Slog PM: Concrete Truck Drivers Say Bosses Offered Another Bad Deal, Mayor’s Bus Stop Closure Is an Attack on Public Transportation, Seattle Is Ready for Spring – Slog

Not I-5, so it must be hell on earth. Charles Mudede

Who is still saying no? The concrete delivery drivers in our neck of the woods. The man has got to do more before they get behind the wheel again. MyNorthwest reports: “[The drivers] won’t be taking employers up on an offer to return to work temporarily in exchange for medical coverage in April and continued negotiations for a new contract.”

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Do you know what I spend on gas every month? Zero. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. You get it. My carbon footprint, as a result, is, in this society, very low. But I get no rewards for this from my state or even the Federal government. And yet, we are now, during a period when oil corporations are pushing up prices, talking about subsidizing drivers in the same way we subsidize gas production. This is what the post-neoliberal future is looking more and more like. In the old days, the period that came to an end with Keynesian economics (increased state budgets and market intervention), the British period, it was capital that loaned money to borrowers to buy what capitalists had to sell. (Read Rosa Luxemburg.) In the next movement of capitalism, government expenditures explicitly support both capitalist supply and demand. The function of the state in this situation is simply to sink and bury as much capital from the bloated market in much the same way science fiction imagines technology sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

The closure of a very busy bus stop on Third Avenue is nothing but an attack on public transportation, a point obviously not mentioned (let alone contemplated) by Seattle Times transportation reporter David Kroman. For him, someone says, “This is a donkey.” And then he, blindfolded, reports to readers, “Indeed, it is a donkey.” But if any thought is put into the matter, it is plain to see the closure as the demonization of Metro and, raising that thought from the part to the whole, the unity that forms urban democracy. And the fact that Mayor Bruce Harrell, following the advice of the SPD, used the lamest imaginable excuse possible (“to increase visibility into criminal activity … and to reduce areas of congregation”) to justify the closure/attack/demonization of Metro says it all.

But why don’t we shut down I-5 to end the scourge of road rage? KOMO: “Troopers report ‘dangerous trend’ of rising drive-by shootings on highways.” There have been no fewer than “23 drive-by shootings on state highways and roadways this year,” and “Pierce County is on pace to see more than 100 by end of 2022.” The situation is so bad that troopers are encouraging drivers to call them right away if they spot aggressive driving on I-5.

What are we going to do about the out-of-control violence and criminals on I-5, Seattle Times? “Four juveniles, ages 11-16, arrested in a drive-by shooting on I-5 in Pierce County.”

I rest my case.

Spring, Seattle is here. Seattle is ready. But I will miss the winter and all of that darkness and rain and frozen clear nights. And this season (winter) makes the most sense to me because as you get older you become like a winter star: bright but cold.

The mystery of the crash in the mountains of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 carrying 132 souls, all lost, has yet to be solved. The disaster happened on Monday, March 21, a date that’s still very much inside, to use the words of New York Post, “a sensitive time for Boeing.”

Saying it like it is on KING 5: That fuselage of Boeing’s greatest plane, the Jumbo Jet, to be placed between the “two towers under construction at Stewart Street and Denny Way”: It’s “building a future between its past and future right now.” The past was production. The future is luxury.

What I have to say about Boeing’s situation today and the film Downfall can be heard on this podcast:

My favorite line from Virginia “Ginni” Thomas’s bonkers texts to Mark Meadows, the former Chief of Staff: “Mark (don’t want to wake you)… ” Thomas, of course, is the wife of the super-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Was Clarence snoring beside Ginni as she texted these words? The light of the phone glowing on her wide-awake face. Thoughts of a coup churning in her head. The destruction of American democracy at her fingertips. Another excellent text: “Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark. The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”

What tune would best match Ginni’s nights of seditious passion? What would it sound like to be her during those moments—Clarence snoring? I imagine Bjork’s “Hunter” vibrating from the skin to the core of her being.




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