A couple weeks ago, an overflow crowd packed into city hall for a public forum on Seattle’s growing affordable housing crisis, hosted by city council members Kshama Sawant and Nick Licata. It was a loud, emotional, and politically charged event that clearly demonstrated to Mayor Ed Murray the need for bold and decisive action:
SEATTLE (May 12, 2015) – Mayor Ed Murray and Councilmember Tom Rasmussen proposed legislation today that would strengthen election and ethics rules. The legislation amends existing law to explicitly prohibit campaign activities at, or adjacent to, official City sponsored events.
“City Hall should be – and is – a forum for ideas and civic conversation, but taxpayer-funded events should never supplement or support outside campaign activities,” said Mayor Murray. “We need to ensure public resources are not being used for political purposes. Electioneering and fundraising have no place at, or during, City-sponsored events.”
Jesus. Could Ed and his allies on the council tie their undies any tighter in a knot?
To be clear, there was nothing unethical about that affordable housing forum. What some of Sawant’s colleagues are really upset about is that she has once again latched onto an issue that is turning out to be one of the most dominant issues in the 2015 campaign. But she didn’t do that through illegal electioneering. She did that by being in touch with actual working people.
I really wish my friends in the Democratic establishment would focus more on solving the problems that Sawant is attacking instead of focusing on attacking Sawant.
The people are sick of getting fucked by the rich. Sawant is making that point too loudly for some. Wonder who that could be?
I think the problem was Sawant’s political allies setting up an overt campaign table at the event, to solicit votes and support for Sawant.
It’s not unreasonable to keep such electioneering out of City Hall. God knows there’s enough real estate elsewhere to support such activities.
So, you’ve gone from claiming the forum wasn’t political
http://horsesass.org/affordabl.....-politics/
to describing it as ‘politically charged’.
Does that mean you’ve libeled yourself?
@3 No, it means you’re too dense to grasp nuances.
She did that by being in touch with actual working people. –
So why isn’t she in touch with her contractors, paying their social security and medicare insurance payments?
There isn’t a good solution to housing costs. Unless, of course, you’re a rabbit in which case you can simply dig a hole wherever you happen to be. Human workarounds, such as joining the military, living under a bridge, or sponging off relatives, all have disadvantages. Even if you own a mortgage-free home, your housing isn’t free, because you still have to pay taxes, utilities, and insurance. Shelter costs money, period, and the best we can hope for is to avoid being victimized by market failures. But anyone with any experience in life knows market failures occur frequently, and when they do, some sort of government intervention is appropriate. That’s what government is for, it’s why we have government, because markets can’t do everything for everyone all the time.
If Seattle’s housing market is now experiencing a market failure, then some sort of government intervention is appropriate, although we should pick one that doesn’t make the market failure worse.
Wow Goldy being disingenuous in order to defend Sawant, shocking. Murray isn’t trying to fix housing with tighter electioneering regulations. Murray is trying to fix Sawant’s misuse of City Hall & taxpayer funds for political rallys. Housing is a seperate issue and apparently Goldy doesn’t know Murray can do more than one thing concurrently, address housing and deal with Sawants misuse of city hall.
Goldy on 4/28: It was policy, not political.
Goldy on 5/12: It was political, but not unethical.
Not hard to envision Goldy after the ethics claims are reviewed: OK, it was unethical, but not illegal.
Housing is of course political. Of course when people in city hall start saying that city hall is a forum for ideas and civic conversation ect I automatically assume the people saying it are engaged in politics. Perhaps they would have us believe there is nothing worth stealing in local politics? Or that they and we are not political animals? Perhaps they don’t trust we the people (the voters) to be able to choose correctly in our choice of who we want to represent us or we are unable to remove someone at the ballot box who is a danger to the political process or is a crook. Sometimes we the people do put a crook in. Huey Long for example but Huey was a superb populist politician and he served his constituents.
The issue of housing and the current status quo isn’t going away whether Sawant remains in office or not. Perhaps they are not trying to remove the messenger or the opposition, but we are not in Iran where if your an office holder you must dance to the tune of the Ayatollah. The Mayor and council should remember they are voted in and they don’t decide who is on the council we the people do. The citizens of Seattle also choose the Mayor so the Mayor and council jobs are political and they cannot just say something is or is not political without at least some of us taking on Voltair’s smile or our laughter.