Archives for June 2014

Rep. Dan Kristiansen is concerned enough about how much our environmental laws are doing to small businesses. How concerned? Well, concerned enough to pull all context from a stat before putting it into a press release!

Our state has some of the strongest environmental laws on the books. As a result, Washington only produces 3/10ths of 1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally and ranks second lowest in per capita emissions among seven Western states.

Wait what?

Well, in fairness the second half of that had something approaching context. Still, I’m not sure why we’re only including Western states. If it’s per capita, just do all states. It doesn’t say what those states are. I’d guess it’s the states that touch the Pacific and Idaho and Nevada, but I really don’t know. It also doesn’t cite the source.

But assuming that there are sources, I’m still confused about the first half: 3/10ths of 1 percent. I have some questions. First, is that really the best way to write that? 3 of every 1000 tons of carbon come from Washington might be better. Or 0.3% of world carbon. But beyond semantics, where does that actually place us in the world?

Let’s see. There are 6,971,406 Washingtonians as of 2013 according to the Census. There are about 7,176,032,000 people on Earth right now. So the math is fairly easy,* and we’re a bit under 0.1% of the planet’s population. So if we are producing 0.3% of the world’s carbon pollution, just to get to a place where the average Washingtonian was producing the worldwide average of carbon pollution, we’d have to cut our output by 2/3.

I realize that the comparisons to the rest of the world can be problematic. Our economy is so different from subsistence farming. But, Rep. Kristiansen brought it up to imply that we’ve done enough.

At some point I was going to make fun of the whole press release, but if I got this worked up over a paragraph, I should probably stop now.

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In an effort to repeal Seattle’s historic $15 minimum wage, business-backed Forward Seattle has been gathering signatures for a referendum to put the ordinance on the November ballot. And how are they persuading Seattleites to sign their petition? By lying:

In the audio above, recorded June 27 outside the Target in Northgate, the signature gatherer can clearly be heard telling potential signers that Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage “hasn’t been legalized yet,” that the city council “didn’t officially vote on it,” and that the petition “raises it to $15 an hour.”

These are lies. In fact, the petition is for a referendum that would entirely repeal Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage, and replace it with nothing. That is what the businesses behind Forward Seattle have resorted to: paying signature gatherers to lie to voters about their referendum.

And it’s not just one rogue signature gatherer. Over the weekend I was forwarded this audio from an unrelated source, a compilation of various signature gatherers telling various lies about their petition. Potential signers are told that “they’re going to get to $15, just not so fast,” that “this is not to eliminate it,” and that the petition will “incrementally raise it to $15, not all at once.”

If I lied about Forward Seattle and the shameless lying liars who back it, they could sue me for defamation. But it is perfectly legal for them to hire people to lie about their referendum. Still, if these businesses are so willing to lie to me about their referendum, why should I trust them to tell me the truth about their goods and services? Politics aside, I won’t willingly do business with people I don’t trust, and so I will never spend my money at these businesses again.

While the Twitterverse remains obsessed with the US Supreme Court’s awful ruling in the Hobby Lobby case—that closely held corporations can exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception requirements on religious grounds—a potentially more impactful decision isn’t getting nearly as much attention.

Again, by 5-4 vote split purely on ideological grounds, the court has ruled that home health care workers in Illinois have a First Amendment right to refuse to pay “agency fees” (you know, dues) to the union that represents them. There is little analysis so far online, and I haven’t had time to more than skim the decision, let alone wrap my mind around it, but the conclusion of Justice Elana Kagan’s dissenting opinion (pdf) is probably instructive:

For many decades, Americans have debated the pros and cons of right-to-work laws and fair-share requirements. All across the country and continuing to the present day, citizens have engaged in passionate argument about the issue and have made disparate policy choices. The petitioners in this case asked this Court to end that discussion for the entire public sector, by overruling Abood and thus imposing a right-to-work regime for all government employees. The good news out of this case is clear: The majority declined that radical request. The Court did not, as the petitioners wanted, deprive every state and local government, in the management of their employees and programs, of the tool that many have thought neces- sary and appropriate to make collective bargaining work.

The bad news is just as simple: The majority robbed Illinois of that choice in administering its in-home care program.

Just like in Hobby Lobby, newspaper ledes will likely describe Harris v. Quinn as a “narrow” opinion. It did not overturn Abood, and thus apparently did not drive the final nail into the coffin of organized labor by extending “right to work” rules to all public employee unions. But it also did not extend Abood’s protections to home health care workers in Illinois. And that could potentially have an enormous political impact here in Washington State.

By far the most influential and successful union in Washington in recent years has been SEIU Healthcare 775NW, which organized and represents the state’s 40,000 in-home health care workers. It was SEIU 775 that largely funded the organizing efforts behind Seattle’s fast food strikes and SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage initiative. It was SEIU 775 president David Rolf who co-chaired the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee, and played a major role in pushing through our new minimum wage law. Other locals may grumble at the assertion, but it is fair to say that SEIU 775 has been the most powerful and effective union in the state.

But if the court’s ruling in Harris v. Quinn extends to Washington State, then SEIU 775 may have just been largely defunded, and the state’s in-home health care workers left without effective representation.

Because that’s how “right to work” works. If workers are given the right to opt out of paying union dues, narrow self-interest dictates that many of them will become freeloaders, benefitting from union contracts without bearing any of the cost of negotiating them. I mean, if you’re struggling to make ends meet on $12 an hour, what are you going to pay first—your electric bill or your union dues? And without the majority of the workers paying their dues, unions wither away into political insignificance, lacking the funds to effectively organize, advertise, or make political contributions. As the union grows politically weaker, its ability to collectively bargain on behalf of its members weakens too. And as the union becomes a less effective negotiator, fewer and fewer members choose to pay their dues.

It is that sort of death spiral that has made it nearly impossible to unionize in “right to work” states.

I’ve asked SEIU 775 for comment and was told that they are still “analyzing the decision.”

Maybe organized labor largely dodged a bullet in Harris v. Quinn. This time. Maybe. But clearly some of our nation’s lowest paid and most vulnerable workers did not. And if this ruling applies to in-home health care workers in Washington the same way it applies to in-home health care workers in Illinois, then it may end up having an enormous impact on local politics, largely defunding what has been the most powerful and effective union in the state.

UPDATE: SEIU 775 spokesperson Jackson Holtz offers the following defiant response: “Home health care workers in Washington will continue to stand with low wage workers throughout the state and around the country in our fight to lift workers out of poverty. Today’s Supreme Court decision will in no way change that.”

Holtz emphasizes that this is “a long and complicated opinion,” and that Washington’s in-home health care system is very, very different from the program and Illinois. “We have a far more robust collective bargaining model through which workers have won benefits,” says Holtz, like health insurance, mandatory training, and certification, as opposed to just wages. “The distinctions between the two programs are too innumerable to go through.”

In other words, their lawyers are still trying to figure out what this all means.

One thing that seems certain is that today’s ruling will surely spark similar lawsuits here in Washington State, attempting to widen the crack provided by Justice Alito’s opinion in an effort to further erode the few legal protections still afforded organized labor.

– This has been going around, but here’s the list of places opposing the minimum wage increase.

– It would be very nice indeed to have an Eyman initiative free year at the polls.

– Happy first day of the South Park Bridge reopening.

– Putin’s quite the grand master chess player. It takes a rare talent to push potential allies away, while tarnishing your country’s reputation on the global stage and pushing your economy into a recession.

– It was a bit of a surprise how quick Podlodowski’s tenure was.

– Every time gas prices go up, Republicans pass imaginary legislation.

– Surgically precise

As I explained last week, this contest is beginning anew. The Bird’s Eye View Contest is retired and this is the first Street View Contest, using the HERE mapping engine.

This week’s contest is a location that was in the news in June, good luck!

NOTE: I haven’t found a way to share an image via URL, so if someone figures it out, please post in the comments.

Proverbs 11:2
When pride comes, then comes disgrace,
but with humility comes wisdom.

Discuss.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Stephen gets batshit serious about migrant kids.

Sam Seder: Rick Perry visions of being Jewish.

Ed: Gov. Bobby Jindal calls for a rebellion with a hostile takeover of Washington.

Young Turks: Here’s the Republican scandal machine in 10 easy steps.

Liberal Viewer: FAUX News, “Girls more likely to have hateful little minds” ???

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

The Return of the Neocon and Wingnut War Criminals:

• Mark Fiore: The Neocon reunion tour!.
• #Dicklovers speak out:

• Pap and Cliff Schecter: War chickenhawks coming home to roost
• Maddow: John McCain, ‘Blah blah blah arm the rebels’.
• Jon: Republican warfare queens
• Thom: The return of the neocons.
• Jimmy Dore: Digging a deeper hole.
• Pap and Sam Seder: The King of Iraqi blood and oil, Part I.
• Pap and Sam Seder: The King of Iraqi blood and oil, Part II.

Dark Snow 2014: Why we are here.

Young Turks: FAUX News’s Soccerghazi!!!!!!11!1!!

David Pakman: Looney Toon Rick Santorum says Christians should fight war against gay marriage.

Thom: GOP is the pro-death party.

Daily Show: College sexual assault.

Some historical iced tea for the 4th.

Young Turks: Michele Bachmann’s latest insanity turns Neil Cavuto reasonable?!?

Sam Seder: Election fraud is real, and rich white Republicans are doing it.

Thom and Pap: Gov. Walker’s (R-WI) “Criminal Scheme”.

Sam Seder: Christie builds another bridge to jail.

White House: West Wing Week.

Young Turks: California’s historic vote to get money out of politics.

WaPo: 44 years of Charles Rangel, in one minute.

David Pakman: Benghazi has become an epic Republican embarrassment.

Boehner’s Silly Lawsuit:

• Obama: Boehner wants to sue me for doing my job
• Sharpton: The GOP’s absurd lawsuit
• Pap and Sam Seder: Boehner’s asinine lawsuit stunt.
• David Pakman: Republicons sue Obama over fewer executive orders than Shrub.
• Alex Wagner: Obama disses Republicans.

Liberal Viewer: Is ISIS the #1 threat to the U.S.?

Factivists: The GOP’s Immigration Inaction.

Ed: Herman Cain thinks Obama voters are “stupid”.

Bill Mahar’s guest draws comparison between Teabaggers and Nazis.

Supremes Greenlight Harassment at Abortion Clinics:

• Sam Seder: Supreme court greenlights harassing women at abortion clinics.
• Maddow: Hypocritical SCOTUS has buffer zone, but doesn’t think abortion clinics need buffer zone.

Young Turks: Syria hands over their chemical weapons…THANKS OBAMA!

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

This week the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ruled that there is a free speech right guaranteed in the Constitution to shove pregnant women. What after all are the buffer zones for except against harassment of doctors and patients. After all, the law was enacted in “response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.”

We know the ruling will lead to more pushing and shoving of pregnant women who want health care. We know it will lead to doctors being less safe. We know that it will mean more violence, because violent groups with a history of violence attempting to do violence to women (and there’s no other way to call forcing them to remain pregnant against their will).

Freedom!

As Voltaire would have said about this ruling, “I may not agree with your shoving a pregnant woman, but I will defend to death your right to do it.”

We all know Seattle area rents are going through the roof. There’s no surprise there. But what really jumped out at me from the latest statistics was this:

Apartments in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood saw the biggest increase in rents. The average asking rent was 12.3 percent higher over the quarter, rising to $1,628.

But Ballard also had a vacancy rate of 8.6 percent, the highest in Seattle. And when new apartments that just opened are included, the vacancy rate shoots up to 18 percent.

The apartment boom in Ballard has led to a doubling of the inventory over the past six years, said Tom Cain, head of Apartment Insights Washington. When the units now being built are complete, Ballard’s inventory will have quadrupled.

New units rent for a premium, and they’re part of what’s driving up market rents, Cain said.

Listen to the free market folks and you’d think the solution to Seattle’s worsening affordable housing crisis is simple: get out of the way of developers and let them build more units faster! And that somewhat makes sense. Supply and demand and all that. And yet the neighborhood with highest vacancy rate and one of the biggest booms in new construction, is also the neighborhood with the fastest rising rents. How does that work?

The problem is that the market incentivizes developers to focus on meeting the demand of high-end renters to the detriment of middle and low income households. The cost of borrowing and the cost of land remains the same no matter what you choose to build. Given these and other fixed costs, there’s just more profit to squeeze out of any given lot by catering to the highest end of the market the neighborhood will support. And so that’s what developers tend to do.

Thus if we rely on the market to address affordability in Seattle, it will necessarily constrain the growth in luxury housing prices first, before saturation at the high end of the market ultimately forces developers to target their product further down the income scale.

Yes, rents of older housing stock rise more slowly than rents of new, and all this expensive new housing will eventually be old. But as these units age, unless their rents increase more slowly than growth in median income, these apartments will never become more affordable.

Affordability is not just a product of how much we build, but of what we build. And private developers simply aren’t focused on meeting the demand for low and middle income housing.

Yes, the city should always strive to make the permitting process faster, cheaper, and more efficient. And we certainly need to let go of our nimbyist fetish with building heights. Seattle must become a taller, denser city. But simply getting out of the way of developers won’t solve our problem. If we can’t find a way to effectively incentivize developers to meet the demand for low and middle income housing, then the city is going to have to find a way to tap into its own access to capital markets to build more low and middle income housing itself.

Swim at your own risk?

The family of a man who drowned a year ago in the swimming pool at the Quality Inn & Suites Seattle Center has filed a wrongful-death suit against the owners of the hotel, claiming poor maintenance made the water unusually murky and contributed to a botched rescue operation by firefighters.

[…] The hotel operators, Seattle Hospitality Inc., last Friday filed a third-party complaint seeking to draw the city of Seattle into the suit as a second defendant, claiming the Seattle Fire Department failed to conduct an adequate water rescue and didn’t find Deboch in the pool after firefighters were summoned to the hotel.

Except it’s hard to perform an adequate water rescue when the water is so filthy that you can’t see the victim.

[…] Seattle firefighters arrived within 2½ minutes of the call, according to Fire Department records. They searched the pool using a rescue hook and thermal-imaging camera but found no sign of Deboch.

A Fire Department report states that firefighters “believed they were visually able to confirm that no victim was in the pool” and thought they could see the pool’s bottom.

A civilian also got in the pool to search for Deboch, but no firefighters entered the water, according to the report.

I worked three summers as a lifeguard (i.e. pool boy) at swimming pools at four different residential apartment buildings in Philadelphia, and I can tell you that we would’ve been fired had we allowed the water to get anywhere near that sort of condition. We checked chlorine and pH levels throughout the day, and would clear swimmers out of the pool if the chemicals ever got out of whack. Murkiness wasn’t even an option.

“There were more than a dozen people allowed back in the pool to swim,” Micah LeBank, the attorney representing Deboch’s family, said in an interview this week. “The hotel let people get back into that murky water and swim around, unable to see the body.”

That’s disgusting.

When Deboch still wasn’t found, his friends searched the pool again.

Tom Fleming, a 51-year-old off-duty firefighter vacationing at the hotel, joined in the search and cleared the pool of swimmers, according to the Fire Department report.

The Seattle Times reported last year that after about a 10-minute search Fleming felt something in the center of the deep end of the pool. He asked the hotel to turn off the pump and was able to pull up Deboch’s body.

“You could not see him until you got him 18 inches to the surface,” Fleming told The Times last year. “I was fishing around and even though he was at the very bottom, he was not always in the same spot. Finding a victim in a pool in that condition is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Granted, water clarity at indoor pools is more difficult to maintain due to the lack of natural oxidation from sunlight, but that’s no excuse. The hotel was clearly negligent.* And their effort to make taxpayers liable by pulling the fire department into the lawsuit is offensive.

Given the time that had already elapsed, firefighters might have been able to pull the victim from the pool without permanent neurological damage, had they been able to immediately locate the body. But the cloudy water made a timely rescue—about a 10 minute window—all but impossible. From the facts presented in the press, there is no question that improper pool maintenance impeded firefighters’ ability to do their job.

Swimming pools are potential public health hazards, both due to the drowning risk and the spread of disease causing organisms like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and E. coli. That’s why they’re so heavily regulated. So if a hotel is going to seek a competitive edge by offering guests the amenity of an indoor pool, then the hotel has both a moral and legal obligation to properly secure and maintain it.

The hotel should settle with the victim’s family and leave Seattle taxpayers out of it.

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* My former editors at The Stranger never would have allowed me to use such direct language, for fear that the use of such a legalistic term like “negligence” might leave the paper vulnerable to a defamation suit. But my own personal experience as a former pool maintenance professional leaves zero question in my mind that it is negligent to allow guests into water so cloudy that they could swim for three hours without noticing the dead body at the bottom of the pool. And as a blogger, I feel that it would be negligent of me to shy away from bluntly speaking the truth.

After 37 years, longtime Ballard staple Louie’s Cuisine of China is closing, and I blame Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage! Although probably, its closure had something more to do with this:

The property was sold last month for $2.49 million, property records show.

In fact, restaurants and other businesses close all the time, and for all kinds of reasons:

Louie’s expected closure comes three months after the landmark Frontier Room, around since 1954, closed in Belltown. Last year the legendary Alki Tavern closed, and Funhouse music club was closed in 2012 to make way for a seven-story building near Seattle Center. Claire’s Pantry, a Lake City staple since 1974, closed in February 2013, and Piecora’s Pizza on Capitol Hill closed in April after 33 years.

In March 2010, the first restaurant in the Red Robin chain closed in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.

Brace yourselves. In the coming years we’re going to hear all kinds of stories about businesses closing because they can’t afford to pay Seattle’s minimum wage. If $15 was already in effect, we’d be hearing it about some of the businesses above. But correlation is not causation, so you can cast all these anecdotes aside.

It will take a decade or more to truly suss out the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage by comparing local economic trends to both historical data, and to economic trends in other locations. But that won’t stop the scare stories from coming.

This is a decision that can only lead to violence:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Massachusetts law that barred protests near abortion clinics.

The law, enacted in 2007, created 35-foot buffer zones around entrances to abortion clinics. State officials said the law was a response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.

So here’s the kind of scenario that will eventually happen. A man is escorting a woman (wife, girlfriend, whatever) to an abortion clinic when the harassment begins, and as men sometimes do, he feels bound to defend her honor. Yelling escalates into shoving, shoving into punches. And then maybe somebody in the tussle decides to stand their ground, and pulls out a gun and starts shooting. Because if you don’t think that the kind of person who would stand outside a Planned Parenthood clinic and yell “whore” or “baby killer” at teen-age girls seeking health care, is also the kind of person who shows up armed, then you don’t know human nature. Because pro-life!

The whole point of blockading an abortion clinic is the threat of violence. It is an act of intimidation. And anti-choice extremists will rightly understand this decision as an invitation to intimidation.

– Murray’s anti-crime and police accountability proposals seem mostly to the good.

– No matter how many states enact marriage equality, those pictures of the newlyweds always get to me. Congrats Hoosiers.

– Walmart awesome, says Walmart.

– I’m glad that the Catholic Church in Western Washington seems to be taking the child abuse seriously. But this still feels like not enough.

– Sometimes papers (or whatever the P-I is) looking for a local angle on something just crack me up.

– I don’t necessarily want to oversell this, but it’s probably the best invention in pooping history (I’m honestly not sure if that’s overselling it or not).

By now you’ve all probably heard about the terrifying new climate report from a bipartisan group of ex-cabinet officials that outlines the impending economic horrors associated with climate change, on top of the usual environmental ones. For example, due to rising sea levels, as much as $681 billion worth of Florida real estate could be underwater by the end of the century. Literally under water, not the metaphorical you-owe-more-on-your-mortgage-than-your-home-is-worth thing. Although as a consequence, that too, no doubt.

Extreme heat, rising sea levels, intensified storms, and shifting rain patterns could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives nationally. But it’s interesting to note that here in Cascadia, not so much:

The Northwest is among the least exposed to climate-driven agricultural, mortality, energy, and labor productivity impacts; however, the region is likely to experience an increase of 3 to 8 times the number of hot days per year by the end of the century.

I hate the heat, so shifting from our current average of 5 days a year of 95 degree weather or warmer to an additional 18 to 41 such days a year by the end of the century would really suck. But it’s all relative. In the same time frame, the Southwest could be suffering as many as 110 extreme heat days a year, and the Southeast as many as 138!

As for sea level, the Northwest might actually see it fall a bit over the next few decades, or rise only slightly, thanks to the reduced gravitational pull from Alaska’s shrinking glaciers! (Really. I’m not making that up.)

Yeah, our own snowpack is predicted to decline as more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, but if we start planning now, that’s something we can manage. There’s plenty of opportunity for conservation, and a few more reservoirs could help even out the dry periods. Also, we could always tap in to the oft criticized Brightwater sewage treatment plant’s impressive greywater capacity (99.9 percent clean!) to help further reduce demands on potable water. (Thanks for planning ahead, Ron Sims!)

So compared to the rest of the country, we won’t have it so bad. And while it may sound cold-hearted to say so, that means global warming could give Seattle a competitive economic advantage.

Think about it. Where would you rather live or start a business? Relatively temperate 22nd century Seattle with our mild winters and mere three or four weeks of 95-plus-degree days? Or storm-battered, steadily-sinking Florida with its four and a half months a year of oppressive heat and equally oppressive humidity? And then there’s the arid Southwest, where summer temperatures already routinely exceed 110 degrees. Phoenix area boosters have long pitched their region as “the next Silicon Valley”—crank up the heat much further and they could achieve that vision quite literally as the surrounding desert melts into glass.

Look, I’m not making light of climate change. It’s a fucking disaster. But if you don’t think people are going to want to move to the Pacific Northwest to escape the brutal heat elsewhere in the country, you’re crazy. Rain or shine, Seattle’s weather is going to become one of its major selling points over the next half century. So if you think housing costs and traffic congestion are at crisis levels now, just wait and see how bad things get with a few million more people packed into the region.

Or rather, let’s not wait. Let’s plan.

So there’s this secluded little park, right on Lake Washington, an idyllic in-city location for a warm summer’s night barbecue. And you just leave your garbage for others to pick up?

Who the fuck does that?

I’m okay with the beer drinking, even though alcohol is banned in Seattle parks, as long as it’s done in moderation. And I’m even okay with the illegal fire you lit on the beach, though you could’ve cleaned that up too. But what kind of asshole enjoys a beautifully maintained public park and then just leaves empty beer cans and raw chicken packaging and the rest of their garbage behind? How does one walk away from this mess, past empty trash cans, without feeling totally ashamed of oneself?

Sure, life can be tough in the urban hellhole. And often unfair. But not in this place, at this time. You’ve just enjoyed one of the most pastoral public amenities a big city has to offer, and you trash it for your neighbors who follow? What the fuck?