ONE OF THE DARKER aspects of journalism is that it sometimes gives you access to enough information to make accurate judgments about trends and outcomes – judgments in which correctness is synonymous not with the joy of achievement but with the despair of defeat and impending loss.
So it is with public transport in the Puget Sound area of Washington.I do not remember when I first realized the region's vicious xenophobia – its long history of bigoted and hysterical “we-don'-wanna-be-like-Jew-York” opposition to adequate transit – had doomed it, inescapably and therefore forever, to being the Third World of U.S. urban transportation.
Given that, globally speaking, the U.S. is itself the true Moron Nation of mass transit, Puget Sound's position at the imbecilic nadir – the bottom of bottoms – is surely a bête noire of grotesque proportions.
It is also the most outrageous example of electoral hypocrisy in modern history: a population that claims environmental supremacy yet despises adequate public transportation, damning it as an encroachment of alien values (the “Jew York” factor again) or a surrender to allegedly despicable and presumably criminal poor people who might otherwise be banished by the lack of transit.
Such is the area's 42-year record: six of eight regional mass transit proposals rejected.Never mind the region's inside-the-city-limits populations in Seattle, Bellingham, Everett, Tacoma and Olympia are finally after all this time (begrudgingly) admitting they live in cities and not quaintly frontierish country towns – and that good public transport is as vital to urban wellbeing as clean water and functional sewerage.
No matter that Seattleites – formerly the Grand Dragons of regional anti-transit agitation – are finally recognizing that fossil-fueled buses merely perpetuate their enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive, that only electricity and rails might carry them to manumission.Like the rancher alerted to rustlers by the rumbling hooves of his stolen herd, all these people have awakened too late.
The economy has been permanently contracted by the Ruling Class. The national job market cannot ever be rebuilt because the Ruling Class has outsourced all the materials required for its reconstruction.“Jobless Recovery” is therefore forever.
The downsizing of government services will continue – and this is its malevolent long-range purpose – until governance as we knew it is entirely replaced by the zero-tolerance tyranny of Big Business corporate management.
One of the immediate results is that there is already not enough money, now or ever again, to complete the local transit projects already on the drawing boards.*****
I think the first time I publicly wrote about Puget Sound's self-inflicted transit crisis was in Wolfgang von Skeptik, the blog that was porn-spammed to death after I pointed out that the impending apocalypse – the perfect storm of terminal climate change, fossil fuel bankruptcy and technological collapse – is a potentially species-killing combination that has no precedent in human experience.
We have survived dramatic climate changes – ice ages, for example – and we have survived various exhaustions of our resource bases. But we have never faced all these crises simultaneously. Because never until the present era was human technology based on such finite resources, we have never before lost our ability to provide ourselves with the essentials of water, food, fire and shelter.
And that is the true horror of our circumstances – the fact all of these essentials are now 100 percent dependent on the availability of petroleum products and the technologies so derived.The truly eco-minded among us recognized at least 40 years ago that one of the keys to surviving the impending triple apocalypse is public transport that is not – say again NOT – dependent on fossil fuels.
Theoretically, this realization should have given the Puget Sound region a huge advantage: thanks to the New Deal – specifically the Bonneville hydroelectric project – it has the second cheapest electricity in the U.S. (The power generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, another New Deal project, is the cheapest.)But, no, xenophobia prevailed: despite the availability of 80 percent federal funding, the “we-don'-wanna-be-like-Jew-York” crowd in Seattle twice voted down electric-powered regional rail systems, 1968 and 1970, and then at the end of the decade strong-armed the legislature into killing a third proposal that sought to take advantage of the same federal assistance before it was slain forever by the advent of Reaganism.
Better dead than fed – never mind it was common knowledge the federal money was the dying gasp of the New Deal, a magnitude of funding never to be seen again.Never? Absolutely: since Nixon's
declaration of class war in an interview by William Randolph Hearst
Jr. weeks after his 1974 inauguration, the historical baseline trend
has been relentlessly downhill toward continued oppression by
oft-concealed shrinkage of funding for government services, transit
included.
The all-time classic example both of shrinkage and the tactics of concealment is the destruction of welfare: from 1970 through 1990 the welfare bureaucrats jacked up their administrative costs by 5,390 percent – NOT a typo – even as they slashed stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.
Then the bureaucrats and politicians publicly blamed all these runaway costs on welfare recipients. Ruling Class Media responded accordingly: one of its Josef Goebbels clones created the archetype of the welfare queen – the Big Lie that hid the fact the true welfare queens were the bureaucrats themselves.Meanwhile the (former) alternative press – now compromised to compliance by its allegiance with the Bill Clinton Democratic Blow-Job Party – refused to examine the real numbers or ask the poor (or even their advocates) about the worsening nature of life below the salt.
“O don't go there those people are dirty and violent and don't matter O yuk” – the new credo of the journalism school elite.While transit operations are a lot less administratively top-heavy, they employ the same sort of class-war legerdemain – bourgeois reporter to bourgeois press officer and to hell with the people stiffed by service reductions or fare increases.
Pierce Transit, the local agency upon which I am 100 percent dependent since my automobile died and I will never again have the money to replace it, is depressingly typical.
This year it raised its fares. Next year it's asking the voters to approve a tiny sales-tax increase, 3/10ths of one percent, 3 pennies on a $10 bill.The smart way to do this would have been to raise fares AFTER the election.
Now by its fare increase Pierce Transit has given its enemies all the ammunition they need to defeat the slightly higher tax rate.When that happens – as it surely will (especially with a 2/10ths of one percent save-our-transit sales-tax increase already defeated in smaller but demographically similar Whatcom County) – Tacoma will lose 57 percent of its bus service.
Is the pre-election fare increase merely tactical stupidity?Or is it yet another manifestation – an especially cunning one – of the 70-year Ruling Class war on government services, in this case a transit agency downsizing itself by ensuring the defeat of a revenue proposal it cannot survive in present form without.
But no, that couldn't be happening. Not
here: this is America. This is the Evergreen State, the emerald of
the Pacific Northwest, Tacoma the City of Destiny.
Whatever, there's no denying this region is on its way to becoming a public-transport dead zone. Even the Ruling Class Media now admits it:
“Sound Transit can no longer fully deliver the package voters approved in 2008 for more light rail, express bus service and commuter rail.”
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/427268_transit23.html
“84 percent of all transit systems (nationally) report they reduced routes or raised fares in the last year.”
http://crosscut.com/2010/08/17/transportation/20046/A-coming-train-wreck-for-transit/It gives me no pleasure I saw it coming. I wrote of it in WvS three years ago. I wrote of it several times (under censorship and therefore far more euphemistically) for the local journal that employed me as a part-time political reporter until I protested the infuriating irregularity of its paychecks once too often and was fired in early 2009. And of course I've written of it here in Outside Agitator's Notebook.
I depend on mass transit. And because of my dependence, I fear its reduction as my reduction; its death as my death. I had therefore hoped that somewhere, somehow – by the Santa Claus magic of some Easter Bunny miracle – naming my fear might prompt the changes that would make it unnecessary.But the reality is nobody gives a shit – not even the victims of the cutbacks, most of us people who were long ago too beaten down to do much more than quietly whimper in the encroaching darkness.
Such is the imbecility of hope under capitalism: infinite greed as maximum virtue, limitless selfishness as ultimate good, government services in decline, more money than ever in Ruling Class pockets.And the Ruling Class of anti-transit Puget Sound with a big head start in shoving us all into our graves.
LB/28 September 2010