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Death, Cars, and Taxes

I'd like to flesh out some connections between two topics from this week's ETS! -- car culture and abuse of taxes. The issue of suburban sprawl provides a convenient nexus, but this kind of analysis could be used for lots of other facets of the problem.

American car-dependence is connected in pretty straightforward ways to residential development patterns. If lots of people live in new, sprawling townhouse developments built far from public transit systems, and if those people work in distant urban areas, and if they can't buy groceries anywhere near their shiny new prefab townhouses, then they'll spend a lot more time (and gas) driving around.

When lawyers and policy wonks and government bureaucrats assess situations like this, they tend to default to some economic assumptions. It goes roughly like this: if people are free to negotiate and contract with the goods / money they have, the process will move all goods to their highest use-value, and ideal distribution will result. This raises some obvious social and environmental concerns, but even if we proceed with this kind of thinking, there are some big problems. (This is where the tax question comes in.)

Sprawl development is expensive. And a huge chunk of the costs are not borne by the developers or the people who buy townhouses. Someone has to pay for the miles of new roads, sewage connections, schools, and service provisions that make far-flung developments liveable. Typically, municipal governments (i.e. local taxpayers) get stuck with this. Getting a little more complicated, tax breaks for mortgages, depressed car and gas prices, and assumptions that government should deal with (i.e. pay for any redress of) resulting environmental harms all create effective federal subsidies for this sort of development. People who chose to buy into these developments are not paying the full costs -- taxpayers are. The idea that this situation is brought on by freely contracting economic actors ignores much of the financial picture.

No one likes to think about tax structures and government spending. It's complicated and boring. But the car culture that makes all of our lives a little bit uglier has everything to do with public policy, hidden subsidies, and how our tax dollars are being spent.

--Daphne Keller, via e-mail

Trucking Culprits

In response to Valerie Jean's article about traffic dangers:

The truck driver involved in the Amtrak crash may have been just as reckless as the article suggests. But before making general statements about truck drivers, it is important to remember that the real culprits are often the trucking companies. Drivers' pay or employment security can be made dependent on whether or not they arrive at a particular destination at a particular time. Drivers can be sent on lengthy routes with inadequate rest time.

Yes, there are individually reckless drivers. However, never forget the role of corporate bottom lines in creating highway hazards. If you don't believe me, contact Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, and they can tell you all kinds of horror stories.

Peter Cole, Data Manager, New England Conservatory of Music, via e-mail

Learned Something

Thanks for Maria Tomchick's vitriolic take on the state legislature and our gov (Sinking Ship, April 28). She nicely hacked through that mile-deep fog bank known as state politics. And I thought Gary Locke meant it when he said he was the education governor.

Kent Miller, via e-mail

Thugs With Calculators

Dear ETS!,

Couldn't help extrapolating from your article this past week regarding the New Jersey state police official who was canned because of his remark regarding the tendency of minorities to be most easily suspected of drug crimes. It just had to make me wonder if anyone has ever noticed any statistical pattern indicating that it's mostly middle and upper middle class white people working in offices who are likely to embezzle or commit big-money fraud (and to then explain away their actions by claiming some sort of psychological stress, or by saying they weren't aware that whatever it was might reasonably be deemed at least improper if not illegal).

Kerry Canfield, Portland, OR

P.S. Of course, the possibly statistically demonstrable criminal tendencies of middle- and upper middle-class white people might be attributable merely to the fact that such people are the most likely to wind up in such positions of power as seem sufficient to grant them the liberty of committing such criminal acts. (Don't fail to note the interesting color component of that persistent euphemism "white-collar crime.")

And Mercer Island, Too

I like the reprint of that excellent piece on driving while black by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn. It would have been even better if you included information about driving while black in our own backyard: The harassment of black drivers on Mercer Island by police which was exposed not by our own local press (well duh!), but the New York Times.

Hopefully this "American Dilemma" will bring about an investigation from the Justice department and bring about broad institutional changes in how police departments treat minorities, particularly law abiding ones.

--Peter, via e-mail

**22 It's No Excuse

I'm not from the US.

Are you negros?

--Allan Speedy, New Zealand, via e-mail

**42 Buy Our Newspaper?

In the 4/28/99 issue, editor Maria Tomchick goes out of her way to redbait the socialist organizations that participated in the April 22 march and rally "U.S./NATO Out of Yugoslavia." She accuses socialist speakers of "sloganeering" for taking an anti-imperialist stand and pointing out the role that oil profits play in this war. She laments: " Why has this issue been left to the socialist Left in Seattle?" What a disservice to the Left, which took a leadership role to help build a true coalition effort, and put money, time, and labor into making this event a success.

What an insult to everyone else who participated in the rally. Maria ignored the broad array of speakers who represented the numerous political persuasions active in the coalition that organized the event: labor activists, feminists, pacifists, Serbian community representatives, anarchists (some of whom work for Eat the State!), and passionately concerned unaffiliated individuals.

She sneers that left organizations "trotted out their patriarchs for the open mike." It's sexist to define the Left as male and ignore the women who spoke. For example, Radical Women, an autonomous feminist group affiliated with the Freedom Socialist Party, is only alluded to in passing as "an affiliated sub-group." Yet, I spoke for RW early in the program. Many people came up and thanked me for the analysis my socialist feminist group provided about what is going on in Kosovo. Why does Maria fixate on male leftists? Is it really so hard to acknowledge women's leadership?

Maria's editorial is a disservice to the whole anti-war movement in Seattle. Her comments do nothing to build the movement--rather the opposite. I invite everyone seriously interested in stopping the devastating effects of U.S. and NATO military forces to work with Seattle's anti-war coalition. For information on the next meeting, call 206-547-0952.

--Anne Slater, Seattle Radical Women Organizer, Seattle

Dear Editor of ETS!,

In response to Maria Tomchick's nasty little piece taking the left to task for playing a leading role in the anti-war rally of April 22; Why is she so bent on presenting socialists as rhetoric-filled and irrelevant? Isn't it grand that every left group in this city opposes the war? Isn't it a good thing that we took the time to help organize a rally of protest and spoke at the mike, especially when, as Maria points out, European democratic socialist politicians are on the war bandwagon?

Wars polarize people. Many moderates have indeed bought the NATO line or been intimidated by media depictions of the Serbs as evil monsters. Those who oppose the bloodshed get radicalized and look for progressive activists to work with and join. Socialists, unlike the Democrats and some peace activists, are not confused by the U.S. propaganda on this war. They know damn well that NATO's intervention has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. And they're speaking out to that effect.

Maria is more concerned with discrediting the Left to potential supporters than in helping to stop the war. Shame on her.

--Luma Nichol, Freedom Socialist Party representative to Seattle's anti- war coalition

G.P. replies: I was only able to attend part of the 4/22 rally, but the reports I got from a number of people matched exactly Maria's complaints. Representative was a lament from a friend who has been an anti-war activist since Vietnam, who invited a dozen people from her church to the rally. She was deeply embarrassed she had, because of the--well, the irrelevant sloganeering. She was certain none of her friends would be back. With all due respect, the problem isn't the presence or the leadership of socialist groups and analysis. It's the use of language and presentation that is alienating to people who aren't already part of the choir.

Instead of welcoming introspection for these difficult questions, critiques like Maria's are "nasty" and "red-baiting." That's exactly wrong; they're a wake-up call, and we need more of them. I'm glad the socialist groups are out there when so many aren't, and applaud their dedication--but I don't think it's automatically red-baiting to question why people aren't listening. At the present rate, next years's anti-war rallies in Seattle will consist of five proud members of the Left, selling each other their newspapers. That's not an occasion for pride; it's pathetic. And everyone, including Left parties, needs to get serious about how to avoid that fate.