Archives for August 2006

I’ve only read the New Testament cover to cover once (and I have to admit it was more an exercise in opposition research than it was a journey of spiritual discovery) so correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember Christ teaching things like charity, loving thy neighbor, feeding and clothing the poor… you know, social justice stuff like that.

Thus it came as bit of a surprise to learn that Pastor Joe Fuiten — who routinely jostles with Reverend Ken Hutcherson for the role of Washington state’s loudest defender of Christian values — is in the process of turning retired ministers and missionaries out of their homes and onto the streets. I dunno… doesn’t sound very Christian to me.

I’m referring to the longtime residents of the Cedar Springs Bible Camp near Lake Stevens, who over the past thirty years, and with the Camp’s active encouragement and support, have built conventional homes on leased lots in the Camp’s five-acre residential area, and who have volunteered many hours of their time to Camp improvement projects.

The Camp leased lots only to “qualified tenants” with the stated purpose of providing low-cost, year-round residency to both active and retired Assemblies of God ministers, missionaries and lay people. Monthly leases remained low, sporadically rising by no more than 15 dollars a month from $10.50 per month in 1966 to $150.00 per month in 2004. Leases had historically been renewed annually at the option of the tenant.

That is until Pastor Fuiten’s mega-church, the Cedar Park Assembly of God, purchased the Bible Camp in 2005.

In September of 2005, Fuiten’s church offered residents a new lease that would increase rents by 83% over three years, a particular burden on the Camp’s retired seniors living on low, fixed incomes. But the most devastating alteration of the lease terms under Fuiten’s management was the elimination of the option to renew… destroying the resident’s resale value, and forcing them to abandon their houses and improvements in the event the leases are not renewed.

Under the terms of the new lease, there is only one potential buyer for the residents’ homes — Pastor Fuiten’s mega-church — which would be unjustly enriched should it choose to terminate the leases, or the tenants be unable to afford the new terms.

The residents have filed suit in Snohomish County Superior Court, and while I have no idea how the judge will rule, I’m pretty damn sure that if it were up to Christ, he’d feel a tad uncomfortable evicting a bunch of retired ministers and stealing their homes.

So now that the residents’ plight has been publicized, the question remains: what will Pastor Joe Fuiten do?

It was a night of media navel gazing as former Seattle Weekly writer Geov Parrish and former Stranger writer Sandeep Kaushik joined us to ponder the fate of the post-purge Weekly in Seattle’s tech-savvy, blog-heavy media market. Oh yeah… me , Will, Carl and Mollie also chimed in from time to time, and just for good measure we also talked a little politics, including al-Qaeda’s stunning victory in last week’s Connecticut Democratic senate primary.

The show is 50:12, and is available here as a 34.6 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for producing the show.]

The same coalition of business, labor and environmental organizations that came together last year to handedly defeat Initiative 912 (gas tax repeal,) filed a lawsuit today in Thurston County Superior court seeking to disqualify 3000 pages of signatures for I-917, Tim Eyman’s doomed “Yet Another Thirty Dollar Car Tab” (YATDCB) initiative.

Fifteen business, labor and environmental organizations announced the challenge on Tuesday, invoking a 2005 law that requires signature-gatherers to personally sign a declaration that the information on the petition is correct.

Initiative 917 solicitors did not sign the statement on more than 3,000 of the 17,000 petitions, and those pages must be thrown out, the group said.

“The Legislature passed a law to ensure that signature-gatherers are honest and accountable,” said Steve Mullen, president of the Washington Roundtable, the organization of top corporate CEOs. “There has been substantial fraud in other states, and laws like this are necessary to keeping the initiative process clean and to protect the voters.”

Substantial fraud in other states? More like massive fraud, with signature rejection rates surpassing fifty percent with some initiatives.

One of the primary purposes of the 2005 law was to require signature gatherers to identify themselves on petitions so that authorities could better track cases of intentional fraud to individual signature gatherers. But in response to a query from state Rep. Toby Nixon (R-45), Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a rather tortured opinion, arguing that while the law requires the declaration to be printed on the initiative, it does not actually require the declaration to be signed.

Huh? Then what’s the purpose?

That’s what the court is going to be asked to decide — the actual legislative intent behind the declaration — and in an email exchange Rep. Nixon insisted that McKenna got it right:

I’ve seen the opinion and agree with it. In fact, it was me who pointed out the legislative history of the bill

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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. I’m told that Port Commissioner Lloyd Hara will be joining us tonight. Mmm. I love port.

And if you happen to be a liberal drinker on the other side of the mountains, the Tri-Cities chapter of DL also meets Tuesday nights, 7 PM, Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd., in Richland. Go ask Jimmy for more details.

The good news is, Geov Parrish now has more time on his hands to devote to blogging. The bad news is, that’s because he just gave notice to the Seattle Weekly that he will no longer write for the paper.

In a letter sent out to friends and associates, Parrish explains his decision:

This morning I informed Seattle Weekly’s new Managing Editor, Mike Seely, that effective immediately I will no longer write for Seattle Weekly. I like and respect Mike, and wish him great success in his new job. I regret having made his immediate challenges that much more difficult. However, in recent discussions with him and with corporate owner Village Voice Media’s Executive Associate Editor, Andy Van De Voorde, particularly in the wake of the recent departures of Editor-in-Chief Skip Berger, Managing Editor Chuck Taylor, and Political Editor George Howland, it became clear that my journalistic priorities were not compatible with VVM’s current and future plans for Seattle Weekly. For this and other reasons, I feel it most appropriate to move on immediately.

Hmm. Parrish, Berger, Howland, Taylor and several other key employees have all left the Weekly in the wake of the New Times/VVM “merger.” That’s pretty much the purge we all expected. It’s going to be a dramatically different publication.

Howland has reportedly landed a job with Seattle City Councilman Nick Licata’s office, and Berger tells me he’s looking forward to exploring new opportunities. As for Parrish, well, he needs a job:

So here’s where the “help” portion of this note comes in: I now need a job. I have a Master’s Degree in Political Science and East Asian Studies, and nearly 30 years of experience in both media (primarily print, radio, and online, both in providing content and on the business side) and in progressive political organizing. I have been based in Seattle for the last 16 of these years, and would like to stay here. With the loss of Seattle Weekly, my remaining paid media work is national in scope, but I am comfortable tackling global or local issues, or both. I am most interested in either further media work (national or local, and either print, radio, online, or some combination thereof, doing administrative, editing, and/or content work), progressive political work, or reentering the nonprofit world. Further details regarding my experience, skills, and/or priorities are available for the asking.

I hope Geov doesn’t mind me reprinting his private want ad, but that’s the only help I have to offer. In fact, if you have two jobs, I could use a little income too.

I’m miffed. Rep. Dave Reichert was too scared busy to come on my KIRO radio show Sunday night, but had no problem finding the time to spend an hour on KUOW with host Steve Scher Monday morning.

Whatever. The more the public hears directly from Reichert the better Darcy Burner’s chances look in November.

You can listen to KUOW’s podcast here, or read thoughtful analysis from local bloggers Darryl, Michael and Dan. Then talk amongst yourselves.

Inlander Online has a great feature on 5th Congressional District Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark… only it’s more than just an article about Goldmark, it’s an article about the decline of farm towns in Eastern Washington.

Decline in farm towns has long been considered a function of fewer farmers running bigger farms. But now, Goldmark says, “Even the bigger farmers are leaving, even the larger farms are struggling.”

Corde Siegel, who farms near the Whitman County outpost of Pine City, says, “My accountant says there is not a single grain grower who is making money.”

The math is as simple as it is harsh. Six years ago, Siegel says, his cost per acre for fuel was $5; today it’s $20. Fertilizer penciled out to $20 an acre in 2000 and is $45 today. Chemicals have gone from $12 to $35 an acre in the last six years; labor from $8 to $18 an acre; machinery from $10 to $33; crop insurance from $4 to $12.50.

Meanwhile, “I have farmers harvesting wheat for the same prices their fathers and grandfathers did,” says Gretchen Borck, director of issues for the Washington Association of Wheat Growers based in Ritzville.

It’s a bad equation, Goldmark says. “Here are the people [who] we say are privileged to grow food for the entire world, and now you’ve got to pay to do it.

“Ag families are going to dry up and go away and nobody cares. I care,” he says. “This is the big issue about why I got into the race

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Last night on my radio show I spent some time laying into Mike!™ McGavick (Joel might call it poisonous partisanship) for lending his campaign $2 million before paying back SAFECO shareholders the $1.275 million no-interest loan they gave him to lure him into the CEO’s office.

Here’s the deal for those who missed it.

Essentially, SAFECO gave Mike!™ what amounts to a free mortgage to help him buy his $4.5 million home in the gated Highlands community. According to SAFECO’s own proxy statements this free mortgage has already saved Mike!™ (and thus, cost shareholders) $541,386.25. Better yet for Mike!™, since this represents dollars saved not dollars earned, this indirect form of compensation was entirely tax free.

Loans like this became illegal in 2002, one year after Mike!™ cut his deal, under the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that passed in the wake of the Enron, Tyco, Adelphia Cable and Worldcom scandals that rocked corporate America.

But none of this is really the point. Legal or not, we all know that Mike!™ was lavishly compensated during his years as SAFECO CEO, and we all expected a substantial portion of his $28 million golden parachute — negotiated after announcing his resignation — to be invested in his US Senate campaign. And given his obvious willingness to take as much compensation from SAFECO shareholders as humanly possible to extract, nobody really expected Mike!™ to pay back early a no interest loan.

But I think it is fair, if McGavick is going to take credit for turning SAFECO around, that voters be made aware of exactly how much money McGavick “earned” and under what circumstances. And I also think it fair that voters should hear from the employees and policyholders who were asked to tighten their belts (or who lost their jobs and policies entirely) while Mike!™ and his top executives were enriching themselves.

Last night I heard from a couple of former SAFECO employees who described how the corporate culture changed with Mike!™ at the helm… we learned of the jobs that were outsourced and the benefits that were slashed under his leadership. We learned how SAFECO’s egalitarian bonus policy — where all employees once received the same percentage bonus based on profits — was dramatically rewritten so that top executives would receive by far the lion’s share. And we learned how SAFECO’s charitable matching program shrunk from $10,000 per employee per year to a mere $1,000.

Whether or not you can justify these changes I think it says something about Mike!™’s view on wealth and class in America, and who he believes deserves the bulk of the reward from our nation’s economic growth. However much credit he may or may not deserve for SAFECO’s turnaround (he came in at the bottom of both a down cycle in the insurance industry and a crash in the stock market,) there is no doubt that during his tenure he enacted policies that favored the highly paid executives at the top over the average employee.

And there’s one other important point I want to make. Much of the collapse of public confidence in the Republican controlled Congress is due to the culture of corruption that has permeated the other Washington. Voters are simply sick and tired of the revolving door in which highly placed congressional staffers leave the Capitol to instantly become highly paid corporate lobbyists.

Which is the exact career path Mike!™ followed to obtain his riches.

Mike!™ was Sen. Slade Gorton’s campaign manager, and then his chief of staff, before cashing in on his political access to become a high priced insurance industry lobbyist. This was the path he took to SAFECO’s executive suites, and that is the undisputed truth. And now that he’s “earned” his millions, Mike!™ wants to head back to the Capitol, this time as a US Senator, so that he can write the laws that regulate his corporate benefactors.

When critics decry the revolving door of power and money that is corrupting our government, they are describing Mike!™ McGavick’s career. I know it might strike some as negative campaigning to point this out, but I think that with this knowledge in hand voters can make a more informed decision come November.

Apparently, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly got a lot of angry email regarding his column last week that categorized former SAFECO CEO and insurance industry lobbyist Mike!™ McGavick as a victim of partisan politics. To sum up my response at the time: boo-hoo.

So Joel is back again this week defending bipartisanship, with reasonable sounding advice like “American democracy is about debating issues and trying to change minds,” and “A polarized country shouldn’t stop us from judging people on their merits, not attaching horns to their heads.”

I can’t disagree.

Unfortunately, we’re not living in an age of reasoned politics — at least not at the national level — where reasonable advice such as Joel’s can be unilaterally followed without risking utter defeat.

This is the age of Karl Rove. This is the age of the K Street Project. This is an age where war heroes are swift-boated and morphed into cowards and traitors while those in the press who are not actively complicit tend to dismiss the rhetorical violence with a “kids will be kids” shrug.

In this context, to advise Democrats to refrain from negative campaigning would be like advising the Israelis to respond to Hezbollah rockets with heated letters to the editor.

No doubt one should be wary of a disproportionate response, and yes, Joel is right in warning that negative campaigning can generate a backlash. But more often than not, muddying your opponent is damn effective, which is why political consultants resort to it with such frequency.

And while it is certainly reasonable to judge candidates on their merits, if you fear for the welfare of our nation under exclusive Republican can control, it is absolutely necessary to vote for candidates based on the letter next their name. Whatever one may think of Mike!™ as a person and however you may want to believe his claims that he represents the center, if his election to the Senate assures Republican control it will also assure the unchallenged agenda of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay and their corporatist and right-wing extremist sponsors.

Is unbridled partisanship like I am advocating a danger to our democracy? Under current circumstances I’d argue that it is democracy’s only defense.

Josef Stalin… he didn’t allow political partisanship to threaten his rule, and neither does Fidel Castro or the Chinese Communist Party. That is what the Republican leadership wants for our nation, a one-party state in which the Democratic Party becomes nothing more than an impotent, useful foil. As Norquist once famously quipped:

“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans… Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant. But when they’ve been ‘fixed,’ then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful.”

If that’s bipartisanship, I want no part. I want a Democratic Party with the balls to be Democrats.

Sure it might be tempting to sit outdoors tonight, enjoying our beautiful summer weather, but are you nuts? You could be hit by one of those meteors! So come inside, turn up the radio and tune in to “The David Goldstein Show tonight on Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM.

7PM: Within hours of the revelation that British police had foiled a terrorist plot to blow up 10 airplanes over the Atlantic, Republicans were busy exploiting fear for political gain. Again. I invited Rep. Dave Reichert to join me to talk about our government’s appropriate response to terrorism, but apparently he’s afraid to come on my show. So Democratic challenger Darcy Burner will join me instead to talk about what we’re doing right and wrong in our so-called “War on Terror.”

8PM: Hey… wouldn’t it be great to get a free, zero-interest, $1.275 million mortgage? That’s what SAFECO gave former CEO Mike McGavick to entice him to move back to Seattle. And yet, rather than paying back SAFECO shareholders for their largesse, McGavick just lent his Senate campaign a cool $2 million. Washington State Democratic Chair Dwight Pelz will be joining me, and you can be sure I’ll be pumping him for a few choice soundbites. And if you are a SAFECO shareholder, employee (current or ex) or policyholder, please call in and give me your take on whether Mike!™ earned his exclamation mark, let alone his fortune.

9PM: Incumbent US Senators never lose primaries. That is, until the netroots-fueled campaign of Ned Lamont defeated 3-term incumbent Joe Lieberman Tuesday in Connecticut. Does this election signal the ascendancy of the blogosphere? The decline of the Democratic Party? Or simply the fact that a majority of Connecticut voters are sick and tired of Joe being used as a tool to prop up the Bush administration’s failed policies at home and abroad? Will from Pike Place Politics will join me in the studio take your calls and give you his opinion.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

There are only two things certain in life: death… and Frank Blethen’s editorial board bitching about it.

The Seattle Times prints yet another editorial today railing against what has become euphemistically known as the Estate Death Blethen Tax, and it is curious to see the evolution of their rhetoric. With last week’s failure of the GOP’s cynical “trifecta” legislation, and the prospects of Democrats making huge gains in both houses this November — if not seizing outright control — the Times has apparently conceded that permanent repeal of the federal Blethen Tax is virtually impossible. And so they have settled for attempting to pressure our two US Senators into accepting the best deal possible… for, um, the Blethens.

In so doing they have produced an editorial that is not only arrogant and disingenuous, but at times downright insulting. For example:

Many other advanced countries, including Canada, Australia and Sweden, have no death taxes. These are not low-tax countries: Sweden has the highest tax load in the world, which it can do only by making taxes as efficient as possible. It recently abolished its death tax.

And suppose I were to argue for adopting an “efficient” tax system along the lines of Sweden? Hmm. You think the Times would editorialize in support of marginal income tax rates as high as 87 percent?

Of course not, but then, the entire Sweden reference is nothing but an intentional red herring, because the Times knows damn well that the Swedes replaced their Blethen Tax with a 1.5% annual Wealth Tax on single adult households in excess of about $200,000 (twice that for couples.) This is indeed a more efficient means of taxing accumulated wealth than a Blethen Tax, but I doubt the Times would advocate it as an alternative.

But the Times continues:

Both of our senators have heard these facts many times. Yet, it is an election year. Sen. Maria Cantwell is under pressure from her party’s left, which regards the death tax as a symbol of social concern. They like the idea of it, but they don’t know what it does.

Talk about chutzpah. The wealthy publisher of the largest newspaper in the state, conducting a concerted effort to pressure a Senator during an election year, has the hubris to attack Sen. Cantwell for bowing to pressure from, um, mere voters. Gimme a break.

And as for the argument that us Dems like the idea of the Blethen Tax but we “don’t know what it does”… well, fuck you. (Say what you want about us foul-mouthed bloggers, but at least we don’t try to court readers by accusing them of being uninformed idiots. And FYI, it doesn’t take much perusing of their op/ed page to realize these guys aren’t a bunch of rocket scientists.)

But more interesting than what the Times wrote is what they didn’t write, for in fact, the Blethen Tax should be somewhat reformed. Yet notice the reform on which the Times focuses: reducing the top rate from a nominal 55 percent to something much lower.

What the editorial ignores is the reform most likely to get support from Democrats like me — raising the exemption from the paltry $650,000 the tax would revert to in 2011. Hell, by 2011, $650,000 probably won’t buy you the median priced house in Seattle. Somewhere in the range of $3 million would likely be a reasonable number.

But the editorial totally ignores this part of the equation because it would have little impact on Blethen’s heirs, who will surely pay the top rate on the bulk of their inheritance barring anything but a ridiculously large exemption.

We care about family business

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Let the caption contest begin.

If SAFECO wanted to make unlimited contributions to former CEO Mike!™ McGavick’s senate campaign, a $28 million golden parachute was exactly the way to do it. So it should come as no surprise to learn that Mike!™ just sunk in $2 million of SAFECO’s his own money.

Mike!™ said he gave the money partially to offset the fact that Cantwell “has been a tireless fundraiser over the last five years.” Apparently Mike!™ was simply tired of doing all the hard work necessary to competitively raise money… which isn’t surprising coming from a guy who who’s grown accustomed to getting paid $28 million for two months of part-time work.

Paul Krugman has yet another great column in the New York Times today, ridiculing the assertion that soon-to-be-former Senator Joe Lieberman is either “centrist” or “sensible.” But it was a somewhat tangential paragraph that particularly stood out to me:

Many of those lamenting Mr. Lieberman’s defeat claim that they fear a takeover of our political parties by extremists. But if political polarization were really their main concern, they’d be as exercised about the primary challenge from the right facing Lincoln Chafee as they are about Mr. Lieberman’s woes. In fact, however, the sound of national commentary on the Rhode Island race is that of crickets chirping.

That’s because the establishment backlash to Lieberman’s defeat has never really been about political polarization… it’s about a political establishment fearful for its own survival. Indeed, the only thing truly radical about Ned Lamont is the grassroots path he took to victory.

I guess my question is, when a majority of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, believe it is being mismanaged, and want our troops home as soon as reasonably possible… is it extremist or centrist to agree with them? When 65 to 70 percent of Americans disapprove of President Bush’s job performance, is it extremist or centrist to chastise White House critics as endangering national security and emboldening terrorists?

If you define the center as where the majority of voters reside (and I’m not really sure how else to define it) then it is Lamont who stands firmly in the middle and Lieberman who has wandered to the fringe. That’s why Lamont won the primary, and that’s why he’s the hands down favorite to be the next Senator from Connecticut: because his positions largely represent those of a majority of CT voters.

It’s not that the punditocracy can’t see this obvious fact. It’s that they won’t.