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Snow Jobbed in Virginia: We Pay Top Tax Dollars Only for Politicians to Outsource Essential Services to the Lowest Bidders

Yesterday morning, I woke up early in the morning to get ready for a day of delivering food via Uber. Even though I count myself as part of the upper-middle class by virtue of my career as an IT Project Manager, I nonetheless had to get a second job to supplement my income in order to make ends meet. As I drove to my first pickup spot at a restaurant called First Watch in Falls Church, VA, I was shocked by the abysmal conditions of the road.

Far from being semi-shoveled, for the most part the roads were completely untouched. I passed by dozens of accidents and hundreds of cars stranded in snowdrifts as I traversed Falls Church to Alexandria to my drop off points in Washington DC. Even though the National Weather Service gave ample warning about this encroaching storm, my home state of Virginia and our nation’s capital were woefully prepared for this strong to moderate weather event. Even though the DC metro area has a tendency to panic over flurries let alone a snowstorm that produced upwards of 10 inches in some DMV locations, when you consider the “Snowmageddon” of 2010, yesterday’s squall was a tempest in a teapot.

Perturbed at the number of accidents and stranded travelers I witnessed throughout the day, I tweeted my Mayor Justin Wilson and Councilman John T. Chapman. At the very least, I expected some level of concern and a promise to take action. To the contrary, Mr. Chapman responded with dismissiveness and defensiveness that was unbecoming of an elected official. His first rejoinder was that the pictures I posted, which I tagged him on, “were not in Alexandria“. After I produced additional pictures of the same dire conditions in Alexandria, he then decided to use snow removal staff as a shield in order to defend himself and Mayor Wilson from criticism as evidenced in the Twitter thread below.

After I made an additional delivery, I drove by the Alexandria City Hall on King Street only to run into the same dreadful conditions. Not only were roads barely plowed, I did not see one truck the night before laying down salt and sand in preparation for this winter storm that everyone knew was coming. I interviewed a snow removal staffer on King Street and asked him, off the record, if he was being employed by the City of Alexandria. He responded that he was a contractor working for a landscaping company called Silverbrook and when I asked him if he was being paid a livable wage, he laughed and said he and his partner were getting chump change.

That is when I realized what the issue was; the City of Alexandria, following the lead of almost every other jurisdiction throughout Virginia and really throughout America, cut funding for essential services like snow and ice removal only to “augment” the decimated staff by awarding “lowest bid” contracts to corporations like Silverbrook. In other words, Democrats and Republicans alike are in on the scam where they charge us taxes through the nose only to turn around and enrich contractors that pay their employees miserly wages while pocketing millions for the CEO class.

If you want to know why drivers were stuck on Interstate 95 for upwards of 24 hours as they huddled on in their cars on highways and byways out of gas and out of heat, look no further than the pyramid scheme that is “privatization”. Greed has become a super-God as corporations and hijacked all levels of government from local, state and Federal as the top 1% bribe elected officials by way of “contributions” with the understanding that the executive class will get the outcomes they paid for.

Left out in the cold, in this case literally, are the poor, working and middle-class as we vote for change every election cycle only to end up with change dangling in our pockets for our troubles. Sadly, there to run interference for politicians who are on the dole of plutocrats is mainstream media. Whereas muckrakers once went to the wall to expose corruption and graft, our “free-press” by name only make it their mission statement to give cover to Democrats and Republicans by distracting us with outrageous headlines, clickbait articles and outlandish media narratives.

I reached out to the Washington Post, ABC Local News and the Alexandria Times with an effort to raise awareness about what I witnessed personally only to end nowhere. The same outlets that gladly glom on to an isolated incident and blow it out of proportion in order to sell ads and turn Americans against each other could not be bothered with a legitimate news story that entailed potential graft and provable governmental mismanagement. Their dereliction of duty when it comes to authentic journalism is the reason I decided to revive the Ghion Journal after deciding to shutter it a couple of weeks ago.

I conducted an interview last night with Sabby Sab where the topic was the awful conditions taking place in my birthland Ethiopia. I noted that the war between the government of Abiy Ahmed and the TPLF junta who have been terrorizing Ethiopia for more than 27 years is part and parcel of a broader agenda to destroy countries from within by way of tribalism. What I pointed out to Sabby is that Mr. Ahmed and TPLF are flip side of the same coin; both are being funded and propped up by imperialists in order to pit multiple ethnic communities against each other. As long as neighbors are fighting neighbors, “liberation fronts”—which are really front companies for colonial interests—are able to siphon off the riches of the land while turning Ethiopians into beggars in their own country.

My fellow Americans, what is taking place in the birth land is happening in right here in the United States. Whereas the tribes in Ethiopia are Amhara, Oromo, Tigaru et al, in the US the tribes are “black”, “white”, “left”, “right”, believer, atheist, gay, straight and an endless litany of labels that serve to keep us at each others throats while turning the shinning city on a hill that was America into the backwater of globalism. They use the pains of the oppressed and the grievances of the marginalized to pit one against the other while they privatize profits and socialize losses.

The #SnowJobbedVA that took place yesterday and through today is just one symptom of a government that has gone awry. Whereas the founders of this country had a vision of “We the People” being the bosses of our government, we have been turned into the surfs of the global aristocracy. For the first time in America’s history, this generation entering the workforce will do worse than their parents as the wealth gap continues to explode in ways that are beginning to resemble inequalities witnessed in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Mayor Wilson’s response was thus fitting when he basically told me to eat cake in response to my response to his tweet after he ignored my initial tweets. He declared that I should not believe my lying eyes by making the outrageous assertion that the main roads were cleared when in reality the main roads were teeming with cars that were stuck on unplowed streets. He then “advised” me that I should stay off the streets to which I responded that unless he has declared a state of emergency, which he had not, I had no choice but to work in order to provide for my family.

This is the type of disconnect between the elected and the electors that has made the vast majority of Americans lose faith in their government. The only way the Democrats and Republicans are able to maintain their grip on power is by colluding to prevent any semblance of competition and by deluding their “base” into thinking that things will be different once they get elected. I am not judging here, I too once counted myself among the deluded until two years of homelessness opened my eyes to the racket of these two equally corrupt parties that pretend to serve the people when in reality they are serving us to the wolves on Wall Street.

I spent years railing against both parties only to realize recently that screaming from the outside is about as effective as yelling against the tides. I thus decided to shift my focus to working within the status quo in order to deliver change for America. No, this does not mean that I am now a believer in the establishment, I just arrived at the understanding that we must revamp the existing structure instead of tearing it down and starting over from scratch.

Radical change only leads to radicalism; I know this from first hand experience after living through the coup d’etat of Ethiopia in 1974, which led to the deaths of over 500,000 Ethiopians, that sudden swings deliver violent outcomes. What we need to do as Americans is ensure that corporate money is taken out of governance and elect people who are fully firewalled from corporations and divorced from political parties. Only by endorsing and voting for people based on the merit of their ideas will we have a chance to redeem a government that has turned our Republic into a the Banana Republic of the “Novus Ordo Seclorum”.

As I was contemplating these things and figuring out how I can use my voice and my energy to bring about this much needed change, someone tweeted that I should run for office myself. Amused at the Serendipity of it all and, to be frank, almost enticed by what he wrote, I quickly soured on the idea given the financial and familial difficulties that I’m enduring thanks in large part to my employer deciding to terminate me because I refused to get “vaccinated” given that an antigen test that I took recently confirmed that I still have natural antibodies against Covid-19.

Even though my employer finally backed down, perhaps due to the fact that I sued them in Federal court for $10 million, the cloud of financial uncertainty still hangs over my head because the careers of people who sue their companies rarely turn out well. That is why I am currently driving Uber even though I pull down over six figures and I have an MBA from Johns Hopkins University. I know from personal experience in 2015 that today’s solid ground can turn into quicksand if one or two paychecks are missed.

Even though we pay taxes through our noses, we were literally left out in the cold yesterday as a mild snowstorm turned Virginia into a land of winter gridlock. cc @Justindotnet @J_chapman99 #SnowJobbedVA Click To Tweet

I will thus use my pen and my presence to advocate for independent candidates across Virginia using #MyLove4VA. If this “movement” of, for and by the people take off, perhaps it can become a campaign to reclaim our government and clean up the graft that is taking place in every locality, state and in Washington DC. It is high time we muster up the will to put aside our differences and work together for the common good before the “dark winter” Democrats and Republicans keep talking about arrive at our doorsteps and turn us into slush.

“When you don’t take a stand against corruption you tacitly support it.” ~ Kamal Haasan

If you appreciated this write-up and believe that articles like this should be widely read by others and if you likewise support truly independent journalism, I ask you to support my endeavor. As noted in the Ghion Journal statement of purpose, we are a media entity that disavows corporations and we do not raise ad revenue, we are 100% supported and empowered by our readers and writers. CLICK HERE or click on the icon below to contribute as you are able. Thank you and stay blessed::

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Teddy Fikre

Teodrose Fikremariam is the co-founder and editor of the Ghion Journal. Prior to launching the Ghion Journal, he was a political organizer who once wrote a speech idea in 2008 that was incorporated into Barack Obama's South Carolina primary victory speech. He is originally from Ethiopia and a direct descendent, seven generations removed, of one of Ethiopia's greatest Emperors Tewodros II.

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