Archives for February 2010

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in favor of dropping the armed forces’ 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and for the first time allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the U.S. military.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said it was his personal and professional belief that “allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

When President Bill Clinton attempted to address this issue early in his first term, the ensuing controversy sidetracked his administration, and resulted in the insulting and unworkable half-measure we have today. But it increasingly looks like President Obama need expend little political capital to fulfill this particular campaign promise.

My what a difference a decade and a half makes.

The headline in the Seattle Times says it all: “Gregoire opposes Seattle officials’ request to rethink 520 bridge.”

Of course she does. As does Judy Clibborn (D-41) and Mary Margaret Haugen (D-10), the respective chairs of the House and Senate transportation committees.

And what do all three elected officials have in common? None of them are from Seattle.

Meanwhile, a bill is meandering through the Legislature that would severely limit cities’ local control over large projects in their district, like, you know, the Alaskan Way Viaduct Tunnel, and the 520 bridge.

Of course my gut reaction is to rail against the rest of the state for their “Fuck Seattle” attitude, and the way elected officials outside the city explicitly and implicitly exploit it to their own political advantage. But really, we only have ourselves to blame.

We’re the ones so caught up in the Seattle Way that we can’t ever seem to make a firm decision for fear of pissing off one constituency or another, and we’re the ones who consistently elect perhaps the most anemic political class of any major city in America. Theoretically, the Seattle delegation represents the largest and most powerful political block in the Legislature, and yet they’re either incapable of working together that way, or unwilling to do so out of fear of reinforcing the stereotype that Seattle dominates the state.

Well I’ve got news for you: Seattle should dominate the state! This is where the largest chunk of voters live, and this is where an even larger chunk of the wealth (i.e. tax base) resides. Unlike the goddamn U.S. Senate, we elect all our legislators by the person, not the square mile, and so it’s only fair that our population-dense city gets a disproportionate share of state spending and power.

And yet at a time when two major transportation projects threaten to reshape the city for the next half century or more, we can’t even manage to put one of the transportation committees in the hands of a Seattle legislator. We’re pathetic.

The Seattle Times is earning well-deserved kudos for its three-part exposé of abuse and neglect at adult family homes… which is kinda ironic considering how vociferously its editorial board has opposed an initiative that would require adequate screening, training and certification of long-term-care workers.

Initiative 1029 was overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2008, securing 72.5% of the vote statewide, and passing by better than 20-point margins in all 39 counties. According to King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, writing in its defense, the measure was intended to do two simple things:

• It requires FBI criminal-background checks for all long-term-care workers.
• It requires home and community-based long-term-care workers to complete 75 hours of training — the national standards for nursing-home workers — and pass a certification exam to demonstrate basic competence.

Yet despite the glaring need for better qualified long-term-care workers, and the unparalleled popularity of the measure, the Times, our state’s paper of record, urged voters to reject the initiative before the election, and has repeatedly argued for its repeal several times since, including just days after it passed:

Voters’ good, compassionate intentions were abused by the sponsors of Initiative 1029, which purported to ensure higher-quality long-term-care workers for the elderly and people with disabilities.

This measure, which passed handily, is nothing more than an artfully worded ballot measure that belies the bad public policy it is and the serious blow it will give to our state’s troubled budget — about $30 million over the next three years. … The Legislature and the governor should exercise their right to overturn this initiative immediately.

Tim Eyman’s tax-limiting I-960, which passed with a bare 51% of the vote, that the Times argues should be inviolable. But I-1029, the first statewide measure ever draw over 2 million votes… well… voters were hoodwinked or something, so the Legislature should just toss that one right out.

Why? Well, the Times argues that we just can’t afford $28 million over three years for training and certification. Oh, and the Times liked a supposedly “bipartisan” bill better.

But if you read through its several editorials on the subject, one pattern quickly emerges:

“The SEIU spent $650,000 of union funds to promote its proposal as I-1029.”

“Workers already organized would be trained by the SEIU and paid by the state.”

“Then the SEIU drafted this union-building, state budget-busting initiative and played off voters’ good intentions to get a better deal.”

SEIU this, SEIU that. This isn’t about responsible budgeting or a deliberative legislative process — and it certainly isn’t about the welfare and well being of seniors. No, the Times editorial board’s vehement and relentless opposition to I-1029 stems mostly from its vehement and relentless opposition to SEIU, and organized labor in general.

See, if it’s supported by labor, it’s opposed by the Times, the painful, puss-filled, oozing bedsores of neglected seniors be damned.

Online retailing giant Amazon caved to book publisher Macmillan over the weekend, first pulling then restoring their catalog in a dispute over e-book pricing. Not too surprising.

But what really struck me was the statement Amazon issued Sunday afternoon in announcing their capitulation:

“We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books,”

Really? Macmillan has a “monopoly” over their own titles? Isn’t that kinda like saying that McDonald’s has a monopoly over its own burgers, or that, say, Amazon has a monopoly over the sale of its own Kindle devices?

It is a rather startling implication — that there is something wrong with a publisher maintaining monopoly control over its own titles — but not as purely silly or resentful as it may first appear. The sale of goods and e-goods are not the same thing, and this shift away from physical media to online distribution may in fact demand a dramatic rethinking of the traditional relationship between content creators, owners and resellers.

And it will be fascinating to watch how this all works out.

Friday’s post on Kemper Freeman Jr. generated quite a few angry responses from apologists who insisted it was unfair of me to brand the Eastside real estate mogul with his own shameful family history. But if Freeman insists on wielding his wealth and power to influence public policy, I think it only fair and useful to evaluate his words and deeds within a broader historical context.

There is no such thing as a self-made man, and Freeman is arguably less so than others. Inheriting a family fortune built on the suffering of Japanese Americans and the taxpayer largesse that built two floating bridges to his Bellevue real estate holdings, Freeman’s own business investments can be seen as a continuation of a development strategy first laid out by his father and grandfather decades earlier. This is the family that raised and trained him, and from whom he clearly inherited the auto-centric/anti-rail philosophy that drives his civic participation. So why should his family history be ignored when attempting to discern Freeman’s personal motives?

Of course, I don’t raise these issues merely to fling poo at someone with whom I disagree politically (although I must admit that it can be pleasantly cathartic), but rather to chip away at the undeserved credibility Freeman appears to enjoy on transportation planning issues. The fact is, Freeman and his family have prospered handsomely from the public subsidy of our automobile culture, and thus his vehement pro-roads/anti-rail advocacy must be understood in that context. Likewise, as the great-grandson of a Confederate veteran and the grandson of the president of the Anti-Japanese League, it is only reasonable to explore the roots of Freeman’s passionate opposition to allowing South Seattle rail riders convenient access to his exclusive Bellevue properties.

Again, this all comes down to credibility. If his credibility largely stems from his personal wealth, then the circumstances of his wealth are fair game. But if his credibility is supposedly based on merit, then that should be evaluated too.

For example, my first introduction to Freeman came shortly after I began blogging in 2004, while covering Initiative 883, the Freeman backed measure that would have opened up HOV lanes to single occupancy vehicles, while diverting money from transit and other programs to build more highway lanes. After spending $350,000 on the campaign, 90% of it his own money, Freeman abruptly pulled the plug on the initiative just weeks before the petition filing deadline. The campaign told the Seattle Times that it had collected about half the 197,000 required signatures, but even that is surely an exaggeration.

So how do you spend that much money on a signature drive, and yet fall so far short of the mark? Well, you do it by spending your money very poorly.

According to PDC reports, over the course of its several month signature drive, I-883 spent only $92,000 on “voter signature gathering” (enough for maybe 60,000 signatures, tops), compared to $180,000 on “management/consulting services.” That’s gotta be the most inefficient signature campaign I have ever seen.

To put this in perspective, were Freeman put in charge of our region’s transportation budget, and he managed it as efficiently as he managed the I-883 campaign, for every $1 billion we spent constructing new roads, we’d spend an additional $2 billion on management and consulting fees.

So much for the private sector being more efficient than the public.

I mean, any idiot can successfully run a well financed signature drive (you know who you are, Tim), and yet Freeman couldn’t even manage that. And this is the guy who routinely attacks our regional transportation planning as wasteful and inefficient?

So if Freeman’s perceived credibility on transportation planning doesn’t come from merit, and it doesn’t come from any particular expertise on, you know, transportation planning (former State Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald labeled some of Freeman’s proposals “wacky“), where does it come from? Apparently, simply by virtue of him being Kemper Freeman Jr.

And that’s all the more reason to make every effort to put Freeman’s advocacy in its proper context.

Speaking of investigative reporting, Michael Hood’s got the first of a two part series up on BlatherWatch, exposing former KVI host Peter Wiessbach’s exploitive janitorial business.

It’s an insight into how sleazy operators like Weissbach use illegals. Business always claims American workers won’t do such lowly work, but this demonstrates that some employers give preference to the undocumented.

SBM systematically hired and exploited workers who, because of legal status complied in fear of losing their jobs or being detained and deported.

Janitors who questioned or complained about these practices were summarily fired- as were such managers- after first being frozen out of the management loop.

An ex-manager describes workers with so little English he needed take another worker away from his work to translate the manager’s instructions. When he asked HR asked why he couldn’t get anyone who speaks English, he was told: “[We] don’t hire those kind of people. [We] only hire illegals who mainly speak very little- if any- English.”

Just to be clear, not all conservative talk hosts are exploitive, hypocritical scumbags. They may be 99% wrong 99% of the time, but personally, I’ve never met a KVI host I didn’t like. Then again, I’ve never met Wiessbach.

Personally, I don’t look to the Seattle Times for this kinda stuff anymore. Like most people today, I purchase most of my seniors on Craigslist.

(All snark aside, if there’s anything that makes daily newspapers essential, it’s investigative reporting like this.)