Last week, the Martin Luther King County Labor Council voted, by a relatively close margin, to expel the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild.  The Council stated that there “can be no justice without racial justice” and found SPOG guilty of failing to “be working to dismantle racism in their institution and society at large.”  The Council, like a growing number of witnesses to the deliberate, casual murder of George Floyd, asserted that we can no longer plausibly refer to police officers like Derek Chauvin as bad apples.  We must understand them as the fruit of the malignant and resilient seeds that were planted as long ago as the third or fourth tobacco crop in Virginia. 

This assertion is of course true, as an unrelenting avalanche of victim testimony, eyewitness accounts, commission reports, the reporting of celebrated writers like Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Ida B. Wells, and Sonia Sanchez, and now close to three decades of cell phone videos all make clear.  That it has taken this long for the polls to finally show a majority of Americans believing that racism is systemic is a testament to the power of white supremacist ideology.  But now as we begin to make new laws and draw new boundaries within the labor movement, we should take a moment to consider what it really means to call racism institutional and remember why our institutions have needed their racism.  

Race has become such a naturalized part of U.S. culture and
politics that the labor origins of
racial division have been all but
forgotten. References to slavery as
some version of the nation’s “original sin” in our curricula and our
popular media (like the 1619 Project) leave most
Americans believing that racial
hierarchies arrived in the
Americas fully codified instead of
inchoate and evolving.  The early English capitalist exploitation of the fertile land of the New World was carried out by laborers imported from both Europe and Africa, and those laborers were subject to varying degrees of indentured servitude and bondage. But those degrees were not initially or only determined by race. Both Africans and Europeans were sometimes freed after serving their terms of servitude and working conditions were equally brutal for both. Those brutal conditions and the lack of distinction between Black and White workers led to labor solidarity across racial lines in the numerous workers rebellions from 1660 to 1680 (the most significant of which was Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676).

Recognizing that hyper-exploitation of a large working class that perceived itself as a class with common conditions and interests created the conditions for perpetual resistance and rebellion, the owning class began making moves to divide workers. From 1680 to 1710, the notion of whiteness begins to appear in English colonial law and custom as a property right for the propertyless. White workers are afforded privileges that no enslaved person has and are told that even free Blacks have no rights that even the lowliest white worker is bound to respect. At the same time, hereditary chattel slavery for Black Africans becomes firmly institutionalized. Whiteness and White privilege become the tools deployed to convince European workers that because of their skin color they have more in common with the owners on the veranda sipping mint juleps than they do with the Africans with whom they share laboring and living conditions.

The alchemy of turning genuine class differences into false racial ones (what the historian Theodore Allen calls the “invention of the white race”) has proven to be an extraordinarily effective social control device across U.S. history. It is certainly one of the main reasons why U.S. working class struggle and upheaval have never metamorphosed into long-term working class political organization. White working class acceptance of Black enslavement, the failure of northern White labor to make common cause with southern newly freed Black labor during Reconstruction, organized labor’s collaboration with Jim Crow and New Deal racism in the early 20th century, and the distance between White labor and the Black Freedom movement in the latter part of the century are all testament to the power of White supremacy to keep working people pitted against each other.  

Ruling class production of racial narratives has continuously recreated and reinforced this division across U.S. history. The myth of the Black rapist led to the White working class Ku Klux Klan and lynching. Racist suspicion of Black workers virulently infected the U.S. labor movement in the early 20th century and derailed any genuine labor solidarity. Despite the fact that affirmative action disproportionately benefited White people, the narratives surrounding those programs always colored them Black and routinely presented working class Black people, not ruling class people, as the biggest impediment to working class White people getting ahead.  Since at least the middle of the 20th century, race baiting (from Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” to George Bush’s Willie Horton ad to Bill Clinton’s Sister Soulja attack to Barack Obama’s disavowal of his preacher to Donald Trump’s effervescent racial stream of consciousness) has been virtually de rigeur in U.S. presidential campaigns as a way to keep White working class voters looking away from the actual arrangements of power and voting against their own material interests.

So it is not just coincidence that virulent, bone-deep racism has become an essential part of police culture.  The myth of the Thin Blue Line that separates the civilized from the bestial is almost inconceivable without race–people with an unshakeable faith in their racial superiority make the best overseers.  The police are the labor hired by the owning class to keep the laboring classes divided and incapable of becoming a revolutionary class.  It is not an accident that modern police forces have their origins in slave patrols in the south and anti-immigrant union busting in the north—the black and white sides of the same labor control coin. 

It is thus an ironic moment in U.S. labor history when cops start to form unions in the 1950s and 60s.  The perceived need for collective bargaining suggests an understanding that the police do not share the position of the owning class that employs them and at least a tacit recognition that their status is not all that different from that of the communities they menace.  In this context, it is not difficult to understand why lax oversight and weak disciplinary procedures are so important to the police at the bargaining table.  They understand, as police historian Sam Mitrani has put it, that their job is “to protect wage-labor capitalism from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.”  They also understand that when that protection becomes too violent or exposes the fundamentally racist arrangements of U.S. capitalism, their bosses are not going to have their backs.  And ultimately, their bosses understand this too.  Every time we hear the ridiculous claim that unions have too much political power, we should remember that every bargaining table has two sides and that capital always has more power than labor.  If the owners were genuinely interested in police accountability to anything other than wealth and property, police contracts would look a lot different.   

So the vote of the King County Labor Council to expel the police cuts a lot of different ways.  It is, all at the same time, an attempt by organized labor to atone for and exorcise its own long and deep racism, a recognition that those hired to bust labor shouldn’t necessarily be welcome in the house of labor, and yet another instance of labor taking the bosses’ bait and dividing against itself.  Kicking out the police will have a variety of effects within the labor movement, but one thing we can be sure of is that it will probably not affect police behavior.  It’s not a surprise that the vote was close—the equivalent of a 5-4 decision.

The coming noise around police reform may bring some small adjustments—more jail for the obviously murderous, some demilitarization, and some rerouting of money away from police and toward social services.  It will also undoubtedly bring repeated assaults on collective bargaining rights.  What it will probably not bring is any fundamental rearrangement of the conditions that make the police so frightening in so many communities.  That will not come until we change who the police actually work for.  Genuine “community policing” means not just hiring people from the community but also empowering the community to bargain with police and hold them accountable.  This kind of change is far more likely to originate with organized labor than with government. 

The police kill about a thousand people in the U.S. every year.  They kill Black people at more than twice the rate, per capita, than they kill white people, which is a testament to centuries of deliberate racist division.  Race divides the dead, but the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum unites them.  It is in the labor community that any real conversation about fundamental police reform has the best chance of succeeding.  And that conversation should probably focus less on how racist the police are and more on how they’re killing their own.   

A couple of weeks ago, the white smoke emerged from the governor’s office, signaling that the cabal of budget negotiators had come to an understanding on the size of the budget box and all that was left was to fill in the various line items. Everyone expected the House Democrats to cave on their last progressive tax proposal (capital gains) and the Senate Republicans to let some loophole closures outweigh their new business tax breaks by at least enough to balance a meet-in-the-middle budget.

But then the Republican leaders took the deal back to their caucus, where apparently all the crazy hasn’t been tamped down yet.  Their colleagues told them to turn right around and go remind David Schumacher and the rest of the world that they still have a two-vote majority in the smaller of the legislative chambers, so they expect to get every damn thing they want.  There will be no loophole left behind.

Since then, it’s been radio silence.

That silence has echoed the larger silence that has grown louder every day: the silence of the corporate community on the issue of taxes and revenue.  There have been no one day walkouts from the executive suites.  Groups like the Washington Roundtable and the AWB have remained mum with the confidence that real power is always heard, even when it doesn’t speak.

As we’ve pointed out before here at the blog, Washington is exactly the bipartisan and bi-polar state that these folks built.  The Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle swells can cloak themselves in the progressive garb of gay marriage, legal weed, background checks, and the dream act while at the same time riding herd on an increasingly regressive society of haves and have nots.  For a long time now in Olympia, the schizo business agenda has been invest in education and transportation but don’t raise any revenue to pay for those investments.  The financier-driven policies of accumulation and privatization have stretched the middle class and the public infrastructure that the upper crust depends on for social stability and the rest of us just depend on to the breaking point.  The cracks are getting so big that the defenders of the status quo are starting to look and sound like those rich people in California who feel it’s wildly unfair to ask them to turn off their fountains and stop watering their putting greens while the rest of the state bakes.

Meanwhile, the roar against the silence of the privileged is getting louder and louder.  Forty thousand teachers have walked out.  (And for those of you still clinging to the idea that this was the work of union bosses, not teachers, enough already.  Half the teachers in the state don’t walk out because a Svengali union leader told them to, they walk out because they’re fed up and disgusted.)  Poll after poll shows that big majorities of voters support those teachers.  More polls show that voters support a modest capital gains tax, both for the revenue and the fairness.

And now even The Seattle Times says it’s a good idea.  As our friend Goldy over at Horses Ass pointed out, “it’s pretty stunning to see” such a heretofore anti-tax editorial board “state their support for the tax so bluntly.”  And it’s hard to imagine that they would be stating it so bluntly if at least some of the silent business elites weren’t tacitly giving them the OK.

So here’s hoping that the Republican refusal to compromise has stiffened the Democrats’ spines and made them also less willing to compromise.  From the day they introduced their tax package, the House Democrats have steadfastly claimed they have the votes to pass it.  So maybe it’s time they just went ahead and did that, made a few headlines of their own, and brought the state tax code just a little bit closer to its inevitable leap into the twenty-first century.

Hell, most people usually blame Republicans for government shutdowns anyway.

Yet all these similarities fade into an irrelevant background when we focus on the clarifying foreground of the budgets they have written. Then the starkest and perhaps most important difference between Representative Hunter and Senator Hill becomes clear.

One believes in public infrastructure and the other one doesn’t.

The budget proposal authored by Senator Hill does everything that Representative Hunter says it does: relies on one-time transfers and pipe dreams of marijuana money, makes cuts to local government and social services and more cuts masquerading as “efficiencies,” violates collective bargaining law and rubs more salt in the wounds of teachers and public employees, and makes the most regressive tax system in the country even more regressive with a bunch of new tax breaks.

The fig leaf that Senator Hill and other Republicans have tried to put on their otherwise naked attempt to shrink public infrastructure is their plan to reduce tuition at our state’s colleges and universities. As we’ve mentioned before here at the blog, tuition has become a big time campaign issue and since the budgets from Governor Inslee and the Democratic House both freeze tuition, Senator Hill’s and his colleagues’ dreams of 2016 drive them to propose a 25% tuition reduction.

This proposal has given Senator Hill and his colleagues exactly what they wanted: a lot of slobbering media buzz—even blog hero and usually trenchant columnist Danny Westneat has been fooled into thinking that the Republicans are trying to put the public back in public higher education.

In a theoretical world where Washington state revenues were keeping up with the state’s economic growth, reducing tuition would be a great idea. In the world created by Senator Hill’s budget proposal, it’s simply a campaign headline covering up another way to starve public infrastructure.

Senator Hill and his colleagues have talked a lot about how they intend to “make the institutions whole” after the lost tuition revenue. But their budget proposal falls millions of dollars short of doing that and would require the universities to make cuts either to financial aid or other programs.  And all of the money they do add comes at the expense of other public infrastructure—cuts to the State Need Grant that would leave 33,000 eligible students still unable to attend college, cuts to the capital budget, cuts to state employee health care, and cuts to Temporary Aid to Needy Families.

But even if the Senate budget proposal did fully backfill the tuition cut, that would only bring our colleges and universities back to where they are now—49th in the country in total per student funding.  The Senate budget and its authors are content to let Washington’s public higher education limp along in the sub-basement into the foreseeable future. Students would pay a little less, but they would get a lot less—fewer classes, bigger classes, longer time to degree, less qualified professors, and generally crappier degrees. The long-term costs would far outweigh the short-term tuition relief.

When we get past the headlines and slogans, what the Senate budget gives us is unsustainability, a lot more public pain, and a higher education system that would, at best, remain at the bottom of the national heap.

Representative Hunter and Senator Hill have offered the state a very distinct choice. As we consider it, we should be careful not to mistake it for a choice about priorities or education. The negotiation taking place in Olympia right now is between one guy who believes in public infrastructure and another guy who doesn’t.

At the hearing a few days later, the usual suspects lined up as you would expect: the folks from education, social services, and health care testified once again that we need to raise revenue for starved public infrastructure and do something about the most regressive tax system in the country, while the business lobbyists showed up to tell us that a capital gains tax would surely be the end of life as we know it.  

But along with the Olympia regulars, there were also a handful of concerned citizens, people whose day job is not to testify in legislative committees, but who thought the issue was important enough to show up any way. Some were from the Nick Hanauer wing of the rich people’s caucus. They were among the few people well off enough of to actually be affected by a capital gains tax, and they said they would be happy to pay it, recognizing Washington’s desperate need for new revenue and a fairer tax structure. Others were regular people, none of whom would likely feel the bite of a capital gains tax, all of whom denounced the plan as an assault on Washington families, just like the radio ads.  

Noticeably absent were the rich folks who don’t want to pay the capital gains tax.  They’re probably the people paying for the ads. The ads that ominously claimed that the House Democrats have targeted 30,000 Washington families for ruin.  

Here at the blog, we’re fully sick of this and all the other talk about families. If we have to listen to one more piety about how government must live within its current income, like a real family does, or one more distortion about how a capital gains tax will hurt Washington families, we’re gonna puke.

The citizens of Washington are not a family. And if we were, and state legislators were our mommies and daddies, they would probably be in jail, for having failed to provide for their children to go to school, utterly neglecting their mentally ill children, and allowing their really rich children to live rent-free while their poor children paid all the bills.  

And it’s those really rich kids that would pay the capital gains tax. Thirty thousand families sounds like a lot until you remember that Washington has about 3 million families. And the one percent who would pay the tax wouldn’t even pay that much—1250 bucks for every 25 grand they make buying and selling stock.  So if your portfolio made a million dollars one year, you’d have to make do with the $950,000 you’d have left after the tax.  

The capital gains tax would pay for the schools that our parent legislators have neglected so badly they’re about to be thrown in the clink. Only rich people would pay it and they wouldn’t pay that much. And they wouldn’t pack up to leave to avoid it, because the eight other states that don’t have it aren’t the kinds of places that appeal to rich Washingtonians.  A capital gains tax would be a small step toward making the most regressive tax system in the U.S. a little bit fairer.  There’s really nothing bad about it.

That’s probably why the people who oppose it have to buy misleading ads that spew clichés about families to try to convince regular people to go testify against it. 

Republican State Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler took to the Senate Republican Caucus blog last week to try to put pressure on the House Democrats as they prepare to release their budget proposal. Sounding like a cross between Ward Cleaver and Batman, Senator Schoesler warns the House to “play by the rules,” and spells out what “we expect from an honest budget proposal.” It seems that the Majority Leader is unwilling to talk about any budget proposal from the House that doesn’t include all the tax bills needed to pay for it. He threatens that such a proposal will “keep us here well past our scheduled adjournment date.”

Senator Schoesler professes to care about rules and honesty, but he certainly doesn’t seem to have much use for consistency. On March 11, Senator Schoesler and all of his senate Republican colleagues (including budget chair Andy Hill, who Senator Schoesler name checks as his partner in demanding “honesty” from the Democrats) voted for SB 5954—a bill that does exactly what Senator Schoesler would forbid Democrats from doing.  

SB 5954 would reduce tuition at our state universities and colleges and promises to ante up the three or four hundred million dollars that would cost the institutions.  But it doesn’t say a word about where that money would come from. Both Senator Schoesler and Senator Hill spoke on the Senate floor to encourage their colleagues to vote for the bill and worry about where the money would come from later. All the speeches about responsibility and making sure the money is there to pay for something came from Democrats.  Senator Barbara Bailey, the Senate Higher Education Committee chair and SB 5954’s prime sponsor, along with Senators Schoesler and Hill, all sounded like New Deal Democrats as they righteously proclaimed that reducing tuition was The Right Thing To Do and were blithely unconcerned about how to pay for it.  

At this point, we might begin to worry that the years of proclaiming about bi-partisan majority coalitions have taken their toll and the Senate Majority Leader has become unable to remember from one day to the next whether he is a Republican or a Democrat. But fear not, gentle reader, it all makes sense as soon as we remember that the 2016 election season has already begun.  

When Senator Schoesler wags his finger at House Democrats about honesty and rules, what he really means is that he wants them to take votes that will allow Republicans in 2016 to say, “my opponent voted to raise your taxes.”  And when he waxes poetic about reducing tuition, what he really means is that he wants 2016 Republican candidates to be able to say, “I voted to lower tuition without raising taxes.” Apparently, this sort of thing works in elections.