Click on the headline to link the Boston Fare Strike Coalition Facebook page.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
[Dream sequel, in a series of dreams: The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) announces in January 2012 that beginning on July 1, 2012 it would be forced, as it had several times over the past few years, to raise basic transit fares, cut services and routes, and, possibly, lay off several hundred workers. The reason; nagging and never- ending budget deficits caused by inadequate funding sources and crippling debt payments to banks and huge investors who hold its bonds The MBTA also announces that it will hold, as required by its charter, many public meetings to hear from riders, and other interested parties.
This announcement galvanizes those who are opposed in these hard times to one more “tax” on the backs of working people, including daily riders dependent on the “T,” those who require special public transportation services, and those who would preferred to use public transportation from the outer suburbs but will not do so if services are cut. Moreover local unions, like the SEIU and the BTU, whose memberships heavily depend on public transit, community groups, especially in the Latino barrios of the city, blacks in the city’s ghettoes, Asians and Eastern Europeans, have mobilized for a show-down on this basic issue. The key Carmen’s Union has thrown in its support as well. The public meetings are swamped, including a few taken over as alternative “people’s” meetings while MBTA executive personnel and security look on helplessly. Indignant citizens ready to move might and main to rescind the increases and restore services, and maybe get some fare reductions.
At a point, late in the spring, it is simply a matter of how quickly and when various progressives and radicals can organize a huge coalition of the outraged to stop the MBTA master plan. A coalition plan is worked out for April 15th, the day a decisive vote is to be taken on the master plan, where the two main hubs of inner city transit, North and South Stations, will be shut down by a massive show of support with other lesser centers also to be shut down in solidarity. April 15th arrives and as if by magic, although really as a result of massive outreach in every affected community and education and agitation everywhere on the issues, the two locales are “hit” by mass actions early in the morning. Again massed MBTA security, Boston Police, and selected National Guard units stand passively by, waiting with scowling faces. Later that day the MBTA Board of Directors announces…]
Late Friday afternoon, around six o’clock, on a muggy hot July 13, 2012. At the call, the Facebook call, of the Boston Fare Strike Coalition about thirty well-known organized radicals, independent progressives and public transit activists are milling around, as downtown shoppers and workers scurry on by trying to get out of the over-heated city and head home for the weekend, in front of the Park Street Station in downtown Boston. They are aimlessly waiting for more “troops” to arrive in order to stage their third “fare evasion” mass action in their on-going fare reduction campaign under the general slogan “They say fare hike, we say fare strike.”
Previous actions by the coalition, after the MBTA announced its increased fare hike schedule and service cuts on April 15th included an “occupation” (called “Camp Charlie”) by many of this same group of thirty of the State House steps, a hundred strong anti-austerity march around the city’s financial district on Saturday June 16th with a first “practice” fare evasion, and on the day the increases and cuts went into effect on July 1st a group of forty staged a second fare evasion.
This late Friday afternoon the plan was to gather the troops and lift morale with a few well-chosen words by a couple of speakers, march heartily to Downtown Crossing for a “speak-out,” and from there head helter-skelter to the Chinatown MBTA station for the fare evasion and return, via the “liberated T,” to Downtown Crossing to continue the action. All went as planned, including a stirring sent off speech complete with apt literary references to Herman Melville'sBartleby The Scrivener and Shakespeare to arouse the thirty-odd listeners (and a few curious passers-by taking a break before descending into the depths of the Park Street Station).
With banners blazing this righteous rag-tag remnant marched to Downtown Crossing and then onward to their “target,” although the numbers on this “long march” might have dwindled a bit by the time the activists “hit” the all but deserted Chinatown Station and “liberation.” For those not in the know about “fare evasion” tactics this is simplicity itself. A few activists with “Charlie Cards” scan themselves through the turnstiles and keep them open to let other pass through. Thus aside from the activists a number of bewildered “T” patrons, mainly some somewhat resistant elderly Chinese, got a free ride that afternoon. Nice right.
Nice, except one T rider (a free rider, no less), a young guy, long-haired bearded, clad in tee shirt and shorts against the summer heat and sporting an Obama button was heard to say in passing- “What is this, some college fraternity prank? I thought they went home for the summer.”
No comments:
Post a Comment