Goldy

The editorial board of Vancouver’s Columbian—a paper so knee-jerk anti-labor that it makes the Seattle Times look the Union Record—has once again come out opposing the minimum wage, regurgitating the same blow chunks of trickle-down pablum. Literally the exact same sentence in three different editorials. But it’s fascinating to see how their preface has evolved over the past 18 months.

In our view: Skills the Key to Better Pay
Proposals to hike minimum wage to $15 will eliminate jobs – and opportunities
Published: September 8, 2013

… Realistically, the notion of a minimum wage is a job-killing philosophy. If forced, through legislation rather than market forces, to increase pay for unskilled workers, business owners are going to reduce their number of unskilled workers. They won’t reduce pay for their valuable employees; they won’t reduce profits; they won’t cut other expenses. No, they’ll eliminate the positions that are the most expendable.

 

In Our View: Minimum Wage Experiment
Here’s hoping Seattle’s gutsy move pays off — but it’s tough to not be skeptical
Published: May 6, 2014

… Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata, who sat on the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee, said: “This is an awesome victory for the 100,000 workers earning less than $15 an hour in Seattle. They will see their lives dramatically improved.” That is, if they still have a job. As The Columbian has written editorially in the past: “If forced, through legislation rather than market forces, to increase pay for unskilled workers, business owners are going to reduce their number of unskilled workers. They won’t reduce pay for their valuable employees; they won’t reduce profits; they won’t cut other expenses. No, they’ll eliminate the positions that are the most expendable.”

 

In Our View: Raise Skills, not Base Pay
Minimum-wage workers’ concerns valid, but hike to $12 could cost them jobs
Published: February 2, 2015

… Yet there is a fine line between helping workers prosper and helping the businesses that employ them to prosper. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but they require some balance. As The Columbian has written editorially, “If forced, through legislation rather than market forces, to increase pay for unskilled workers, business owners are going to reduce their number of unskilled workers. They won’t reduce pay for their valuable employees; they won’t reduce profits; they won’t cut other expenses. No, they’ll eliminate the positions that are the most expendable.”

So in September, 2013 they categorically claim that the minimum wage is a “realistically… a job-killing philosophy,” in May, 2014 they allow a touch of doubt to seep in, warning it might improve workers’ lives “if they still have a job,” and now they’re willing to acknowledge that raising wages and helping businesses prosper “are not mutually exclusive.” The Columbian is still wrong to repeat their reality-denying zero sum game supply-side bullshit. But for them, this is progress!

It’ll be interesting to see where the editors are in another 18 months when Seattle and SeaTac are both prospering under their higher minimum wages, and Vancouver is still… well… Vancouver.

And you thought the iPod had a kid-friendly user interface:

A 3-year-old boy found a handgun in his mother’s purse and fired just one shot that wounded both his parents at an Albuquerque motel on Saturday, police said.

According to investigators, the toddler apparently reached for an iPod but found the loaded weapon. Police believe the shooting to be accidental.

It’s never an accident when a toddler gets ahold of a loaded gun: It is criminal negligence. And we will never persuade some people to responsibly secure their guns until we start routinely prosecuting and jailing people who don’t.

Zephaniah 1:14-18
The great day of the LORD is coming soon, very soon. On that terrible day, fearsome shouts of warriors will be heard everywhere. It will be a time of anger–of trouble and torment, of disaster and destruction, of darkness and despair, of storm clouds and shadows, of trumpet calls and battle cries gainst fortified cities and mighty fortresses. The LORD warns everyone who has sinned against him, “I’ll strike you blind! Then your blood and your insides will gush out like vomit. Not even your silver or gold can save you on that day when I, the LORD, am angry. My anger will flare up like a furious fire scorching the earth and everyone on it.”

Discuss.

Couldn’t agree more:

Given a fundamentalist reading of scripture, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is such a total asshole that I doubt I could worship it even if I could be convinced that it exists.

Looks like SPD pepper sprayed the wrong skell. From his lawyer’s press release:

The James Bible Law Group will be filing a tort claim against the City of Seattle and the Seattle Police Department in relation to the senseless pepper spraying of a prominent Seattle School Teacher and activist shortly after his MLK day speech. Jesse Hagopian had finished giving a powerful speech about how black lives matter when he was sprayed with pepper spray by a Seattle Police Officer. He was on the phone with his mother and making plans to be at his two year old child’s birthday party when he was sprayed. It is notable that this irrational police action occurred while he was several feet onto a Seattle Sidewalk.

This incident was captured on video and we will be allowing the media to view it during tomorrow’s press statement.

Can’t wait to see the video. And I hope Hagopian and his lawyers take this case as far as they can possibly go.

UPDATE: Here is the video clip of an SPD officer assaulting Hagopian and other peaceful passersby:

Hard to see how anybody can defend this as responsible policing.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with the Seattle Times that we need to build a downtown elementary school to keep the downtown core family friendly (you know, like a real city). But what really jumped out at me from their editorial was this:

But opening a downtown school is also an implicit contract that Seattle will do better to make its core safe and accommodating for families. That means more vigorous attention to obvious disorder and open-air drug markets, as well as downtown playspace for children.

I have been advocating for years to build a Really Kick-Ass Playground™ in downtown Seattle. Could the editors of our city’s paper of record finally be willing to lend their voice towards this much needed civic improvement?

So, um, in an article describing the Koch brothers’ plan to spend $900 million to buy the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times amazingly writes this:

Roughly 300 wealthy businessmen and philanthropists, many of whom are not traditional Republican givers, belong to a trade organization overseen by Koch advisers, Freedom Partners. The association organizes the conference and helps corral contributions for Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, a national grass-roots organization, and Concerned Veterans for America, which organizes conservative veterans.

Honestly? Really? $900 million later, and you’re still describing Americans for Prosperity as “grass-roots”…? What the fucking headline says. Also, the dictionary:

1. the common or ordinary people, especially as contrasted with the leadership or elite of a political party, social organization, etc.; the rank and file.

Words have meanings. Or did the Koch brothers manage to buy that as well?

Seattle Public Schools are struggling to deal with a crisis of overcrowding, as enrollment continues to grow by about 1,000 students every year—roughly equivalent to the capacity of two large elementary schools! And while our priority, of course, should be on finding constructive solutions, it would also be useful if those responsible for instigating, executing, and cheerleading the district’s recent rounds of disastrously stupid school closures might own up to their errors and issue a public apology, if only to help us learn from our mistakes. I’m talking about the school board members, district administrators, civic leaders, city council members, and state legislators, past and present, who collaborated on the closure process. And yes, I’m also looking at you, Seattle Times.

The case for closing schools was always flimsy. As I wrote back in 2006, when my daughter’s school was on the chopping block:

I remain convinced that the entire closure process is flawed… that the CAC had neither the time, the resources, the data or the expertise to make such profound decisions, and that the district has failed to provide reliable data on demographics, enrollment projections, first-choice ranking, and estimated savings.

My daughter’s school, Graham Hill Elementary, was saved, I believe, largely because we were lucky to have a team of parents available with the specialized skills necessary to make the case to save it: An attorney, a civil engineer, two journalists, and most importantly, a forensic accountant. Together, we had the skill set to dig up the appropriate data, analyze it, frame it, publicize it, and threaten the district with legal consequences. We had uncovered demographic data that strongly challenged the district’s projections—data that suggested that the many housing developments then underway in Southeast Seattle (New Holly, Othello Station, Rainier Vista, etc.) would soon result in a substantial uptick in enrollment in the quadrant. And if the data was so flawed in regards to our school, we asked, how could we trust the data supporting closure of the other schools on the list?

We ultimately saved our school, but the process was brutal, and we could find no newspaper columnist or editorialist willing to question the underlying assumptions behind school closures. The “serious people” accused us of being cranks and NIMBYs—or even worse. The late Cheryl Chow, then a school board member, scheduled a midday meeting with our PTA, and then scanning the room of mostly white women (you know, the people who could afford to attend a PTA meeting at a Southend school in the middle of a work day), all but accused us of being a bunch of racists.

It was heart breaking. Years before, the one clause that I had written into my divorce agreement was that my daughter stay at Graham Hill. That’s how much we loved that school. But when her mother moved to Mercer Island before the start of 5th grade (partially in disgust over the closure process), I let my daughter switch districts without a fight. I haven’t attended a PTA meeting since.

I’m not asking for a personal apology. But as our news media and “opinion leaders” continue to cover and comment on overcrowding in our schools, it might be nice of them to mention their own complicity in this crisis. They were the ones who perpetrated the meme of an inefficient district wasting money on half-empty schools. They were the ones who egged the closure process on, and who not only refused to even question the data on which it was based, dismissively rolled their eyes at those of us who did. And it’s past time they acknowledged their role in fomenting this costly mistake.

At least that way, the next time they publish an editorial touting charter schools or common core or tougher testing regimes as the answer—or God forbid eliminating an elected school board and placing control of the district solely in the hands of Seattle’s mayor (you know, just because)—readers will be able to comfortably conclude, armed with knowledge their prior failures, that “the serious people” clearly don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

Deuteronomy 19:21
Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

Discuss.

What the headline says. Deal with it.

Institutional investors are pouring money into Seattle’s apartment rental market, according to the Seattle Times, not building apartment buildings, but buying them: $3.8 billion worth last year alone!

The Seattle region’s rising rents, stoked by strong job growth and low apartment-vacancy rates, have made apartments attractive to pension funds, real estate investment trusts and other investors.

Some apartment buyers have also said that given the price they paid for buildings, they need to raise the rents.

Investors have swarmed the Seattle area and bid up prices. Developers of new apartments and longtime owners of older apartment buildings have found it a good time to sell, but renters in those buildings often face much higher rents or even displacement due to massive renovations.

I mean, why invest in building affordable housing when you can make much more money by buying existing housing and making it unaffordable? Hooray for rational self-interest!

Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant gets ridiculed by the serious people for advocating for rent control. And yes, I know that poorly done, rent control risks unintended consequences, and that it is currently preempted by state statute. So it wouldn’t be easy either politically or in practice. But you gotta admit that rent control would put a damper on this sort of speculation and the skyrocketing rents it produces.

To bad we’re not allowed to have a serious conversation about rent control, because even talking about it is crazy or something.

I’ve never been all that enthusiastic about the city council’s move to district elections—I didn’t like the district boundaries, and thought it should have been 9-0 or 5-4 rather than this weird 7-2 district/at-large split. I’m also not convinced that it makes it easier to run a grassroots campaign, as big money now buys an even bigger advantage in these smaller districts. Public financing is the the more pressing reform. Or if you really want to fix what ails the council, their’s a much better and bolder reform than district elections: Proportional ranked choice voting.

But if you had hoped that the move to districts might shake up the composition of the council, forcing some of the old timers out, then you’ll be pleased with the news that council member Tom Rasmussen has decided not to run for re-election in Council District 1:

“I am profoundly grateful to have served the people of Seattle for more than 25 years, both as a member of the City Council, as Director of the Mayor’s Office for Senior Citizens and for former City Councilmember Jeanette Williams. I’ve sought to contribute to Seattle in ways that I hope will be meaningful for future generations.

“This wasn’t an easy decision but, it is the right one. It is now time to direct my efforts toward the same causes I have always been most passionate about — in exciting new ways.

Well, it probably wasn’t all that hard a decision. Rasmussen may have been the most vulnerable incumbent on the council, facing a credible challenger in community activist Chas Redmond, and a vocally dissatisfied constituency back home in West Seattle. Nobody wants to be conlined. Better to go out a winner.

As for what it means for city government, I dunno. Didn’t have much of a relationship with Rasmussen, who was good on some issues and not-so-good on others. Like I wrote earlier this week, Nick Licata and his passionate liberalism will be missed. But I never really thought of Rasmussen as standing for much of anything. So I’m happy to see somebody else get a chance.

So… is Jean Godden the next to go? She’s got a couple of credible challengers in District 4, and, well, let’s be honest: She’s very old. But Godden pretty much retired to the council, so it’s hard to see much motivation for her to retire from it.

New York political bloggers/reporters have all the fun:

The speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, was arrested on federal corruption charges on Thursday and accused of using the power of his office for more than a decade to secure millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks and then covering up his schemes, according to court documents.

Mr. Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who has served as speaker for more than two decades, is accused of a range of corrupt dealings that capitalized on his official position. They include using his position to obtain corrupt payments misrepresented as referral fees from a law firm, funneling state research funds and other benefits to a doctor who in return referred asbestos claims to the law firm where the speaker worked, and secretly helping real estate developers win tax breaks.

Say what you want about Washington State House speaker Frank Chopp, but he’s not corrupt. Hell, as loathsome as they are, not even our Republicans are corrupt (at least not in any legally actionable sense of the word). I suppose our relatively scandal-free politics is a good thing, but it sure does make it boring to cover.

Perhaps it was a surge in demand that brought down the Seattle Channel’s live stream (or perhaps it was a Comcast/Centurylink conspiracy), but for those of you who missed all or most of council member Kshama Sawant’s Socialist response to the president’s State of the Union address, I’ve embedded the entirety, courtesy of YouTube.

My challenge to my fellow members of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is: Watch Sawant’s speech and tell me what you disagree with apart from maybe your knee-jerk defense of the president and your discomfort at her call for an alternative to the Democratic Party. Seriously… don’t you wish more Democrats would talk this way?

It’s no surprise really, but Seattle City Council member Nick Licata officially announced today that he will not seek reelection in November:

“I’ve been lucky to have an exciting life filled with challenges taken on voluntarily, not out of hardship.

“Perhaps the greatest challenge we all face is the need to improve the lives of Americans who are seeing their future increasingly impeded by the outrageous growing concentration of wealth, and I would add power, in this nation.

“No one city can resolve this problem. But Seattle has done much in attempting to do so. I would like to play more of an active role in that effort. And see what I can do to have Seattle’s accomplishments duplicated elsewhere.

“I hope after my current term ends this year that I may have that opportunity in some capacity. So, I will not seek re-election.

It’s a shame, really. Long the most liberal member of the council, Licata’s energy and influence had arguably faded in recent years, but Kshama Sawant’s election as an honest-to-godless socialist appeared to reinvigorate him. 2014 was a very good year for Licata and his issues. He’ll be missed.

If Licata’s retirement was making room for bringing some young blood to the council, I suppose I’d feel more sanguine about the prospect of replacing an old white guy. But it won’t play out that way. The move to district elections had put Licata in the position of running against another incumbent, either Mike O’Brien in District 6, or more likely Sally Clark in one of the two at-large seats. So Licata’s retirement just makes the other incumbents more secure, and the council as a whole more conservative by subtraction.