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Perceptions of safety on different transportation modes. Green bar = more safe. Blue bar = the same. Orange bar = less safe. Source: Urban Mobility Trends from COVID-19

by James A. Bacon

We are taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming about the culture wars to highlight a more traditional topic: government dysfunction. In so doing, we shall contrast the flailing, failing response of a quasi-governmental entity, the Washington Metro, with the proactive, enterprising response of a private toll road operator, Transurban, to the challenge of epidemic-induced declines in traffic.

The Washington Metro, an independent authority governed by a board of directors appointed by three states and the federal government, is a train wreck. For years the commuter-rail and bus system was plagued by maintenance backlogs, a toxic workplace, frequent accidents, deteriorating on-time service, and declining ridership. Then the epidemic hit, and people found it impossible to maintain social distance. Ridership was down 85% in July compared to the same month in 2019 which was down from previous years.

Ridership on the Silver line in Fairfax County is so sparse that it is now practicable for would-be rapists to assault people on trains. Last month a 21-year-old man sexually assaulted a woman who, with her child, was the only other rider in the car. The woman did manage to escape the train at East Falls Church Station, but it wont bode well for ridership if the public concludes that riding the train is on a par with picking up random hitch-hikers.

Metro has kept the lights on this year thanks to $767 million in federal coronavirus relief funding. But unless Congress approves another round of bail-outs, Metro officials say they may have to cover a $200 million budget shortfall by cutting back capital spending, freezing vacancies, and cutting service all of which aggravate the underlying problems that drive riders away. Only 25% of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority revenues came from fares. Almost all of the rest came from state-, federal- and local-government taxpayers.

When Metro fails, riders suffer and taxpayers take the hit.

Contrast that with Transurban, the toll road concessionaire for the Washington Beltway, Interstate 95, and Interstate 395. Transurban, an Australian company which owns toll roads and infrastructure projects around the world, took a $111 million loss in fiscal 2020. The company had taken a huge bet that increasing traffic in Northern Virginia (and Australia) would boost revenues from its dynamically priced express lanes.

Traffic on the 95, 395 and 495 Express Lanes hit a low in April when it declined 80% according to the Washington Post. Through mid-June, average daily traffic was still about 60% of pre-pandemic levels.

Now, guess how big of a bail-out Transurban is asking for.

Oh, its not asking for a bail-out. So, the answer is zero. Taxpayers are not on the hook for the companys massive decline in traffic and loss in revenue.

You see, Transurban is managing the company with a multi-decadal perspective, it is diversified, not dependent upon a single revenue stream, and it has access to private equity markets. Indeed, last month the company announced that it intended to sell a financial stake in its U.S. toll roads because it wants to strengthen its balance sheet during the COVID-19 epidemic and have enough cash on hand to bid on new projects.

Transurban has one other advantage over Metro. As the shutdown has eased, riders have returned more quickly to roads and highways than to Metro. One likely reason is, as the chart from a recent Transurban research report indicates (shown above), people are far more likely to feel safe in cars and motorcycles than in mass transit or in (Uber, Lyft, etc.) Exclude the motorcycles, and Id bet that the perception of safety would be a lot higher for just cars.

The long-term threat to Metro and toll roads alike is that more people will work from home. A high percentage of the Washington-area workforce is employed by occupations that can telecommute, and the COVID-19 epidemic has proven that distance working is a viable option for many. More telecommuters means fewer commuters, which means fewer customers for both METRO and toll roads.

If I had to bet who will adapt better to this profoundly adverse trend, Id lay my money on Transurban. Metro, a permanent ward of the state, has defied all reform efforts, and there is no sign that anything will change.

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Metro vs. Transurban in the Age of COVID - Bacon's Rebellion

Middle-class squabbling over statues and outdated anthems only serves to fill up the political discourse with meaningless hot air and to perpetuate a system that keeps them comfortable and the working-classes quiet.

The moralising rhetoric of our betters has always been with us if you are working class in Britain. The Poor Law of 1834 laid down that narrative, distinguishing not between need but between culture, behaviour and a moral judgment of character this was the original culture war. The plight of the working class under capitalism, discussed by their betters.

Culture wars have not gone away, they have progressed into other areas of family and social life and once again seem quite fashionable amongst the middle class. However, the culture wars of today are as confused and full of prejudice as they ever were.

The original culture war judged a man in retirement worthy of alms if he had been of good character his whole life and worked hard, despite a system that made that impossible through scarce decent paid local work. What man would not be forced to steal if he or his family were hungry? Yet at the same time an unmarried woman with children would be undeserving and her children inherited her shame. We have come a long way from those judgments, havent we? From the days when we judged peoples beliefs, actions, and justifications as deserving or undeserving?

Yet I see the contemporary culture wars breaking out everywhere and taking up so much political and social space there is barely room for anything else. They are again de rigeur amongst the elites, but those that have neither the time nor the inclination to stand in moral judgement of each other, seeing the world as they do from the level of making ends meet, do not involve themselves.

In the spaces where the chattering classes congregate social media, news media and political talk shows talking heads jostle and shout at each other in a never-ending battle of outrage. Im on the sidelines watching these culture wars, despite the combatants best efforts to try and get me to pick a side because I speak and write about society as I see it as a sociologist. I may be a sociologist, but I am a working-class woman first. I am not fighting the culture war I am fighting the class war.

Culture wars are great for the middle class. It leaves the warriors feeling relevant when in truth most are not. They fight daily battles over words to ancient anthems, and whether or not wearing a red poppy means you are a fascist. They argue over whether or not statues should be pulled down and who gets to decide what is funny and what is not.

The culture warriors tribally scream at each other for flagellating too much or not at all about their white privilege. Nothing is more important to them than the outrage they feel at whatever thing they are outraged about at that moment.

But as these culture wars rage across social media and people scream until they almost have coronaries over issues they knew nothing about yesterday, there can be serious consequences amongst the screaming. People can lose livelihoods and jobs culture wars morph into cancel culture, where, amid the noise and heat, a vindictiveness moves in, whereby any side can alert employers of abhorrent behaviour.

During their high-pitched tantrums, warriors use smartphones as artillery in this cultural conflict. Videos of red angry faces and screen-grabs of profanity-laced arguments can be taken and sent to workplaces.

Culture war sleuths, self-trained in online snooping, dig into social media accounts with the sole intent of finding out where someone works in order to complain about them to their boss. These contemporary Miss Marples wearing this seasons Mac lipstick and the Hercule Poirots wearing a Series 6 Apple watch are all out there, waiting to ruin somebodys life at the push of a button.

While the middle class conduct their culture wars and column inches are filled by the latest battle, the real war is raging, the only war that I acknowledge, the class war. Let me explain. Today in Britain there are millions of people who are unemployed and this number is growing sharply. Our welfare system has been constructed and shaped continuously as a source of shame and punishment for working class people thrown out of their jobs by a capitalist system.

The original culture war that measured our moral worth into rough and respectable was won a long time ago. Now we have rising homelessness and tens of thousands of families are living in rent arrears because of our broken and rigged housing system. There is nothing they can do about their situation private rents are too high, and social housing is scarce. Yet still, to be in rent arrears and to be homeless is the greatest shame and fear for a working-class family. What did and does it take for a family facing homelessness to be seen as undeserving?

Rather than judging an unfair system that (and yes, I will say it again) advantages the middle class and disadvantages the working class, those who benefit from it continue to thrive. They fill the political and social space with their moral judgments, measuring not only what we do, but also how we think on cultural scales to divide us up into neat piles of the deserving and the undeserving.

Fight your culture wars if you wish. Im fighting the only war that will emancipate the undeserving the Class War.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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The Culture War is nothing but a bourgeois distraction from the only war that really matters Class War - RT

One of the moments that resonated with me during the Vice Presidential debate was when Sen. Harris pointed out that both she and Joe Biden are people of faith. The Vice President's remarks, like comments I hear all of the time as a Democratic politician, suggest that faith, especially Christianity, is somehow incompatible with my politics.

I was raised Catholic, and for the last several years have been a member of a United Methodist congregation that is part of the Reconciling Ministries Network. In my religion we learn to treat others as we want to be treated, to serve others with humility and to take care of our neighbors (even when they don't look like us).

The culture wars, especially the reductive way that our debates about the government's role in reproductive healthcare decisions play out, have obscured the fact that there are people of many faiths serving the public as Democrats and Republicans. I've never thought it was politically advantageous to talk much about my faith, but I sure find a lot of strength, fellowship and wisdom worshipping, singing and taking my daughter to St. Paul's.

I was once asked by a neighbor who is a conservative Christian, surprised to see me playing music with the church band in the park, "How can you be Christian and be a Democrat?" My response was "I don't see how you could be anything else." This election shouldn't be about reducing people, with all of their complexity or the issues, with all of the nuances we should be able to explore, to tight little labels that set "us" against "them".

Rep. Mike McCarthy

St. Albans

Excerpt from:
Don't use religion to pit us against each other - St. Albans Messenger

For complex historical reasons, Federal employees dont get much love.

Republicans already had begun their war on expertise nearly 90 years ago, when they condemned the New Deal for being run by distant bureaucrats. Joseph McCarthy made a career accusing those bureaucrats of being Soviet spies. George Wallace demagogued that they were pointy-headed intellectuals who couldnt park a bicycle straight.

This calumny has reached a peak with Trump. Federal employees are either denizens of the Swamp or agents of the Deep State conspiring with George Soros against Real Murrica. Republicans have now reached the point where they think they can demolish the federal government, fulfilling Grover Norquists dream of making it small enough to drown in the bathtub.

Yet somehow Republican officials also believe their voting base will continue to get their Social Security checks delivered, their Medicare claims processed, and their doublewides promptly repaired by FEMA after theyre knocked off their cinder blocks by a hurricane or tornado. Magically, it seems, the work will get done without anyone to do it.

An honest, dedicated, professional, and apolitical civil service is a necessary adjunct to competent and humane governance. What happens when its rejected is evidenced by the number of COVID deaths in the United States that might have been avoided if not for the Trump regimes sabotage of previous CDC guidance and denigration and the muzzling of government health experts.

History is a reliable guide to this contention. The German civil service of the 1920s, a hangover from Imperial Germany, was generally hostile to Weimar democracy. That's why it happily complied with Hitlers orders to fire Jewish employees and coordinate (gleichschalten) its policies with those of the Nazi Party. Administrators, statisticians, and employees of the state railway cheerfully scheduled the delivery of human cargoes to the death camps. They became willing desk murderers.

The French civil service, riven by culture wars since the Dreyfus Affair, on the whole submitted readily to the demands of the German occupation, rounding up Jews and dissidents. Its avatar might be Maurice Papon, a career police bureaucrat whose opportunistic infamy did not end with the deportation of Jews to their deaths, but extended to torture and massacre during the Algerian War of the fifties and sixties.

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The Danish civil service, by contrast, generally retained its human decency and upheld national solidarity with the citizens it served. A higher percentage of resident Jews survived the war than in any other country the Germans occupied, partly because the civil service, in collaboration with the Danish people, helped them escape to Sweden.

We can count on a near-certainty that Trump will attempt, both before and after the election, to maintain a death-grip on power by foul means. It may come as an effort to use federal law enforcement to interfere with election preparations, balloting, and vote-counting. We have seen indications of this already.

If a loss at the polls is plainly evident, he may try to sabotage the machinery of federal agencies, destroy or alter documents to hide evidence of criminality, or retaliate against persons in or out of government. He may even use compliant armed agencies like ICE (which lately seems to believe it works for Trump, rather than the country), or mercenary groups such as those run by Erik Prince to launch an insurrection as prelude to a declaration of martial law.

Accordingly, Joe Biden must make a major speech directly addressed to all federal employees, including the military and those employed by U.S. corporations like the Postal Service. It must make these points:

Therefore, Biden must there make the following clear in no uncertain terms: We know exactly what you in the Trump regime are capable of; we will not be caught by surprise or react timidly. Those who keep true faith with the Constitution and the laws of the United States have nothing to fear; those who abuse their authority will receive swift and certain removal, punishment, and disgrace.

And that includes you, Donald Trump. President Ford may have had other ideas about the criminal acts of his predecessor. I assure the American people my administration will uphold the words engraved on the Supreme Court building: equal justice under law.

Read the original here:
A Modest Proposal to Prevent Sabotage by the Trump Regime - Common Dreams

On a recent visit to the Albertinum museum in Dresden, the guestbook was flipped open to an entry that read: You have three rooms dedicated to Gerhard Richter Take some more works out of the depot!!

Such emphatic demands from the public are common occurrences here. In the six years since its newest director, Hilke Wagner, arrived, the guestbook has been filled with weekly criticism (and occasional praise), while the museum fields further feedback via phone calls, emails, and in community meetings.

Richterwho has a dubious reputation in his birth city both for defecting to West Germany from what was then a part of the German Democratic Republic, as well as for his abstract paintings, a frequently snubbed art form in the former Eastis one recurring subject.But the public has an even longer list of grievances about what should and shouldnt be on view.

The museums criticshave also been casting doubt on whether Wagner, who is a West German,has been programming East German art appropriately, or whether she is suited for her role at all. Among the museums more vocal challengers is the far-right Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), which has honed in on culture as a key battleground in the former Eastern states, a region that is seeing a resurgence of far-right extremism. In Dresden last November, the city declared a Nazi emergencyand the Albertinum has become a cultural flashpoint.

Performance zu Ehren von Erika Hoffmann und ihrer Sammlung am 31.08., 01.09. und 02.09.2018 in Albertinum und Kupferstichkabinett von Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Oliver Killig.

The museum serves in many ways as Dresdens memory bank, reminding residents of the citys complicated and painful history.The East German riverside city was once a glimmering pre-war cultural capital, and in many ways it still is: Its state collections boast a formidable holding of art, ranging from antiquity to modern and contemporary masterpieces. Once a former treasure trove of Saxonian kings, it fell under Nazi party control in the mid 1930s, before being badly damaged during World War II, alongside the entirety of Dresden, a pain that still resonates with many who live there.

Much of the collection was recovered in the postwar years, and the museum was a vital player in establishing and presenting East German artistic canonswith the Albertinum fashioning itself as a documenta of the East, as Wagner puts it, throughout the 1960s to 1990s. Today, Wagner and her team are trying to forge a way forward while keeping those aspects of its past alive. This includes presenting a more pluralistic view of East German art history than some traditionalists might like.

General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker, with civil rights activist Angela Davis in East Berlin in 1973. The Albertinum will open a show focused on the legacy of Angela Davis in East Germany on October 10 called 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis. Photo by Giehr/picture alliance via Getty Images.

This week, the museum opens a major group show, on October 10, which explores the political and symbolic power of the Black Power activist and philosopher Angela Davis, who was a hero in East Germany and embraced by the Communist nation. The show, 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis, seeks to revise what Davis represents to both East German and German identity on the whole.

We do notwant to completely shock people or drive them away, says the shows curator, Kathleen Reinhardt, but rather take something that is here and that people hold dear, and then look at it more closely, contextualize it, and then unfold it in a different way. Reinhardt, who is from the former East, is working with archival material as as well as commissions and works by contemporary artists including Arthur Jafa, Slavs and Tatars, and Senga Nengudi that address themes in Daviss work.

The Albertinum frequently pairs its permanent collection with contemporary works: A bright painting by Kehinde Wiley stands out in a hall of stately pre-modern portraits. Elsewhere, Paris-based Kapwani Kiwangas draped fabric sculptures draw on the pastel palettes in German painter Max Slevogts exoticized 1914 portraits of his travels in British-occupied Egypt.

Another recent exhibition, The Medea Insurrection. Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain, which closed in 2019, spotlighted work by female artists that went beyond the bounds of state-supported art in the Eastern Bloc at the time, including figures like Geta Brtescu, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and others who did not fit neatly into the canon of Soviet-era art, which officially championed figurative realism.

Arriving here in Dresden, I had been fascinated by the variety of East German art that was still to be discovered, Wagner said, referencing performance, film, or abstract works that were not championed during the German Democratic Republic (GDR). But this, I learned, was not the kind of GDR art people wanted to see.

Kapwani Kiwanga Oriental Studies (2019) on view at the Albertinum around 1914 paintings by Max Slevogt. Courtesy the Albertinum.

Soon after Wagner joined the museum, in 2014, she began receiving threats and hate mail in increasingly strong wording. People had the feeling that I, as a Western German, was attempting to explain to them what good East German art wasthey felt that was an arrogant gesture, she says.That same year, outside the museum walls, the anti-immigration group Pegida began their weekly anti-immigrant, anti-refugee demonstrations near the museum.

Not long after, the AfD became more vocal in its criticism of the museums new program.In 2017, the political party submitted an official request for the museum to count the number of East German works of art it had on view. (The museum complied with the ensuing government mandate and found that, in fact, there was actually more East German artworksthree times morethan the party had thought.)

People who are fighting for Eastern German art are not always right-wing thinkersit is merely a strategy that the AfD is using to get to the East German people, Wagner says.

To try to work through some of the publics concerns, the museum held a community forum in 2018 and 2019 titledWe Need to Talk.The series was intense and heated.

Panel discussion on how to handle East German art in the museum, a part of the talk series We Need to Talk. Courtesy Albertinum.

First, the Western Germans stormed out shouting, and then the Eastern Germans stormed out and smashed the door behind them, Wagner recalls. But, on the whole, she found the project constructive. We didnt necessarily reach a point of agreement, but we cleared up misconceptions, she says. We learned a lot from each other.

The public feedback made clear that anarrative of suffering is often what qualifies art as East German, Reinhardt saysworks that seem to say that people suffered under socialism. They did not want the museum to challenge any simplistic victim narrative with additional nuance and context, Wagner adds.

So the museum strove to find novel solutions: When the public asked for paintings that showed the Dresden bombings, it complied, but paired them with anti-war works by Maria Lassnig and Marlene Dumas.

Supporters of the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident) demonstrating in front of the Albertinum museum in Dresden during a visit by Angela Merkel. Photo: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/AFP/Germany OUT.

Most former East German citizens will recall the state-sponsored Free Angela Davis postcards, petitions, and marches, which demanded the activists freedom after she was jailed in New York in 1972 on terrorism charges. Shortly after her release, Davis visited East Germany, where she was received as a revolutionary hero, greeted by 50,000 cheering citizens.

The show 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis,which will open at the Albertinums Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, examines the unlikely role that the leftist cultural icon plays in todays divided Germany. It considers the principles she stood for and their push and pull against East German identity today. Even as Dresden has emerged as a cradle for the resurgent far-right, Davis has remained an admired figure.

People here on the extreme right would not dare to attack Davis, because she is a hero, so a really strange and highly complex situation occurs in terms of the mechanisms of appropriation and racism, says Reinhardt, who is curating the show. Alongside the exhibition, which draws a line between the rise of socialism after the war to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the museum will also host workshops and events focused on racism.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany first secretary Erich Honecker shakes hands with civil rights activist Angela Davis in 1972 in East Berlin. Photo: German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv).

The exhibition, which includes archival material from the Davis campaign in East Germany as well as new commissions by contemporary international artists, aimsto destabilize a history of socialist glory, Reinhardt says.

The Other was only welcomed as external, special, foreign, as a guest in this uncritical white imaginary that shapedand still shapesEast Germany, and maybe German identity as a whole, says Reinhardt.

These themes dovetail with other initiatives at the museum, including an ongoing effort to diversify the works in its collection. Despite the museums well-established prestige and curatorial might, Wagner has been struggling to find affordable East German art, a category that is rapidly increasing in price.

Exhibition view of 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis. Courtesy the Albertinum.

Its terrible becauselarge international institutions are now acquiring East German art, and we are out of the race, Wagner says. We are not talking about a single Expressionist work of art that is worth millions. With $300,000 or $400,000, we could acquire quite a lot of works that would diversify the collection.

But foundations, at least for the time being, do not seem particularly interested in taking up the cause and aiding the museums collecting efforts. We have to preservefor the next generations a more multi-perspective view of the arts from the former country, Wagner says, referring to the GDR. As of now, the collectionhas a large concentration of official art from the period, but that excludes many female or dissident artists.

Despite the challenges Wagner faces, she says shes encouraged about the direction of the museum and the potential for learning within its walls.

For East Germans, art was always something really existential, she says. It still reverberates today. Here in Dresden, you can really reach all kinds of social communities, attitudes, and generations with art, she adds. This is a really big chance for us.

1 Million Roses for Angela Davis is on view from October 10, 2020 until January 24. 2021.

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With Right-Wing Extremism on the Rise, the Albertinum Museum Has Become an Epicenter of Germanys New Culture Wars - artnet News