MOST EVERYONE WHO reads this blog knows I avoid writing about Pacific Northwest politics unless they're either local examples of national conflicts or particularly egregious demonstrations of the truth behind Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's admission Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class rat lab – a proving ground where techniques of subjugation are refined for use against everybody else.
But the outspokenly malicious downsizing of a local transit system by the voters' overwhelming rejection of a negligible sales-tax increase Tuesday undoubtedly falls into both categories.
It reflects not only Moron Nation's poisonous envy of union members and its disturbingly Nazi-like hatred of lower-income peoples, but how easily the virus of such hatefulness is disseminated through a population already long notorious for its “don't Californicate Washington/we don't wanna be like Jew York” xenophobia now further inflamed by capitalism's signature economic terrorism.
Thus were pogroms organized by the Okhrana, the Tsar's dread secret police; thus were lynch mobs instigated by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States; thus was Krystallnacht spawned by the Nazis in presumably civilized Germany.
And the vindictive downsizing of Pierce Transit – like the nationwide war on government services of which it is part – is indeed a kind of socioeconomic lynching.
Its victims are those of us now increasingly blamed for the economic collapse: not the Wall Street banksters and Big Business tycoons whose criminal conspiracies forever ended the American Dream, but we who are elderly, disabled or permanently unemployed (and therefore no longer exploitable for capitalist profit); or we whose union membership enables us to successfully resist such exploitation.
(Disclosure: I am an elderly, disabled and officially retired journalist who remains an active member of the National Writers Union AFL/CIO.)
Considering that Pierce Transit serves a big segment of a population so fanatically opposed to public transport that in the past 43 years it has defeated five of seven regional transit measures (a record that seemingly has no precedent anywhere on Earth), the agency nevertheless does a truly admirable job of providing bus service to Tacoma and parts of Pierce County.
Though its schedules are woefully minimal by the public-transport-as-a-civil-right standards of my native New York City and the Northeast in general, Pierce Transit was the first operator on the planet to fuel its buses with compressed natural gas. The remarkably farsighted price-contract it negotiated at the time (1986) held down fares for more than 20 years in an era of runaway fuel costs – a management triumph the local News-Tribune stubbornly refuses to acknowledge.
Unlike the opposition to transit characteristic of The Seattle Times, which is an expression of the region's nasty xenophobia, TNT's anti-transit bias is a subset of its malevolent anti-unionism. As long as Pierce Transit remains a union shop – its workers are robustly represented by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 758 – TNT's editors will continue to demonize it. Indeed the McClatchy-owned daily is the most scab-minded rag I have encountered anywhere including the systematically scabby South.
Thus – though the sales tax increase that would have saved bus service in Tacoma and Pierce County was minuscule (only three pennies on a ten dollar purchase) – TNT reacted with predictable worker-bashing hatefulness via a 20 January editorial:
“The agency has imposed some economies on itself, including a substantial squeezing of its administrative costs. But its employee compensation packages – by far the largest part of its budget – bear no relationship to reality. Its standard health plan falls into the 'Cadillac' category, and most of its workers have enjoyed generous pay increases right on through the worst economy in 60 years.”
Full text of the demagougic diatribe is available here, though registration for all such links may be required:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/01/20/1509426/come-back-pierce-transit-with.html
The reportorial disinformation campaign that followed the editorial denunciation would have made Josef Goebbels proud.
Its core deception was repeatedly describing the proposed three-tenths-of-one-percent tax increase as a “50 percent tax increase,” a deliberately confusing technicality based on the fact an additional three cents on a ten dollar purchase would have amounted to a 50 percent hike in the transit authority's tiny share of the nine percent sales tax.
As no doubt intended, TNT's shameless agitation soon yielded a baleful bonus of racism, poor-bashing and anti-union invective.
Here are five representative comments from the online thread generated by TNT's 31 January report, “Pierce Transit tax faces a rare foe,” linked here:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/01/30/1524114/pierce-transit-tax-faces-a-rare.html
“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.”
“As far as the routes in town not running as often, people are just going to have to learn to wait, like they used to. If you're getting around on someone else's dime the correct response should be 'thank you,' not 'what took you so long?'
“Your bus ride should not be subsidized by my non-rider tax follars !!” (sic)
“I for one cant pay anymore. Im already paying for everybodys medical and welfare and my family cant aford anymore entitlement programs. Its just too f*^c&@ing much. Im sorry, Id like to, but enough is enough. ” (sic x 9)
“Any measure that gets this much Union support is an automatic 'NO' on my ballot.”
No wonder then the transit authority's Proposition 1 was killed by a 55-45 majority.
And the slaying of Proposition One, which will slash Pierce Transit's service by a devastating 35 percent, is clearly part of the carefully orchestrated Democrat/Republican war against lower-income people and unions everywhere in the United States.
Not only is this war a calculated effort to shift the blame for economic collapse from its Wall Street perpetrators to its Main Street victims. Its infinitely darker purposes are the elimination of people who are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit – all of us who are elderly, disabled or permanently unemployed – and the disempowerment of anyone who dares resist what former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls “supercapitalism.”
With all due respect to Mr. Reich – and I damn well respect him a lot – the capitalism of which he speaks should more accurately be labeled “tyrannocapitalism”: lizard-brained plutocrats proclaiming their greed and selfishness the height of virtue as they run amok robbing the defenseless.
And since the ideology of Moron Nation and its creeds of theocratic Christianity all define poverty as entirely the fault of the impoverished, there's no effective outcry at the mounting death toll. These days – more often than not – there's actually applause, whether from the politicians or an electorate cunningly agitated ever closer to lynch-mob fury.
American democracy, once rightfully a global beacon of hope but now forever reduced to a Big Lie, is thus revealed as manipulative tyranny imposed by a monolithic, increasingly merciless oligarchy intent on seizing all the nation's wealth.
Until recently the oligarchs hid their unity of purpose behind the deceptive facades of two seemingly rival political parties. But now we see mounting evidence they – especially the politicians of the parties whose names I spell “DemocRat” and “GOPorker” – have been secret collaborators for at least the past 37 years.
Yes, the requirements of public image still grant us some protection: for example U.S. politicians don't (yet) dare re-establish the sorts of death camps that characterized Nazi Germany. But that's only because the same genocidal result – albeit more slowly (though with the added bonus of avoiding the public embarrassment of barbed wire or the irritating stench of crematoria) – is easily achieved by abandonment and neglect.
Hence the obvious motive behind the not-so-subtle re-branding of health care, transit and even public education as “welfare”; also the reason for capitalism's sharply escalated war on unions. Whenever a governmental function is portrayed as a subsidy for the undeserving, it is all the more easily ended forever – the result ever more workers hurled into inescapable poverty, ever more lower income people savaged by denial of stipends and services.
Such is the increasingly undeniable agenda behind the harsh new social-Darwinist paradigm of governance in the United States: absolute power and unlimited wealth for the oligarchs, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
LB/10 February 2011
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It was delightful to follow your write up, very thoughtful and explanatory. Bookmarked. Don't forget to keep in the loop.
Posted by: Lewis Blade | 11/29/2011 at 04:28 AM