for which a tip of the green visor to an extremely useful email newsletter, PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest. The data, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, show a key aspect of how we in the 99 Percent are methodically impoverished: “Between 1979 and 2007...the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent. Simultaneously, the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.” 

EPI then addresses the discrepancy state-by-state. The worst states – the realms of capitalism so malevolent the One Percenters allowed us no increase in average incomes – are Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan and Alaska. The 15 next worst, where the One Percenters made off with from half to 84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007, are Arizona (where the richest of the rich grabbed 84.2 percent of all income growth); Oregon (81.8 percent); New Mexico (72.6 percent); Hawaii (70.9 percent); Florida (68.9 percent); New York (67.6 percent); Illinois (64.9 percent); Connecticut (63.9 percent); California (62.4 percent); Washington (59.1 percent); Texas (55.3 percent); Montana (55.2 percent); Utah (54.1 percent); South Carolina (54.0 percent); and West Virginia (53.3 percent). 

Another Popular Resistance dispatch – a photo essay on the homeless camps  that have become a signature presence in the USian woodlands – exemplifies the real-world consequences of the EPI data. (The suppression of these communities, which earlier generations knew as Hoovervilles, is amongst the primary reasons for the endemic closures of formerly public lands throughout the United States.) Ben Marcin's pictures of individual dwellings at these sites are well-composed, so much so they vividly portray the eerie, almost tangible sense of tragedy and banishment that haunts all such locales. Though that is part of the story's strength, I must nevertheless as a photographer and former photo editor fault the work for its failure to include the people who built and inhabited these wretched domiciles. But its publication in the same edition of PRODD as the EPI report is laudable – another wake-up call demanding we recognize the forbidden truth of class-struggle. 

Likewise the conclusion of the EPI report: “Policy choices and cultural forces have combined to put downward pressure on the wages and incomes of most Americans even as their productivity has risen...In the next decade, something must give. Either America must accept that the American Dream of widespread economic mobility is dead, or new policies must emerge that will begin to restore broadly shared prosperity.” 

Meanwhile the One Percenters' choice of alternatives – zero-tolerance fascism – is already obvious in the politicians' embrace of “austerity” at every level of USian governance, federal, state and local. Hence the class-struggle relevance that binds the following texts and comment-thread responses into a single OAN entry. 

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“How the Union Was Defeated at Volkswagen”  Kevin Drawbaugh and Nick Carey of Reuters byline an obviously-censored report that nevertheless manages to suggest the behind-the-scenes, beyond-the-workplace coordination that defeated the United Automobile Workers effort to unionize a Volkswagen plant in East Tennessee. The defeat is all the more revealing because VW's (German) management, which believes workers do have rights, welcomed the union's presence. But the wire-service dispatch, though detailed, says nothing about the anti-union fanaticism of the local white churches, to which I can attest because I lived in Tennessee for a miserable 13 years. Such theocratic malevolence is often enforced by the Ku Klux Klan – colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Hence my contribution to the comment thread: We on the Left need to “recognize the role Christianity plays -- Godzilla huge and King Kong strong -- in keeping the South anti-union. The so-called 'Prosperity Gospel,' which originated in the fundamentalist South but is now the doctrinal mainstay of Christianity throughout the USian homeland, holds that wealth and power are meted out by the Christians' god to reward godly men. An extension of the same doctrine decrees the manager is god's anointed representative in the workplace. Managerial right is thus divine right – the same entitlement formerly accorded kings. Thus too any disobedience is deadly sin -- and from this perspective, there is no greater sin than unionism. (Moreover) this is all part of 'a cultural/ideological war that extends far beyond the workplace.' It reaches into the bedroom via bans on abortion and birth control; into the schools via bans on teaching scientific truth; and into the military via the forcible Christianization imposed on the officer corps. It is nothing less than an organized campaign to replace the constitution with Biblical Law, the Christian equivalent of Sharia, and it has already conquered the federal government, for which see The Family: the Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008)” 

Ralph Nader's later, much more revealing report on how East Tennessee and Ayn Rand ideology defeated the UAW is here. But even Nader, a skilled and insightful researcher, missed the Caucasian pulpit-pounding that, sure as sunrise, hammered home the Christian  god's commandment “to put them uppety workers back in thar rightful place.” 

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“Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Blames Reporters”  Dan Froomkin of First Look reports in detail on a ruling by the U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., that voids the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom, blames the press for the associated controversy and grants USian secret police the right to monitor religious practices. Remembering how Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic judiciary cleared the way for Hitler, I supportively answer another poster on the story's comment thread by saying, “what is being done to us is infinitely worse than 'blow(s)' to our civil liberties. To understand the magnitude and objective of the One Percent's assault on the rule of law, and why the Democrats are as instrumental as the Republicans in subverting the Constitution, the best source is probably The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (William L. Shirer; Simon & Shuster: 1959). Apropos the total corruption of the U.S. judiciary, the parallels described in the section entitled 'Justice in the Third Reich,' pgs. 268-274 (1981 edition), are especially damning. 'The law was what (the Leader) said it was...with the power to do to death whomever he pleased.' Sound familiar? Welcome to the Fourth Reich.” 

I regret I did not comment on why the court decision is so personally disturbing: because I remember how the authorities in East Tennessee – including officials at the University of Tennessee – persecuted Unitarians during the 1950s, and how the First Amendment was ultimately our only defense. 

Now in the looming Christian theocracy of the USian Empire, I can easily envision the secret police whether local, state or federal again assigned to monitor the political conformity and even doctrinal orthodoxy not just of Muslims (as in the Newark case), but of all people – especially those in sects officially viewed as “suspicious,” as Unitarians were during the era of the postwar purges, as all non-Christians, agnostics, atheists and even non-fundamentalist Christians are today.

 

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“Lying to Survive at the Air Force Academy: An Open Letter to Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson”  Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation shares a letter he received that bitterly protests the Christian theocracy imposed upon the U.S. officer corps. I point out that “In the de facto Fourth Reich of today's USian Empire, the Christian church in its more savagely fundamentalist cults is becoming the equivalent of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich of Hitler's Germany...In which context recall the inscription around the swastikas on German military uniform belts: Gott Mit Uns -- 'god with us,' thereby granting Christian sanction even to the Holocaust.”

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“Does Nixon's 'Treason' Boost LBJ's Legacy” Robert Parry of Consortium News reports on the oft-ignored fact President Nixon's treason prolonged the Vietnam War, adding at least 20,000 U.S. military people and perhaps a million Vietnamese men, women and children to the death toll. As a result, President Johnson's domestic humanitarianism is “overshadowed” to the point it is nearly forgotten. My answer notes what should be obvious: “Methodical censorship of historical facts that rehabilitate President Johnson's image is understandable when viewed from the perspective of class struggle. The benefits of LBJ's generosity toward the 99 Percent were very real. These included giant strides toward redefining USian health care and adequate transport as civil rights rather than privileges of wealth; equally significant steps toward ameliorating the socioeconomic disadvantages that keep lower-income peoples imprisoned in poverty; and, as a result, strong reinforcement of the New Deal/anti-Ayn-Rand notion of the United States as a genuine land of opportunity. Were LBJ to be historically rehabilitated, these aspects of his policies -- humanitarianism that is truly revolutionary in the context of the Ayn Rand fascism that rules the USian Empire today -- would be brought to the forefront.”

(Which is not, say again NOT, to  suggest LBJ's conspiratorial role in turning a little war into a big war -- and thereby handing his One Percent masters untold profits -- should ever be forgiven.) 

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“Misremembering America's Wars, 2003-2053” Nick Turse of TomDispatch describes an ultra-high-tech 2053 in which government propaganda is the only so-called truth. He then uses this improbable fiction to legitimately criticize the Big Lie “history” of the USian Empire's wars now being disseminated by the military. While I applaud his critique, I am so vexed by its underlying PollyAnna notion of progress, I focus mostly on that: “Mr. Turse's high-tech 2053 will exist, if at all, only in the privileged quarters of the One Percent and its factotums, the politicians and bureaucrats whose job is to perpetuate capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total wretchedness for all the rest of us. The One Percenters and their enablers will live in guarded and gated compounds. As for us, think not of Star Trek but of Les Miserables; picture not houses and apartments but the sordidness and stench of slave pens and homeless camps...That will be the real 2053.” Another poster rejects the likelihood of slave pens; I say “slave pens -- specifically for-profit prisons -- are already a key part of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand economy.” 

(And this was before I had seen Marcin's photographs of homeless camps – which are so vivid you can almost smell them, exactly as I have smelled them in parts of the Cascade Mountains back country before it was closed to public access.) 

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“Can Atrocity Be the Subject Matter of Poetry?” Robyn Creswell in The New Yorker reviews Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu, editors; W.W. Norton: 2014). 

Creswell gets the title wrong but raises compelling questions about the relationship between politics and art. As a socialist, I of course believe the two are inseparable, that what Robert Graves describes as “one story and one story only” cannot be told without reference to the elements of class-struggle that are evident even in our most ancient myths. But Creswell – a man of obvious Ruling Class privilege no doubt schooled in the capitalist dogmas that dismiss class struggle as delusion and proclaim art and politics to be like Kipling's East and West, “never the twain shall meet” – damns the anthology for its very democracy: “(t)he editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism...means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria – vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm – very bad.” His review -- despite its begrudging nod to editor Wu and many other critics of the socioeconomically exclusive, academically cloistered narcissism so much USian poetry has become since the 1960s -- is perhaps then an exposition of the selfsame exclusiveness. But that insight comes to me only now, after a much more careful reading. My original comment was written in delight at finding a poetry review – any poetry review – on RSN. My intent was mostly to thank RSN Founder/Editor Marc Ash for running it and to express my hope it represents another expansion of the site's already eclectically gratifying content. I also applauded a fellow comment-thread poster “for reminding us of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and 'Babiyy Yar,' which was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his wrenchingly powerful 13th Symphony, subtitled with same name in a slightly different spelling, Babi Yar." 

I cannot listen to Babi Yar without getting tears in my eyes, and I doubt anyone who is fully human can. It achieved enormous popularity in the allegedly brainwashed Soviet Union, but here in the allegedly free world of USian homeland, Babi Yar died in the oblivion of public indifference – one of the many reasons the Soviet citizenry often jeered us as nyekulturniy. Other great works, including virtually all of the formerly recognized occidental classics, have similarly perished. That's because the One Percent uses censorship as a weapon of class struggle. And censorship thus employed takes many forms. There is censorship by denunciation, as in Craswell's review. There is censorship by obscurity, imposed by the fact so many USians never lose the intellectual gag reflex with which our public schools condition us to reject art and literature, thus to ensure we carefully avoid the near occasion of enchantment by aesthetic agitators. There is censorship by price, as the anthology in question lists at $29.95, more than most of us in the 99 Percent can afford for anything beyond the necessities of our household budgets: food, clothing, transport, doctors, medicine, shelter. And now there's censorship by suppression (as against Edward Snowden or as implicitly demanded by the Federal District Court in Newark), plus of course censorship by the Big Lie, as in the falsified histories of the empire's wars. But let us not despair: our understanding of class struggle – in this instance the One Percent's escalating efforts to ensure we proletarians and peasants remain forever impoverished, powerless and ignorant –  now melds a plague of seemingly unrelated oppressions into a single, potentially revolutionary summation of grievances.

LB/23 February 2014 

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Obamacare Betrayals Prove Barack's Treachery

A slightly better picture than the one I published in 2009. (For my additional photos of the event, see “Faces of the Fight” (left-hand column near bottom). Don't know why I chose that frame over this one, particularly since the determined-looking the woman holding the near end of the “Health Care is a Human Right” banner is more visible in this image. Pentax K1000, 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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NOW AS WE DISCOVER yet another dimension of how Obamacare victimizes everybody but the very rich,  we are beginning to fully understand what Barack the Betrayer, the most brazen liar in U.S. political history, promised the prescription drug lords, the insurance aristocrats and the Wall Street barons during all those secret meetings  at the White House. Again we get schooled in the first law of understanding U.S. politics: anything a politician says in public is a lie – especially when the “change we can believe in” promises to make things better for us 99 Percenters. Thus we see once more how the bottom line of our everyday lives is the bottomless despotism of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and ever-worsening poverty for all the rest of us. In other words, if we're not part of the One Percent, we're fucked. 

While Chris Hedges says the bloodshed that now characterizes everyday life in Egypt “offers a window into the coming dystopia,” so indeed does the Judas-like transformation of Obama the Orator into Barack the Betrayer. Just as the Egyptian crisis shows us the methodology of ruling the Third World, so does political treachery demonstrate how the Ruling Class imposes tyranny on more allegedly civilized nations, especially the United States.

In this context, the Obama phenomenon is a case-study in mass deception. Obama and his Madison Avenue hucksters shamelessly used his race to project an “I-knew-hard-times-and-I'll-govern-accordingly” Big Lie of empathy with everyday people, particularly our struggle for survival against a capitalist system completing its inevitable transition into Ayn Rand fascism. But his presidency has shown us that in truth he is just another obedient servant of the Ruling Class, differing from other USian politicians only in the magnitude of his lies and the totality of his obedience. Thus because of the nasty peculiarities of USian race-relations – the fact all African-Americans are unjustly blamed for the misbehavior of one – Obama's exploitation of his racial identity cannot but hurt his own fellow blacks. Thus too he betrays the cause of racial and ethnic equality and drives yet another wedge into any rational hope of 99 Percent solidarity. And given Obama's political savvy, I cannot doubt these outcomes are part of a far more diabolical agenda. The president, it seems, is not just a typical politician scheming to fulfill his own self-obsessed, morally imbecilic greed. He has also emerged as the most effective facilitator of the capitalist dictatorship the USian One Percent has sought at least since the failed Bankers Plot of 1934.

But Obama's unprecedented use of racial camouflage – his concealment of tyrannical intent behind the facade of the one people who most powerfully symbolize the USian struggle for freedom – is not the only treachery of which he is guilty. He also carefully hid his Wall Street heart and his Machiavellian mind behind the false flag of the Democrat Party. True, the party was terminally corrupted by the events of 22 November 1963, and now differs from the Republican Party only in the false rhetoric required to hide its embrace of the neo-fascist principles that unite both parties into One Party of Two Names. But Obama has thrust the Democrats' deceptiveness to never-before-known extremes. And by so doing, he has probably inflicted the coup-de-grace on the already fatally wounded USian experiment in constitutional democracy. He has taught us politics is a waste of time, that it is never anything more than a rigged game, one in which the house – in this instance the Ruling Class – is the only possible winner. Our vote is thereby proven meaningless; regardless of for whom we cast our ballots, we get a Republican – that is, an unapologetic fascist. We ourselves are thus reduced to the abject powerlessness of medieval serfs; our hopelessness is ever-more-clearly that of slaves for whom the Jubilee will never come. Hedges again: we live in “...the final stage of human habitation of the planet.”

I should point out that while I have enormous admiration for Mr. Hedges and his courageous outspokenness, I vehemently disagree with his notion religious extremism is nothing more than a reaction to oppression. I have experienced firsthand the often-violent religious fanaticism that defines the USian South as a de facto theocracy, where the Ku Klux Klan was known colloquially as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class,” an acknowledgement of its broader function as the local equivalent of the Islamic Morality Police. Hence I take the more conventionally Marxian view of religion – especially Abrahamic religion – as not just a key mechanism of oppression but most often its chief perpetrator. Indeed it is the seductive Jewish, Christian and Islamic notion of ego-survival in an eternal afterlife that so effectively obstructs revolution everywhere on this dying planet. That's why U.S. policy in the the Muslim world, despite claims to the contrary, always favors the imposition of theocracy.  It's also why the One Percent seeks to impose Christian theocracy on the entire United States – the better to brain-police its United Estates, the One Big Plantation on which we are all herded ever more relentlessly toward the corporate slave pens.

Speculate as we might on these matters, the vindictiveness of the Obamacare scam – and it is now obvious it was a scam from the very beginning – is undeniable. Not only is Obama setting aside the out-of-pocket limits that were to protect patients from runaway profiteering by the health-insurance and prescription-drug cartels; the rule requiring employers to provide insurance for their workers has also been discarded  – each betrayal a huge windfall for the obscenely wealthy One Percenters to whom Obama now gives his only loyalty. Predictably, organized labor – the only representation for USian 99 Percenters that still effectively resists capitalism's new paradigm of zero-tolerance authority – has meanwhile been excluded from any of the associated discussions. Moreover, just as any other Republican would surely do, the allegedly “Democratic” president has designed Obamacare to methodically further the wretchedness of the USian 99 Percent. He has given the capitalists tacit encouragement to shrink full-time employment by forcibly expanding the ranks of part-time workers.  And via Medicaid expansion, he has granted the states unlimited authority to fatten their treasuries by post-mortem seizure of all the possessions of anyone  whose income is at or below the new eligibility limit, which after 1 January 2014 is 133 percent of poverty. Based on this year's definitions of poverty,  this is an annual income of $15,282 for a one-person household; $20, 628 for a couple; and $31,322 for a family of four.

Thus our poignantly desperate yearnings for affordable, adequate health care – that which the civilized nations regard as a basic human right – have been perverted by political deception, presidential sleight-of-hand and outright Big Lies into yet another mechanism by which we Working Class USians, already the most oppressed people in the industrial world, are further victimized by those who see us as nothing more than beasts of burden.

LB/18 August 2013

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How Hate-Mongering Wrecked an Urban Transit System

VOTER REJECTION OF a tiny tax increase that would have saved a local transit system in the second most populous county of Washington state exemplifies the grassroots venom that fuels the One Percent's campaign to destroy government services. And the bitterly contested election's dreadful aftermath provides a vivid portrait of the life-disrupting, potentially deadly consequences inflicted on the victims whenever the One Percenters win.

 

Fostered by a disturbingly Karl Rovish “transit is welfare” meme that mysteriously surfaced here in 2010, the defeat of Proposition 1 on the November 2012 ballot will downsize local bus service almost to nothing in Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County. It will impose a 53 percent cutback atop two other devastating contractions: the 35 percent reduction mandated by anti-transit voters last year and the previous eight percent decrease forced by declining tax revenues in 2010.

Even now, with its reduced-frequency buses uncomfortably overcrowded even by New York City standards, Pierce Transit carries an average of 35,737 boardings every weekday. But the pending cuts will strand tens of thousands of these passengers, denying them transportation to jobs, schools, medical appointments and other life-sustaining essentials.

Kate Whiting, who headed the Restore Transit Now campaign, says the loss is already inflicting the terrible anxiety of “an uncertain future” on anyone who lacks other transport options. Local social-service officials expect far more devastating consequences. They predict the termination of access to vital services will eventually be death-dealing, especially for elderly and disabled people.

In response, the gloating victors are “applauding, exalting, congratulating, cheering, celebrating and dancing,” ostensibly because they “beat back a tax increase funded by $125,000 of union money.”  But many of the remarks posted on related Internet threads suggest the real motive for the anti-transit vote is hatred and contempt for transit users and lower-income people in general.

The defeated measure would have added a mere three tenths of one percent – three pennies on a $10 purchase – to local retail sales taxes. Like all government agencies in anti-income-tax Washington state, Pierce Transit is funded mostly by these ad valorem taxes; the proposed increase would have compensated for the ongoing revenue loss inflicted by the economic collapse and the resultant decline in retail sales. Had Proposition 1 been approved, its minuscule tax increase would have restored bus and shuttle operations to the (barely adequate) levels that obtained prior to 2008.

Rejection of an identical tax proposal in February 2011 eliminated 11 bus routes, cut schedules on most other routes to one bus per hour and sharply curtailed PT's operations-day by ending most service at 9 p.m. Now, thanks to this year's anti-transit vote, all weekend buses and evening bus service after 7 p.m. will be terminated, probably in February 2013. Innumerable Saturday, Sunday and night-shift workers throughout the 292-square-mile PT service area will have no way to get to and from their jobs. Shuttle operations – the sole means of transport for 6,948 elderly and/or disabled people – will be abolished at the same time. Most likely – given the permanent end of the American Dream economy and the burgeoning anti-transit-rider venom in the suburbs – the shut-downs will be forever. 

Just as a PT commissioner warned before the election,  the radically reduced service – downsized by a total of 97 percent since 2009 – will impose an additional revenue loss so staggering it will almost certainly kill the entire system. The PT district population of 556,908 persons, 200,678 of whom live within the seaport city of Tacoma, would then be left without any local public transport.

Pierce County with its total population of 807,904 could thus become the largest metropolis in the industrial world without mass transit – probably the only such locale in history to have spawned an anti-transit-user movement so vengeful its contempt and hatred of lower-income people destroyed its entire transit system. The ensuing crisis and its resultant odium is sure to cripple the already wounded local economy.

The longer-term outcome – especially ironic given the anti-transit stance of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce – is permanent entrapment of the local economy in the same sort of chronic depression that plagued the post-Civil-War, pre-Tennessee-Valley-Authority South. As RTN's Whiting noted, “a reliable public transportation system is a necessity for sustained economic development.” 

Though Proposition 1 passed by a 55 percent majority in Tacoma, it was rejected by 56 percent in the suburbs. The overall anti-transit majority was only 695 votes, but an additional 15,400 under votes – ballots cast by people too disdainful of transit and transit users to mark a preference – indicate the real anti-transit majority is much larger. This approaches an impossible-to-overcome 57 percent in the suburbs, which contain nearly two-thirds of the PT service district's population. The same mode of reckoning – adding Tacoma's under-votes to its “No” votes – reduces Tacoma's pro-transit majority to a barely dependable 53 percent.

In any case the damage is done. The Republicans have focused socioeconomic, racial and ethnic hatred into an anti-transit-user movement, and the anti-transit-user movement has prevailed, mobilizing its Ayn Rand malice into “a vote against human decency.” 

Transit advocates regard this “hate vote” as a new form of gentrification, its vindictive denial of public transport a not-so-subtle eviction notice to all transit-dependent people in the area. With about half Tacoma's total population officially classified as “lower income” – individuals earning no more than $2,793 per month, families of four earning no more than $5,763 per month – the city's poorer neighborhoods provide most of PT's total ridership. Forty-five percent of these riders, PT spokespersons say, have no working vehicle; 56 percent come from households with incomes less than $1,667 per month.

Never mind these figures and the devastation an anti-transit vote would inflict were repeatedly stressed by pre-election news coverage; in the hate-fueled political climate of the present-day United States, appeals to humanitarianism often backfire. Comments on the web site of The News Tribune, the local McClatchy daily, reveal the intensity of the anti-transit-user malice.

Each entry is printed here exactly as it appeared, misspellings, grammatical errors and all:

“You really believe that other people are responsible for supporting you and providing cheap transportation because you are too lazy to work for a living,” wrote gerry0416 in response to a transit supporter. 

“The transit system should be self supporting,” posted Mary Bishop Kellog. “Don't ask me to pay your bus fare.”

“Call a Cab,” said tommy98466. “This should be a private venture not a taxpayer funded operation.” 

“If living in Tacoma becomes life or death to pay there own way on the buss they can just pack up and move out,” wrote TerryTman.

Rage at municipal unions and spiteful envy of the pay and benefits for which union members have successfully struggled was also a big factor:

“Why is it Pierce Transit has to be fed by taxpayers? Let private sector take over it and I am sure it'll be cheaper and more effective service. Of course union will not allow it, because they are like leaches will not survive without supply,” said  Alisa Simson.

“Many of those who vote no,” said crusader, “are expressing their desire to end the quid pro quo that is politicians providing unsustainable compensation to public sector union who in turn donate and vote to perpetuate the cycle.” 

“Agreed 100% on starving the beast,” wrote taxedenoughintacoma. “I live it everyday. If everyone else did we would cripple the unions overnight. We MUST stop enabling the ponzi scheme that is the public sector unions and their bought and paid for political party, the democrats.” Elsewhere in the same thread taxedenough denounced unionism as “thuggery.”

With bus riders and Amalgamated Transit Union members so obviously despised by the suburban majority and the bus system itself therefore almost certainly doomed, it's legitimate to ask how such an atrocity could occur in a state so apparently “blue” – that is, reliably Democratic in its presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial and social-issues votes.

The short answer is Washington's electorate is bitterly divided between forward-looking, secular-minded urbanites and avowedly conservative, often fanatically Christian rural and suburban residents. By about 55 percent, the urbanites are the majority population, and their viewpoint is reflected accordingly in the state's notably “blue” politics.

Moreover the cities typically govern themselves with self-protective policies that sustain progressive values and relative enlightenment in environmental affairs, often extending these attitudes into the adjacent suburbs. 

But in Tacoma this tolerant and generous application of the basic principle of democratic governance – enabling people to do collectively what they cannot accomplish individually – has uniquely resulted in cataclysmic and probably irreversible failure. Tacoma's attempt to extend urban amenities beyond its city limits – the expansion of Tacoma Transit into Pierce Transit via Urban Mass Transit Administration grants in the late 1970s – has given the vindictively reactionary Pierce County suburbs the political power to literally destroy the city.

Because the suburbanites' notion of “the city” symbolizes everything they despise – socioeconomic, racial and gender equality; the paycheck democracy inherent in unions; racial and cultural diversity; sexual and reproductive freedom; every other aspect of progressive thinking – they are now mercilessly employing the deadliest weapon in their arsenal: killing mass transit and thereby killing the city itself.

Additional results from the November 2012 election reveal the true magnitude of the forces arrayed against Tacoma. Though President Obama won re-election statewide by 54 percentage points, the losing Republican presidential ticket won parts of suburban Pierce County by as much as a 70-30 margin. Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Rob McKenna, who lost statewide to Democrat Jay Inslee, carried the same general area by at least a 60-40 margin. Referendum 74, the marriage equality measure that passed statewide by a 55-47, was emphatically rejected by the county's suburbanites, again by as much as 30 percent. 

PT's probably-terminal defeat is also very much in keeping with the region's long ugly history of opposition to public transport, a modern trend that began in Seattle with the defeat of a regional transit proposal in 1968. That measure, labeled Forward Thrust, was denounced as a threat to “the Pacific Northwest lifestyle” and condemned as “Manhattanization.” A whisper campaign by bigots went even further, denouncing Forward Thrust as an effort to make the city another “Jew York.” Xenophobia and bigotry thus quickly trumped Seattle's self-proclaimed environmentalism, reducing it to scarcely more than a blatantly hypocritical lie. (This anti-transit background is further detailed in the “Editor's Pick” response I wrote last April to a transit report in Crosscut, the Seattle online daily, for which scroll down.) 

Though Seattle's hostility to mass transit has in recent years been partially neutralized by an influx of high-tech “outlanders” – the pejorative by which locally born Seattleites eternally damn anyone from elsewhere – the city's transit system is immeasurably behind that of its northern neighbor Vancouver B.C. and is at least 40 years behind that of its southern neighbor Portland, Oregon – gaps that post-American-Dream budget constraints have made permanently unbridgeable. Now the anti-transit pattern established by Seattle prevails throughout the region, with the rejection of at least 11 regional transit proposals since 1968.

In Pierce County the anti-transit forces parlayed all these factors into what is undoubtedly their most destructive victory yet. The “transit is welfare” meme afixed to public transport the same implications of race and socioeconomic status that made “crime” and “welfare” racist buzzwords during the final decades of the 20th Century. No matter PT's proposed tax hike was so small even a pauper could have afforded it, the Josef Goebbels psycholinguistic manipulation at which the Republicans have excelled at least since the Nixon years quickly turned a “Yes” vote into another form of the affirmative action the White Right regards as abject surrender to minorities they most despise.

That's why the anti-transit propaganda characterized the tax increase as doomsday made real: “Up to 10.1% Sales Tax? It's Too Much! Reject Prop 1.” The 2011 anti-transit slogan was similarly euphemistic: “Stop Wasting Tax Funds...It's Time To Take A Stand In Pierce County.” Curiously, the page on the party's website featuring the grossly misleading “10.1 sales tax” claim has since vanished, but the propaganda from last year remains: “Pierce Transit and the unions they support are waging a war against your wallet in what may be the most audacious tax grab of 2011.”

As pro-transit poster Zaqar notes on a long TNT thread already linked above,  “A racist subtext certainly underlies Pierce County opposition to the tax and many of the comments on this article – unless you think everybody has somehow failed to notice that the majority of people earning less than 20K per year, that is, the majority of people riding the bus, are not white.”

Dg54321's retort is a classic:  “And who's fault is that?  With affirmative action, there is no reason people of color cannot make as much money if not more than white people.  Enough of the "whitey is keeping me down" BS, cause it just doesn't fly in the year 2012.  A black man is in the Oval Office for crying out loud....what more do you people want?”

Remarks on 2011 threads were even more blatantly racist. “It's dangerous (to ride the bus),” said taxedenoughintacoma. “I don't ride uless (sic) I have my carry weapon. Go ride the bus and night and look at some of the people. You won't ride again. Too scary if you ask me.” 

“You want me to vote for the Transit,” asked WarmNfuzziOne, “when this is the primary means juvenile petty thieves and thugs become enabled with transportation to spread their behaviors beyond the hood? Ever wonder how much safer the Lakewood Town Center and Tacoma Mall would be without the Transit?”

Another racist comment has since been deleted from the same thread: “If this thing (is defeated), it will probably be comfortable to go to South Hill Mall once again. The last time I was there the place was chock-a-block full of hood-rat gangsta' wanna' be punkasses with more being delivered every ten minutes by Pierce Transit. The Mall employees told me they are an unmitigated negative, never spending a dime and spending their afternoon harassing the few customers they had not succeeded in running off.”

But is Pierce County's anti-transit-user movement – and a movement it surely is – a harbinger of things to come elsewhere in the suburban United States? Or is it merely another dying spasm of the Republican/Teabagger racial bigotry and socioeconomic hatred that swept the nation ​in response to the 2008 election of President Barack Obama?

That too is a legitimate question, particularly given the long-ago testimony by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman, one of Disgraced President Richard Nixon's top henchmen, that Washington state is a favorite proving ground for the One Percent's techniques of oppression. Its relevance is underscored by the mystery of how the “transit is welfare” meme that was PT's downfall appeared seemingly from nowhere, its Carl Rove/Grover Norquist malignancy suggesting manipulative cunning far beyond the usual “Nuke Tehran/Kill Fags/Get a Job” utterances of the local reactionaries.

The best guess of the more savvy transit advocates is it was introduced by national Republican operatives, the political equivalent of a marketing test. If this is true – if the ruin inflicted by the Pierce County anti-transit-user movement is the first battle in a nationwide Republican war on mass transit – it bodes ill for the users of every U.S. public transport system outside the Boston-New York City-Washington D.C. Corridor, the only region in the entire nation where public transport is considered a civil right.

Given these givens, is there any possibility of saving the Tacoma portion of the bus service?
 

Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland, who also chairs the PT Board of Commissioners, is noncommittal. Briefly interviewed after a 20 November city council meeting, she reluctantly acknowledged Tacoma's newly created Public Transportation Benefit District could indeed provide the legal framework for creation of a Tacoma-only bus system. But the PTBD, she said, was established for emergency repairs of streets and sidewalks. It has only a $3.5 million budget, she added, with no plans to expand into the realm of mass transit.

ATU Local 758 President Don McKnight said he doesn't know whether or how Tacoma's bus service might be preserved. “At this point,” he said, “it's been made clear that everything is on the table.”

Another unknown is how the end of PT bus service will affect the commuter trains and express buses provided by Sound Transit, the Seattle-based regional transit authority that serves a three-county area from Tacoma north through Seattle to Everett, another Puget Sound seaport city. ST, which autocentric suburbanites bitterly criticize for its refusal to squander money building giant parking lots, depends heavily on local buses to ferry passengers to and from its railroad stations and bus terminals.

Transit advocates thus rationally fear the loss of local bus service will prompt ST to discontinue the trains and express buses that serve Tacoma and its immediate environs. Given the strength of anti-transit sentiment in the Pierce County suburbs, they say it's possible ST will even shut down the popular trolley it operates in downtown Tacoma, part of a light rail system that was to be expanded within Tacoma and eventually extended to link the city with SeaTac International Airport and Seattle itself.

But Pierce County suburbanites killed those projects too, voting against regional transit proposals in 2007 and 2008. Hence the probability is the proposed ST expansions will never be built. Indeed the trolley itself may be shut down. 

Meanwhile, the victims of the Pierce Transit cutbacks – students, low-wage workers, PT employees whose jobs will be lost, anyone who is elderly or disabled – now live in post-election dread.

“It is already difficult to get to use this system,” wrote MFM008 on another TNT  thread about the looming shutdown.  “I am disabled and without this some people could die. How do kidney dialysis patients get to appointments 3 times a week?  This isnt just to get to jobs or shopping. I cant drive because of my eyes, my moms are worse- she uses pierce transit. What do you do when this is all you have? suggestions? Die?”

Said Tomwa007 in a typically heartless response: “You better move to downtown Tacoma with service if you can not afford private transport. That is how it works, get used to it.”

LB/24 November 2012

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