At least they warned us.
https://twitter.com/decolonize_this/status/1222218010267734017
It wasn’t much of a warning, but it was as articulate as they could muster and certainly appeared to make their point.
“We encourage you to link up with your friends, your family, and think of the ways you can move in affinity to build and f— shit up on J31 [Jan. 31] all day long,” the masked leader said. He later added, “The mood for J31 is simple: F— your $2.75, no cops in the MTA, free transit, no harassment, period, and full accessibility.”
Granted, the plan to add 500 cops to the subway force is very controversial, given that most of what they do now is harass the poor and homeless who try to make a buck and take shelter where they can because otherwise they would starve and die.
Then again, crime happens in the subway as well, from theft to sexual assault, on a fairly regular basis. Not having cops patrolling the subway might contribute to a hostile riding environment.
But make it free?
Grand Central commuters were unimpressed with the 5 p.m. attempt to disrupt service, which dissipated within 30 minutes.
“I think it’s absurd, things aren’t free; things cost money,” said one Westchester-bound traveler. “Asking for free stuff, it’s like they’re 12 year olds. They’re acting like children!”
Well, they are children. They think like children. They behave like children. They’re children. They demand “accessibility,” which is important as subways are, for the most part, underground and difficult to reach for people who can’t use stairs. But escalators and elevators are often broken, making access impossible. They’re mechanical contraptions, used constantly, treated poorly by the people who use the subways, and they break. You know what’s needed to fix them? Money. The same money they don’t want to be required to pay.
Yet, their “weapon” was to protest, vandalize and disrupt, meaning the people who suffer for their actions are people commuting home from work. Pouring glue into fare readers means there are more things that need repair, more ways to divert money away from the things they claim matter to them, and just annoy the crap out of the people whose support they, theoretically at least, need.
As of 5 p.m., police were also looking for an unknown individual who used a metal chain to shatter the screen of one of the MTA’s new OMNY fare machines at West 50th Street and Eighth Avenue.
Each OMNY machine costs the MTA $2,000 to replace, sources said.
Well, if that doesn’t achieve their goal, what will?
Two women were also arrested, summonsed and released at around 11 a.m. after posting “F—k the police” signs inside Bronx Criminal Court, cops said.
A visceral message for sure, and likely one that would reasonate with the folks taking forced day trips to the courthouse, but they didn’t need to see signs to feel that way and there wasn’t much chance those signs would accomplish much otherwise.
Masked anti-cop protesters flooded Grand Central Terminal at the start of rush hour Friday in an attempt to shut down the commuter hub — but the whole thing soon fizzled out.
New Yorkers are a funny lot that way. They see a lot of odd things happen around them on a regular basis, and aren’t easily fazed. New York commuters even moreso, as they really want to get home, I mean really, and don’t care about other people’s passionate demands when they get in the way of their reaching their train on time.
There’s an old joke about one commuter telling another that a person died on the IRT. “Really,” the other person asks? “Yeah, I almost missed my train.”
Maybe the problem is that the masked protesters don’t commute. Who knows if they work at all, as they may plan to save the universe from their dorm rooms, where they also demand that their college divest from fossil fuels but complain when the heat doesn’t work.
And it’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate complaints and issues here, as the subway is run poorly, the cost of a fare has long been divorced from anything beyond the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s* need for mo’ money, and the NYPD has been its usual disgraceful self in dealing with people who just haven’t done enough wrong to deserve their beating treatment.
But is the solution to make everything free? Is chanting nonsense to people who are rushing for their trains the way to convince them? Is screaming “Fuck the Police” going to persuade people? Fuggedaboutit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNKo4FEGPYI
*I say this with love, given that its chair is an old friend of mine and former partner at Skadden, Pat Foye,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbtkL5_f6-4
(OK, it’s Boston’s MTA, not New York’s, but…)
Such lofty goals…
So, the children couldn’t find any actual fascists to be “anti,” so now they are on to “free transit”? What’s next? Free s’mores? Free #2 pencils? They have actually fallen a few rungs below “damned silly” at this point.
Cloward-Piven hasn’t broken the system yet, so they’ll break what they can’t take. Wreckers and takers–have they been reading Ayn Rand?
Invoking Ayn Rand is like telling others that your intellectual growth ended in 6th grade. You might not want to do it.
It is not difficult at all to create a fund to make NYC transit free. It’s perfectly legal and pretty unobjectionable. With microtransactions using cryptocurrency, you can even contribute to the cause at a level that even basement dwellers and dorm room activists can afford.
But nobody does it.
This lack of peaceful attempts to accomplish their goals demonstrates that Antifa’s preferred solution is coercion and violence. If I had money manager training, I’d be setting up accounts to do this already and rendering their whole con obvious even to the most inattentive.
You may be overthinking this.
Actually, a big chunk of your MTA fare is indeed free. If the city did not subsidize the subway system, the fare would double. Since 60% of the city’s taxes comes from Wall Street, it’s capitalism, in part, that keeps the subways running. There is also the Highway Trust Fund, drawn from gas taxes to maintain the roads, which is skimmed to subsidize mass transit in the US, all of which runs at a loss.
When radicals demand that goods and services be provided free, they are really demanding that other people be enslaved to provide them.
The MTA also runs the toll bridges within the city, and charges over $10 on the bridges and tunnels. More than half of that goes to subsidize the subways and busses. The Port Authority (bi-state) runs the Hudson crossings. The George Washington Bridge costs $16 (one way) and goes to subsidize the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) commuter rail.
To the extent it was relevant in the first place, it seems the point that the subways are already subsidized such that riders don’t pay their full cost has been established.
I lived in Queens and worked in Manhattan for 3 years, and I noticed that driving a car in NYC doesn’t really work. The subway does work. Given the lack of funds, it’s amazing that it works so well. If these retards keep at it, they can probably sabotage the system to the point where it doesn’t work anymore. We already see chunks of concrete falling when a train passes overhead. How much worse do they want to make it?
A Lot Worse.
That’s the point.