Progressive indeed.
Does the city have jurisdiction over that bridge? In my experience Portland is mad quick to respond to requests to patch potholes. However, the city can’t currently do anything about some roads, like 82nd Ave, because that’s under state jurisdiction.
Sure, Chicago is pretty cheap. Housing costs are a lot lower than the west coast. Transit system is a lot better. But when you compared income taxes you didn’t mention the other way the state tax systems are quite different.
Yea, Seattle had a snow then ice event that lasted about a week in… 1995? about then. It was rough. Pretty much shut it down the whole week. That was the only time that happened in my 42 years. I think a similar thing did happen in the early 70’s.
There is one thing that makes dealing with snow and ice easier in Chicago: it is flat. Many Seattle/Portland streets become useless at levels of slipperyness that just slow you down in Chicago.
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I am reminded of a story about a neighborhood that hated paying taxes for streetlights. So they (somehow) opted out, collected money amongst themselves, and lit their neighborhood themselves.
The sick part is that it cost MORE than taxes would have, but at least they slept easier knowing they weren’t paying for anyone else’s light. Because, you know, some of those people would be undeserving.
If anyone could get me a link on this, I’d appreciate it.
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Barcelona isn’t an anarchist society, it’s the capital of a relatively autonomous regional government. They still have a city council and taxes and regulations and municipal services and all the other things you’d expect to find in any major city.
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Until as late as 1913, some US states had systems of corvée, where citizens could be drafted for a few days a year to work on maintenance of the public roads. (In virtually all localities that had it, a citizen could buy his way out of the obligation by paying a higher tax. No apology for ‘his’ - the rules almost universally applied only to males.)
The system went out of favour, not because it was involuntary servitude - so is a military draft, which has long been held not to violate the 13th Amendment - but because the quality of the work done was so poor.
It’s not clear that a system in which citizens can volunteer for such duty would be better or worse - but I bet that a minarchic system could be put in place wherein citizens did maintenance of way subject to standards of practice. It would even be popular with the “privatize everything” crowd, since they could pay crews to maintain the roads that they care about and let the poors walk on the dirt.
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I have lots (LOTS) of giant (GIANT!) potholes in the road in front of my house in my quiet east Bay Area neighborhood. They’re definitely very low on the cities priority list. I often think I should fill them. I haven’t yet, but I’m pretty sure anything I did would not be worse than the craters there now.
I can totally confirm that fixing holes of any kind can take an Anarchist months if not years.
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You might be trying to discredit our effort, but this is actually exactly why we do it: to move the goal posts.
At first they say “Anarchists are just some idealistic kids, they’ll never actually translate their ideas into action.”
And so we do, by mobilizing major disruptive protests and riots.
Then they say “Anarchists are just rowdy hooligans, they can break stuff but they can never build anything meaningful.”
And so we do, by creating programs to feed the hungry, shelter the abused, and fix the roads.
Then they say “Anarchists can build in small ways, but they’ll never build enough to solve these larger problems.”
And so we will.
Unlike other political movements, anarchists don’t seek to impress you with our master plan, or gain your loyalty by convincing you we can solve all your problems. Saying we haven’t fixed everything is not undermining us, it’s encouraging us, pointing the way. We must keep moving the goal posts and never stop, because freedom isn’t a destination, it’s a direction of travel.
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I"m afraid I have to agree. if you don’t do it right, it might make the road worse or even get someone hurt. same thing for roadside medical assistance.
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“We don’t think the city should exist; we are only limited by our capacity and our imaginations,” says PARC. “We aren’t asking permission, because these are our streets. They belong to the people of Portland, and the people of Portland will fix them.”
Isn’t that kind of what already happens? The city consists of the people of Portland. The city government, elected from and by those citizens, fixes potholes on their behalf. The people of Portland, in the form of citizens employed by that government, are the ones who fix them.
If the city government is corrupt or not doing their job, that’s one thing, but the quote above makes it sound like they think the “city” is some oppressive alien force that has no connection at all to Portland’s citizens. City government generally exists because people want actual experts in charge of things like fixing potholes, maintaining parks, writing death certificates, etc. It’s not perfect, and I mean really, REALLY not perfect, but how does anarchy offer a superior alternative?
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My understanding is that these “anarchists” are actually shaking down all the local marijuana dispensaries. They reefer to it as the Pot hole tax.
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But that’s the entire point of the action - to get you to look at the larger picture! Why are our streets maintained the way they are? Who controls the resources for maintaining them, and why? How are decisions made about city maintenance, and what is stopping ordinary people from solving problems themselves?
By taking the action so literally, it’s ironically you who are failing to grasp the larger picture. It’s both a program and a provocation - an effort to get people thinking about these questions in a very material, practical way.
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Ferrell’s really restrained in Everything Must Go. Underrated film.
At the risk of some seriously recursive irony…
I had to laugh at their idea that the city shouldn’t exist, if this is kind of amateurism is an example of what would replace it. Let’s not even go into how insufficient this is for building infrastructure like roads in the first place. People don’t seem to have any clue how engineered roads actually are.
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I put in requests for farking MONTHS. There was never any action.
And it’s not “whining” when the City Council and the DOT publicly admit they’ve been deferring maintenance for decades and that the streets are in terrible condition. They screwed up. They didn’t think maintenance mattered or had other priorities, so they did nothing. Now it’s going to cost many millions more than it should have.
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Are they still doing that?
Politically, anarchy isn’t about just doing whatever you want - it’s about mutual cooperation outside of the structures of a modern nation-state.
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