In the very heart of the empire, under the very feet of the civil service that enforces the Cathedral’s will, lies decay and ruin due to ideology.
The DC Metro is threatening to shut down whole lines for months and possibly a year. This is the mass transit system built in the mid-20th Century “ugly government building” aesthetic, whisking noble federal workers to and from the federal nerve center. The decline of the Metro is pure ideology, if one looks at where the problems are.
The Metro’s infrastructure has not been properly maintained. Maintenance is incredibly important, but the Metro employees have engaged in what is called check-mark paper inspections. Money is required for maintenance, and maintenance is a normal part of running any firm with physical capital and machinery. Where is the money going? Wages, health care, and inefficient outlays to keep the parasitic city employees happy. DC is not alone. All metro areas have seen expenses rise. The MBTA system in the Boston metropolitan area received wonderful press protection when the Boston Globe stated the budget increased only 44% over the last 8 years. This is an era of cost-cutting on the private side, which never ever is suggested for the public sector.
Similar to other public budget issues, this is primarily a problem of public employee unions. Collective bargaining was a bedrock of the progressive economic platform, and even if progressives waffle on it today, public employee unions are a key to their Jenga-styled election coalition. The Wagner Act of 1935 did not apply to state governments. The progressive saint himself, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was against the idea of public sector unions. He spoke out against them due to the unique situation of public goods and services.
Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied.
This all changed starting in the ’50s, as governors and mayors allowed public employees to unionize. President Kennedy issued an executive order that allowed federal employees to unionize. Even conservative saint President Reagan was governor as California’s public employees unionized, sinking the state’s finances today. Unions allowed for a concentration of power into the union representatives and lawyers trained at Ivy League universities. The dues became pools of money for funding campaigns. This created an organized interest to use in elections. Unions also allowed progressives to break up the old city machines for vote manufacturing.
Tucked away within the story of budget bloat and maintenance decline is the peculiar problem of employee incompetence. Foreshadowing the future of American infrastructure if present trends continue, all of that employee money was going to departments turned into fiefdoms of ethnocentric employment practices. The Metro became a source of easy money for little work, and despite the changing dynamics of the city’s population, the Metro workforce maintained DC’s previous appellation of “Chocolate City”.
In 2012, The Washington Times covered the problems of the Metro. They focused on the culture of complacence, incompetence, and lack of diversity. Now this is not the common lack of diversity, which in liberal parlance means “few black people”. This report discussed the black ethnocentric hiring practices that put the Metro in the position that it finds itself today four years after the article. The ethnocentric hiring practices might have reached a nadir with one reported anecdote:
It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said.
Those hiring practices are how trains derail and the empire’s capital closes down entire rail lines. How black is the Metro? In the 2012 article, it reports that the Metro has 1.4% Hispanic bus drivers and train operators and 1.5% who are white. Washington DC is nearly 40% white and 10% Hispanic. Those kind of imbalances would be front page in The New York Times, were the situation reversed.
To clean the Augean stables of the Metro employment would require powers of a dictator. This has been tried in Michigan because of corrupt and dysfunctional city governments. The Flint water crisis, perpetrated by an evil white governor, is the national media crisis that is reported. Few stop to consider the majority black city council and black mayor’s role. Very little ink is given to the city’s steady decline under black stewardship, and even less to that fact that Mogadishu in Michigan is no one’s fault but the community’s. Imagine a competent, and likely white administrator firing black employees en masse. The media would go into hysterics. Even Michelle Rhee’s Asian-American status could not prevent her being run out of her job as superintendent of DC schools, due to controversial policies than ran opposite to the chocolate constituents’ desires.
The media will protect the public transit systems since they want expansions to those programs. The media even has some random thinkers who want to downplay this and say the Metro is not useful. Markets will fix it! The market will provide a solution right on top of the sunk cost ruin of the old solution. The solutions out there are beyond the pale and unmentionable. Private management? Destroying ethnocentric hiring practices by non-whites? Reforming employee pensions? No, no, no, just open up that wallet wider. If one does not like it, build your own system. The ruling ideology will not place function over form.
Mussolini understood the character of the sort of man who would work in public transport. He therefore abolished the public workers’ unions. This apart, every rail system will lose money, because people prefer to use their cars.
The proposed: ‘high speed’ rail system in California, originally intended to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco, will now offer a truncated route.
The politicians continue as wilfully – and genuinely – ignorant as they always have been.
So, “Fascism” is the answer?
Although I am not a libertarian, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute (he blogs at the http://ti.org/antiplanner/) and Wendell Cox both have written extensively on America’s woefully underfunded mass transit systems. Randal O’Toole especially focuses on the lack of funds that are budgeted for the maintenance of these systems and the huge gap between the maintenance and capital costs of these systems and the transit fares received. Both guys are worth checking out.
Didn’t you read the article, Carl-Edward? The problem with the Metro is that it was put in the hands of black people and now it’s falling to pieces. The end. They have a racial genius for fucking shit up.
By 1979, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young was obliged to forfeit control of Detroit Water and Sewerage to Federal Judicial oversight for failing to meet new EPA standards.
“One of the things we have to give black people the time to learn to do is to learn how to run city governments, to run projects like the water and sewer plant,” The Free Press quoted Judge Feikens as saying. ”Unfortunately,” he continued, ”they’re still in an era of development, many of them, in which they think all you have to do is talk about this thing. So you hear a lot of rhetoric. Talking is important; words are important. But you have to do more than talk about it. And I think that as the black people come into political power in all the big cities of the United States, they have to learn how to climb hills.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/02/us/judge-is-critical-of-detroit-mayor.html
Thirty years on, not much has changed. As an exercise for the commenters here, suggest a black run municipality that isn’t in some stage of collapse, I’ve looked and come up empty.
Very interesting note from the judge that black municipal leaders think “talking” is what does it but don’t know that they have to act. This seems to apply to schools too where blacks say they want their kids to go to good schools and their communities to be safer, but they have no clue what goes into making those two things happen. In this era, that judge would be removed from his post for uttering the truth.
I’m becoming convinced that blacks, as a whole, aren’t bright. If it’s not preaching from the lectern, which they do a fine job at, when put into a position of political authority they often times totally make the system much worse than it already is.
Just look at the private academies run by blacks as alternatives to public education. The names they give to the institutions couldn’t be more blunt. Like “Rise Up Academy” or something.
Good story. See also: the time a couple years ago that a dindu nodded off at the wheel of a Chicago CTA train and crashed it right into O’Hare Airport:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/train-operator-dozed-off-crash-chicagos-ohare-ntsb-171228841–finance.html?ref=gs
Ha! I remember when that happened. It was the talk of the town when it occurred.
Good blog. It rather reminds me of this:
Basil Fawlty: “Can’t we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant: Mrs. Sybil Fawlty from Torquay. Specialist subject – the bleeding obvious.”
The fact that blacks ruined the Metro falls easily into the category of “the bleeding obvious,” but in our debased and corrupted world it becomes invisible. It’s an un-thought. You just aren’t permitted to say what everyone knows.
It could be funny, but it’s both tragic and dangerous. The entire Western world is facing the takeover of the black and brown races, and infrastructure will decline, decline, decline as whites are steadily driven out. Even in Germany, known FOREVER as a place where public facilities like trains, parks, ski lifts, etc. are maintained at an almost insane level of perfection, will find itself first more like Italy in quality, and then more like Morocco. Hell, in 1900 when Jerome K. Jerome wrote the delightful “Three Men on the Bummel,” he was commenting on the perfection of things in Germany compared to the “sloppy” British!
Of course as everyone here understands, Germany is like that because it’s full of Germans. But it’s full of lots of other riff-raff now.
The coming Asian-ization of America won’t be much better. Sure, Chinese and Indians are more competent than blacks and Arabs, but they are equally corrupt. In fact, since they’re smarter they’re better at corruption.
Thank God commercial airline pilots are still largely white. That may be final holdout.
Good. I *want* the Washington Metro to be dirty, dangerous, and dysfunctional. For once, let the people who rule us in Mordor-on-the-Potomac deal with the consequences of the policies that they force on the rest of us. If its sad state makes their empire (not “our” empire – I have no stake in it, so what’s this “we” shit, kemosabe?) look like a total joke, all the better.
I, too, want to see D.C. take a bad turn. Outside of the glitz of the memorials, it’s a sad sack of a city.
My observations has been that it’s a city filled with irony, filled with eager grads from the BoshWash corridor.
D.C. is like Detroit in terms of its economy – it’s a one trick pony (government). It’s just that Detroit didn’t have the federal agencies on the level that D.C. had. If D.C. wasn’t Mordor-on-the-Potomac I’m pretty sure it be some kind of mini-Baltimore.
DC *is* a mini-Baltimore. But there’s another, smaller DC inside the mini-Baltimore DC that is filled with politicians, monuments, federal agencies, and WMATA lines to the suburbs.