Goldy

The Washington State Supreme Court held a hearing yesterday to give state lawyers a chance to explain why the legislature should not be held in contempt for failing to make adequate progress toward meeting the terms of the court’s landmark McCleary decision. And while I’ve seen a ton of media coverage on the hearing, I haven’t seen much mention of the ginormous elephant standing quietly in the back of the courtroom: taxes.

In McCleary, the court ruled that the state was failing to meet its constitutional “paramount duty” to amply fund our K-12 schools. Exactly how much more money McCleary requires the state to spend on basic education is unclear, but we’re talking billions. Roughly an additional $4.5 billion in the 2017-2019 biennial budget. Give or take. That’s equivalent to over 13 percent of our current $34 billion biennial budget!

And the honest to God truth is that there is simply no way to meet this obligation without raising tax revenue. Everybody knows it. There isn’t $4.5 billion in waste, fraud, or abuse available to cut. So there are only two choices: raise revenue, or defy the court.

If I wielded the unfettered powers of a benevolent dictator I’d just overhaul our entire antiquated tax structure and replace much of it with an adequate, fair, and sustainable income tax. Problem solved. But our non-dictatorial democratically elected legislators aren’t entirely without options either.

The first revenue item on the table should be a substantial hike in the state property tax, which is, after all, a school levy. Given our current fiscal crisis it is just plain stupid that the state is currently using only $2.39 per $1,000 of value (and falling!) out of its $3.60 per $1,000 of value statutory cap. We can’t responsibly use it all, for various technical reasons, but we could generate at least another $1 billion per biennium in state property taxes, easy.

Next (and I know this is being bandied about in some circles in Olympia) the state could raise at least another $1 billion or so per biennium through a targeted capital gains tax that only hit, say, the top one half of one percent of Washington households. It would be a new tax, with some ramp up time and administrative overhead, so it’s not as easy as just hiking the property tax, but it’s perfectly doable.

Hike the state school levy, tax capital gains, close a few hundred million dollars in unproductive tax “preferences,” and cross your fingers that a strong economy bumps up other revenues, and before you know it the supremes could be congratulating legislators on a job well done. But let’s not pretend that we have a snowball’s chance of meeting McCleary without raising taxes. It just can’t be done.

The sad truth is, we have more than just a structural revenue deficit in Olympia. We have a structural honesty deficit. And we can’t begin to address the former until we fix the latter.

 

Republican challenger Pedro Celis’s chances of toppling Eric Cantor just got a little bit better. To bad for him, though, that he’s running against Democratic incumbent Suzan DelBene:

After a shaky primary-election showing, Republican congressional candidate Pedro Celis has reshuffled his campaign, replacing his campaign manager and hiring a pair of young strategists who helped tea-party challenger Dave Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor earlier this year.

Brat’s campaign manager, Zachary Werrell, is now managing Celis’ campaign, replacing local Republican strategist Don Skillman, who had been campaign manager for the primary. Gray Delany, another Brat campaign staffer, is now Celis’ campaign spokesman.

Uh-huh. He can blame his former staffers all he wants, but the problem, according to people who have watched Celis in action, is that he is just an awful candidate. Flat. Unoriginal. Uninspiring.

This was supposed to be a competitive race: a first term Democrat in a midterm election being challenged by a well-financed Republican in a swing district. But the Republicans simply did not field a competitive candidate.

Writing in the New York Times, op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof recently pushed back against the notion many American whites have that racism isn’t really the vexing national crisis that it used to be. To this end Kristof lists several uncomfortable statistics illustrating the stark inequality between the races in areas like income, educational attainment, incarceration rates, life expectancy, and so forth, including the following headline grabbing bullet point:

The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid.

These are all indisputable facts. But you don’t need a bunch of statistics to intuit the reality about racial inequity in America. Just look at the composition and layout of our communities: 150 years since the end of slavery, and a half century after Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, socioeconomic lines and color lines are still largely one and the same in what remains a profoundly racially segregated nation.

Why? Well, if you think about it logically, there can really be only two explanations. Either African Americans (and other non-white communities) are being held back by institutional racism… or nonwhites are, on average, racially inferior.

Feel free to argue the latter explanation if you like, although there is no science to support it. And even if you insist that there is some sort of cultural, rather than genetic inferiority that is holding back black Americans, that still doesn’t let you off the white supremacist hook.

So if we accept the premise that we are all more or less born equal (and what could be more American than that?), how else can we explain the stark disparity in life outcomes that stubbornly sticks to racial lines? Institutional racism is the only logical explanation.

If we define “institutional racism” as any kind of system of inequality based on race, then that is what we have here in America. The outcome is the proof.

 

I am writing this post from my new office on the 28th floor of the Russell Investments Center in downtown Seattle, where I have just started my first day of steady part-time work for America’s premier self-loathing plutocrat, Nick Hanauer. I have been hired to put my research, analysis, and writing skills to work advancing a broad range of public policy issues—obviously, income inequality and gun violence prevention, for example—but notably, not education reform, because Nick is totally deluded about charter schools, so it’s not even worth the two of us having that conversation.

So yeah, I have sold out, in the sense that I’m being paid decent money to help Nick advocate on issues for which I have previously advocated for free. But rest assured that I am still the same arrogant, know-it-all, incorruptible, holier-than-thou Goldy, and I will continue to use my powers solely as a force for good, not evil. Only now I’m getting paid for it.

So suck on it, Goldy-haters: I’ve landed on my feet.

What does this mean for HA? Well, obviously I’ll have a bit less time for blogging. But it’s not like I’ve been blogging full time since leaving The Stranger, anyway.

Over the past several months I’ve been paying the bills through various freelance journalism and ghostwriting gigs, and in fact this job leaves me free to continue to take on interesting freelance work, time permitting. But more importantly, this job also leaves me free to blog about whatever I want—even, say, the ever more pervasive and destructive role of big money in politics.

Which brings us to the purpose of this post: think of it as a form of voluntary public disclosure. I’m certainly under no legal obligation to tell you who pays me and for what, but if I’m going to continue blogging—particularly on pet issues like income inequality and gun violence—then my readers deserve to know that I’m being paid by this really rich guy to work on issues like income inequality and gun violence. It’s only fair.

But let’s be clear, Nick is not paying me to blog. As always, all opinions I post here to HA are my own. And he’s certainly not paying me to be passionate about his issues—no amount of money can buy that. What he is offering me is a really great opportunity to continue to make a difference on issues I care deeply about, while earning a decent living in the process. And that is an opportunity I’d have to be stupid to pass up.

So there you go. Full disclosure. I am a sellout. Sorta. Make of it what you will.

On the home page of the Seattle Times website right now is a headline touting “Times poll: 84 percent support elephant-exhibit closure—which would represent impressive results, if they were produced by an actual, you know, poll. Instead, this number is the result of an entirely unscientific and easily freeped online poll, a totally noncredible bullshit methodology perfectly befitting this totally noncredible bullshit editorial page.

“Certainly the poll reflects a measure of self-selection,” cautions editorial columnist Erik Smith. No, Erik. The poll reflects nothing but self-selection. I too think the elephant enclosure should be closed, but these online polls are click-bait, pure and simple. Nothing more.

To wit:

[polldaddy poll=8281790]

Vote early, vote often!

A great example of why church and state should always remain absolutely separate:

The mayor of Winter Garden, Fla. on Thursday had a man removed from a City Commission meeting after he refused to stand during an opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.

As an atheist, I absolutely dread those stand and pray-or-pledge moments. And while I like to tell myself that I now stand out of respect to others, the truth is, my obeisance comes as much from a fear of standing (well, sitting) out as it does the desire to politely observe a societal norm. I got my share of nasty stares and verbal attacks when I was younger and more defiant. It just didn’t seem worth it.

But I never recite the Pledge of Allegiance—the “under God” part just sticks in my craw. And ironically, were I an observant Jew, I’m not sure I could pledge my allegiance to a flag regardless, a notion that sure does seem to contravene the second commandment prohibition on bowing down to graven images, at least in spirit.

So while some might click through the link and come back to argue that the man was tossed out for refusing to stand for the pledge, not the prayer, I’d argue same difference. As long as “under God” is in there, the pledge is a prayer. And as such it can always be used as a tool for ostracizing, excluding, and bullying nonbelievers.

Ecclesiastes 5:12
Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.

Discuss.

We doublechecked with our sources, and we stand by our work. We always correct mistakes, but there is no mistake here.

When the editors at Yes! Magazine first asked me to write a piece on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage struggle, I initially joked that they’d have to change their name to No! Magazine, because, you know, I don’t have much of a portfolio writing upbeat, forward looking pieces on local politics. But in fact, if there’s ever a political story to instill optimism, it’s “$15 and Change: How Seattle Led the Country’s Wage Revolution…”

Shortly after 11 p.m. that night, May 29, 2013, Durocher walked off her $9.19 an hour job to become the first fast-food worker in Seattle to strike for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The next day, hundreds of Seattle fast-food workers and their supporters followed her lead, temporarily shutting down as many as 14 restaurants to chants of “Supersize our salaries now!”

It was an outrageously ambitious goal—a 64 percent pay hike to more than twice the federal $7.25 an hour minimum wage. Yet only one year and four days later, the Seattle City Council met their demands, unanimously approving the first $15 minimum wage in the nation. Seattle’s path to a $15 minimum wage is a winding tale of effective organizing, smart messaging, bold experimentation, opposition missteps, and blind dumb luck. It is also a roadmap for bypassing our nation’s partisan gridlock by rolling out a broader progressive agenda one city at a time.

You can read the whole thing in the latest issue of Yes! Magazine, available online and on newsstands now.

It’s maybe not the smoothest piece I’ve ever written, but that’s totally my fault—I turned in a kajillion more words than they asked for (I originally included a historical context that stretched all the way back to 1905, because I’m just like that), and so some of the narrative flow necessarily got lost in the editing. Still, I think I give a pretty good overview of how the fast food strikes, the SeaTac $15 minimum wage initiative, and Kshama Sawant’s unlikely victory all played off of and into each other to yield the larger victory, sowing the seeds for similar victories nationwide.

Give it a read and let me know what you think.

And if you’re wondering what else I’ve been doing to pay the bills since leaving The Stranger, well, I’ve got news to share soon on that front too, as well as what it might mean for the future of HA. Stay tuned.

From the Stating the Obvious Department:

In an open revolt, more than 100 Seattle police officers suing to block new use-of-force polices assert that high-level city, police and union officials privately agree with their contention that the court-ordered changes put them and the public in danger.

But the officers who filed the suit aren’t naming those high-level officials, saying only that the officials told them they won’t seek to alter the policies because of the “politics” of the situation and the “perceived inability” to fight federally mandated reforms, the officers allege in newly filed court papers.

“This means that the City is now knowingly and willingly playing politics with Plaintiffs’ lives and the lives of the law-abiding citizens of Seattle,” the officers wrote in a 34-page amended complaint filed late Wednesday with U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman.

While I don’t think the court will view this complaint with much credence (“Evidence of police injuries is mounting,” the complaint says, without providing a scrap of, you know, evidence), I think this “playing politics” charge does provide a window into a fundamental misconception underlying many police abuses: some officers seem to have forgotten who is actually in charge.

See, it’s our democratically elected civilian government that writes the rules, not the guys with the guns and the pepper spray and the scary demeanor. And politics is the process through which democratic governments craft and enact policy. So of course the City is playing politics with the use of force of guidelines. That’s how city governments work.

Is it the perfect method for crafting and enacting policy? No. The perfect method would be to appoint me benevolent dictator. But alas, in a democratic republic, we’ll just have to rely on politics to get public policy done as best we can.

Ironically, by filing this complaint and giving it to the press, the rebel SPD officers are playing politics too. Which is fine. But the fundamental assertion implicit in their complaint—that it is the officers who should write the use of force rules, not their civilian overseers—is downright disturbing:

In the complaint, the officers allege the use-of-force policies do not reflect the work of department members who were asked to develop them and instead were hijacked by Bobb and the Justice Department.

“Those personnel will testify that the UF policy they wrote was altered almost in its entirety and replaced with specific language provided, and required, by the Monitor,” the complaint says, referring to the overall use-of-force policy.

“This supports,” the officers wrote, the “contention that DOJ, in partnership with Mr. Bobb, intends to use consent decrees in Seattle, as well as other jurisdictions, to rewrite longstanding constitutional law and principles intended to protect officer safety, and eliminate reasonable police practices, with which they — from the comfort and safety of their desks and with no experience facing dangerous threats — disagree or find distasteful.”

This is were some police officers go wrong. It is the officer’s job to enforce the law, not write it. And if these rebel officers truly harbor such arrogant disrespect for civilian authority, then I’m not sure we should feel comfortable arming them to the teeth and trusting them to patrol our streets.

I hate to say I told you so, but… no… wait… I actually kinda love saying I told you so:

Some UberX drivers in Seattle are no longer working for Uber as a way to protest how they’ve been treated by the transportation company.

About 100 drivers from a new group called Seattle Ride-Share Drivers Association gathered Wednesday to show their frustration with a recent price reduction Uber has implemented.

[…] The Seattle Ride-Share Drivers Association, which has 500 members, said Uber’s claim that its drivers are making more overall income is “unfounded.” It noted how some drivers, when expenses are accounted for, are actually now losing money when accepting a ride.

“No sensible person would stop working if he or she is making more money,” association board member Jamal Ahmed told GeekWire.

One of the more insulting and Orwellian attacks on me for advocating a more gradual and regulated entry of so-called “ride share” into Seattle’s taxi and for-hire market, was the charge that I was “anti-driver”—that I was shamelessly (and perhaps racistly) shilling for exploitive taxi owners at the expense of the city’s largely immigrant for-hire work force.

Well, you tell me: who is exploiting who?

Yes, under the old system we had a regulated monopoly with legal barriers to entry, but at least we had government regulators charged with looking out for the interests of drivers and consumers. But when Uber and Lyft are done with their creative destruction, there will be one, maybe two out-of-state for-profit monoliths dominating the market and dictating terms to drivers and customers alike.

Uber is going to have to do something to justify its $17 billion market capitalization. And as UberX drivers are beginning learn, that something will come at their expense.

Meanwhile, the lack of caps leaves aggrieved drivers nearly powerless to wage a meaningful protest. With over a thousand drivers in its system UberX apparently suffered no slow down in pick up  times due to the labor action. It’s like UberX has a virtual scab feature built right in. Hooray for progress!

 

So, I’m not going to link to them again (because why drive them traffic?), but the ironically named Freedom Foundation seems intent on drawing me into a pissing match. In their latest web video, their scruffy faced young spokesdude asks me (and you can tell he’s just an average Joe from his facial hair and his closet full of plaid shirts): “How does forcing someone to join a union spell freedom? Answer us that, Goldy.”

Well, as spokesdude very well knows, I can’t answer that. Because it’s a trick question. Nobody is ever forced to join a union.

Under federal law, the most a worker can be required to pay the union is an “agency fee” that covers the worker’s fair share of the cost of collective bargaining, contract administration, and the grievance process. No contract can require workers to join a union, or pay the fees that cover the union’s political activities. And yet nonmembers are still fully covered by the collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the union and the employer, receiving all of its benefits. Sweet!

What the Freedom Foundation is fighting for in its “right to work” initiatives is the freedom for nonmembers to get an entirely free ride: all of the benefits of the union contract, without paying any of the costs of negotiating or administering it. They are counting on narrow self-interest to drive individual workers to opt out of paying agency fees, bankrupting the union in the process. It is a calculated exercise in the tragedy of the commons.

So that’s the short answer to the specific question: nobody is forced to join a union.

As for scruffydude’s larger implication that being forced to pay one’s fair share of the cost of negotiating and administering a union contract is somehow a violation of one’s personal liberty, I guess the most direct response is: grow the fuck up!

I don’t get to opt out of paying for wars I oppose, or roads I don’t drive on, or a prison-industrial-complex predicated on the racist policy of jailing black men for petty crimes at much higher rates than we imprison whites. In addition, there are plenty of actual line items deducted from our paychecks to fund programs that, as individuals, we may or may not support; if you are a non-union-member employed in a unionized workplace, the agency fee may be one of them. So answer me this, spokesdude: How would paying an agency fee be any more a violation of your personal freedom than the portion of my paycheck funding Predator drone attacks and domestic NSA surveillance is a violation of mine?

Through our laws we make all sorts of collective decisions that inevitably run counter to the desires of individual members of the republic. One of those decisions, which coalesced during the previous Gilded Age, is that it would be beneficial to society to enable workers to organize collectively in order to at least partially balance the inordinate power of capital. The result was an expansion of wealth and economic opportunity unprecedented in all of human history.

That you oppose this policy, scruffydude, is clear. That the Freedom Foundation and its ALEC co-conspirators and the Koch brothers et al. who fund your cute little videos would like to free corporate America to dictate the terms of employment entirely unencumbered by government regulation or union organizing, is no secret. And you are free to pursue your agenda.

But when you crusade against the institution that won American workers the weekend, the eight-hour workday, paid overtime, workplace safety standards, workers compensation for on-job injuries, unemployment insurance, paid vacation time, the minimum wage, paid health insurance, and any number of other benefits and reforms we all now take for granted—don’t you dare pretend that it has anything to do with securing workers their freedom.

The Seattle Times on “How to fix Yakima’s racially polarized elections“:

Legislators should also rectify this un-American disparity, too common in the state, and pass the Washington Voting Rights Act, which empowers local jurisdictions to solve problems of voter exclusion at the local level.

No doubt. But also, you might want to stop endorsing all those Republican senators who are blocking passage of the Washington Voting Rights Act. Just sayin’.

What do you think? Sounds like a great opportunity to improve the quantity and quality of content here on HA, doesn’t it?

Dear Sir/Madam,

How are you? I hope you don’t mind that I contact you today. I am emailing to ask if you would be interested in accepting articles for your site.

I have a campaign I am currently running for which I feel that your website would be a great fit. My client is a respected provider of online casino. I am looking to provide you with an informative, entertaining, and well worded article which contains only one text link to the page of my client and does not look like advertising.

We are keen to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with you. Could you please let me know if you would be interested?

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Kind Regards,

Juliette Duprès
Marketing Specialist – Omnibuzzmedia

I get these sort of emails all the time. Yes, an “article” from a “respected provider of online casino” would be a “great fit” on a blog like HA with a long history of passionate screeds against expanding legal gambling. Makes me wonder how much of the Internet is composed entirely of advertorial link spam?

That said, I am always open to taking on new contributors. So if you’re a great local writer looking for your big shot at the minor leagues, let me know and I’ll give you read.

The recent infusion of $3 million from local zillionaires Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, and Nick Hanauer, has drawn national attention to Washington’s Initiative 594, which would close the so-called “gun show loophole” by finally imposing universal criminal background checks on all private gun sales in the state. And it’s got national pundits wondering if the NRA has finally met its match.

Yesterday in the Daily Beast, columnist Cliff Schector suggested that in Bill Gates, “the NRA pissed off the wrong nerd genius.” And then last night on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell repeated the theme, ending with NRA lobbyist Brian Judy’s infamous background-checks-equal-Hitler audio. “I think the rule is, when you reach for Nazi Germany, you know you’re losing,” concludes O’Donnell.

To be clear, this has been a very bad month for the NRA, which has been running silent ever since I released Judy’s anti-Semitic comments back on July 28. A month later, local and national coverage of I-594 still leads with that audio, and the NRA remains speechless. At this point it’s not only preventing the NRA from fighting I-594, it’s also interfering with its ability to lobby Washington lawmakers in advance of the coming legislative session.

Generally, I’m not a fan of really rich people buying their issues onto the ballot. But I’m also not a fan of fighting a political battle with one hand tied behind my back. The NRA has enjoyed the money advantage for far too long. It is entertaining watching them run up against an even wealthier foe.