Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Adventures Among the Bureacrats." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 207-209). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Fall 1982
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Y’ALL BETTER BE NICE to me. I have been awarded $135,265.14 by a judge who is obviously brilliant, fair, ethical, objective, and most practical.
Of course, the money exists only on paper, I still have no job at City Light, and we have to go to court again to settle the fees for my superb and indefatigable attorneys.
The Internal Revenue Service — that eternal reviled disservice — will clutch about $30,000 of my money to its panting bosom and soon three more rivets can be drilled into a nuclear warhead. Oh, joy.
Also, about $15,000 comes off the top for Social Security and retirement benefits. I should live so long. And if I do, will these programs be solvent? Or bankrupt, as threatened?
If all this sounds like sour grapes, ingratitude, or postpartum blues, it’s because I, like earlier American revolutionaries, don’t like taxation without a little representation.
Anyway, I’ll have about $90,000 or so after being stuck up by the feds. And do you know what? I now understand the plight — and guilt — of some white liberals. It’s truly shocking, and humbling, to find yourself with a hunk of the capitalist medium of exchange when hardly anyone you know has any, and when unemployment rages.
Of course, visions of wealth dissolve when I divide those thousands by eight long years of low-paid alternative employment, perpetual job search, and legal battles. $11,000 per year isn’t exactly putting on the Ritz!
STILL, IT DOESN’T SEEM right. And there is so little I can do at the moment to redress the worldwide economic imbalance. But the little I can do will mean a great deal to the low-income friends who sustained my body and spirit over the grueling years of jousting with the Emerald City bureaucrats.
I would like to start a modest fund for workers who suffer job discrimination and reprisals. At the top of my list is the redoubtable Merle Woo of San Francisco, with a case so achingly reminiscent of mine — and waged against my very own alma mater, the University of California!
Everyone wants referrals to lawyers "who do free job discrimination cases." But the few worker-oriented lawyers who donate services are overwhelmed, and I know of no groups that supply attorneys for employment cases. The ACLU won’t. And while women, people of color, gays, handicapped, and the aged can appeal to government human rights agencies, where can a white male employee without union representation turn?
WHICH BRINGS ME back to public officials. One of the more annoying strands in my case is the myth — the hoax that some top-drawer politicians tried to help me. Many people believe that Mayor Charles Royer and City Attorney Doug Jewett have "long tried to settle the case," as reported by the Weekly, a Seattle news magazine.
I tried to rectify this illusion in a September 14 letter to the Weekly. But they weren’t nice to me and didn’t print it. Well, that’s all right, because I just happen to have a column of my own — nyahhh — and this is what I wrote them:
In 1979 [Royer and Jewett] insisted on terms for the conciliation agreement that I knew would be unacceptable to the City Council, i.e., a job at the Seattle Human Rights Department instead of City Light. When the Council called upon Assistant City Attorney Dona Cloud to give them the real opinion of her office, she insisted that City Light ... could win.
And when the case went to hearing in 1980, Royer and Jewett collaborated on legal policy and launched a 5-month attack on my political, professional, and personal methods that was so exaggerated it became ludicrous, and made Joe McCarthy look like Tom Paine.
Then after I filed my court appeal, they used delaying tactics for two years before the main case came before a judge. And when Judge Goodloe ruled for me, the city promptly announced it would appeal.
Had Royer/Jewett ... wanted to settle, they could have done it at any time ... Instead, they put the taxpayers, and me, through the old wringer. And they’re still doing it — threatening to appeal the ... just fees for my attorneys.
So I’m bemused when I read paeans of praise to this odd couple for their supposed herculean efforts at diplomacy. I’m laughing with tears in my eyes.
THERE ARE MANY other scores to settle with the bureaucrats, but who’s counting. As of now, I’m ready to take the cash and let the discredits go. Do tune in next time, however, for another chapter of Clara’s endless roller coaster adventures in Imperial Ozland.