printer-friendly version
www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
It's Not the Snow, It's the Dough
Here in Boston we're under eight feet of accumulated snowfall this winter. It's broken all sorts of records. Our public transportation system (the MBTA or "T" for short) has been clobbered. The Boston Herald reports here that:
"The blizzard-battered commuter rail and subway will not be back to normal for “at least” another 30 days, the transit authority’s embattled general manager admitted yesterday, forecasting a bleak month of long, expensive slogs for hundreds of thousands of commuters — as another storm looms."
Here's what public transportation does NOT look like in Boston, even though we have much less snow than where this photo was taken:
Here, sigh, is what it DOES look like:
Passengers waited for hours at some Red Line stations between JFK/UMASS and Braintree on February 11, 2015. The MBTA has been plagued by systemic delays since Winter Storm Juno. (Jennifer Krowchun, Special to MassLive.com )
It's Not the Snow
The problem in Boston, however, is not the snow. Parts of Japan (where the top photo above was taken as well as the ones below) get MUCH more snow and still provide excellent public transportation despite it. Look:
(To see these and more such photos, with information about their specific locations, just google "japan train snow photo".)
The problem in Boston, and in the whole United States, is not the snow, it's the dough. Money that should be spent on things that most people want it spent on is spent instead on things that most people either don't want it spent on or on things that they wouldn't want it spent on if they were told the truth about why it's being spent the way it is.
Instead of money being spent to provide excellent public transportation even in the snowy winter, or to repair problems like this Seattle bridge
it's used to provide things like this
It cost "only" $100 million, but Mr. Trump "needed" it because: "Inside there is a master bedroom with a work desk and an integrated home theatre system, a television room featuring a 52in flatscreen TV with a control box giving access to over a thousand of Trump's favourite movies, not to mention a bathroom with a circular shower. The lavish interior features golden fittings all over the plane, including the gold plated seat belt buckles in the main and guest cabins as well as a gold plated sink and faucets in the bathroom."
which hardly anybody thinks is a priority, or things like this
which cost us $4.5 billion each and are used not to protect Americans from harm (as we're told) but to protect the wealth, power and privilege of billionaires like Donald Trump from ordinary people like us around the world who don't think it's right that the 400 wealthiest Americans should own more wealth than half the American population or that, if present trends continue, the richest 1% of people in the world will by 2016 own more than all the rest of the world's people combined.
Multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers instead of repaired bridges and good transportation systems and good schools and the abolition of poverty and homelessness--that's what our ruling plutocracy wants. Our wealth is devoted to luxuries for the billionaire class or the military might of the billionaire class.
This wrongful allocation of social wealth is fundamentally due to the class inequality of our society and the fact that in order to maintain this class inequality the Big Money class imposes a fake democracy on us. The failure of our public transportation system this winter is just one more sign that we need an egalitarian revolution so that economic priorities can become what most people want them to be. See www.PDRBoston.org for details.
This article may be copied and posted on other websites. Please include all hyperlinks.