HorsesAss.Org

Next year when the wage increases start to kick in in Seattle, large employers, including fast food franchises (if their lawsuit doesn’t pan out) will be paying more than the mom and pop places. And there will be a tip penalty at those places, so the employees at McDonalds or Chipotle will probably be making more than at a greasy spoon or a local Thai place, at least for a few years.

Now, I already eat a fair amount of fast food, so it’s not like this has been driving my decisions on that level. But now I’ll know that I’m not contributing to poverty wages, so that will be a plus. Or maybe I should eat what I have a hankering to eat and not worry about this since $15 is coming for everyone?

So is the initiative going to change anyone’s eating habits?

For all the hoo-hah over threatened challenges to Seattle’s historic $15 minimum wage ordinance, there will be no minimum wage measures on the ballot this fall. Nada. Bubkes. Zilch.

Shortly after a group of local business owners calling themselves “Forward Seattle” announced a proposed charter amendment to instead raise the city’s minimum wage to $12.50 over five years, City Attorney Pete Holmes let it be known that voter-proposed charter amendments can only be run in odd-numbered years. Holmes is out of town and unavailable for comment, but a quick perusal of the city charter and the Revised Code of Washington suggests he’s right. Article XX, Section 2 of the charter states that amendments proposed by voters are to be ratified at “the next general municipal election,” while RCW 29A.04.330 clearly says that city general elections are to be held in “odd-numbered years.” And in case you think the intent is vague, Article XX, Section 1 makes a clear distinction from council-proposed amendments, which are to be ratified in the “next general state or municipal election.” There’s really no other way to read this language.

Which is really pretty amusing given how Forward Seattle’s home page makes a point of boasting: “We’ve met with experts, we’ve hired consultants, and we’re ready to make this happen.” Sounds like their experts and consultants owe them a refund.

Of course, I suppose this is also embarrassing for 15Now.org, which has been gathering signatures for its own impossible minimum wage charter amendment—but no more embarrassing than it is to all the political and business insiders who allowed $15 Now to bully them into compromise by holding an empty gun to their heads. A couple weeks ago the chatter in City Hall was that $15 Now would go to the ballot almost regardless of what the council passed. Didn’t anybody bother to read the charter and make sure the socialists had their ducks in a row?

I didn’t. But I’m just some dumb blogger, not one of the high priced consultants and attorneys that helped broker this deal.

Why Holmes never bothered to tell $15 Now that its charter amendment would have to wait until 2015, I don’t know. But with yesterday’s statement he kinda did $15 Now a favor. While Kshama Sawant and the rest of $15 Now’s leadership has already declared victory, there remains a lot of pressure from within the rank and and file of the organization to continue to the 2014 ballot with their more sweeping measure. But now we know that’s impossible. Divisive debate averted.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, it would be virtually impossible at this late date to go through all the procedural hurdles to file a city initiative and gather enough signatures to qualify for the November 2014 ballot without the implicit cooperation of the city council. Which nobody would get. So there will be no minimum wage ballot measures this fall.

As for yesterday’s other “news,” that HA namesake Tim Eyman has filed an initiative to the legislature seeking to preempt municipal minimum wage laws, well, who the fuck cares? Eyman files dozens of initiatives a year trolling for financial backers, and this one is weak even by his spindly standards.

The minimum wage is hugely popular statewide, last passing by a two-to-one margin in 1998, winning all 39 counties. So who would put money behind this dog? Not the Washington Restaurant Association, which I’m told tacitly agreed not the challenge Seattle’s ordinance in exchange for the longer phase-in and temporary tip credit. Longtime Eyman sugar daddy Michael Dunmire is dead. This isn’t part of Kemper Freman Jr.’s trains = communism obsession. AWB has been quietly advising members to distance themselves from Eyman’s antics.

Eyman is nothing without other people’s money, and his funding sources have been drying up. 2014 will be the first year without an Eyman initiative on the ballot since 2006. He’s a paper tiger. Good riddance.

How was an even larger tragedy avoided?

Jon Meis, a student working as a building monitor, pepper-sprayed the shooter as he stopped to reload, then put him in a chokehold and took him to the ground, according to police and a friend who spoke with Meis after the shooting. Then other students and faculty members rushed to hold the shooter down until police arrived.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre infamously proclaimed: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Jon Meis’s conscientious act of civic heroism pretty much disproves that.

And it also proves how effective pepper spray can be as a weapon. A mere civilian used pepper spray to disable a gunman. Police officers throughout the nation might want to take this weapon more seriously the next time they are tempted to indiscriminately mace an old lady or a peacefully assembled group of nonresisting student protesters.

There was a mass shooting at SPU today. I don’t have much time to put something up here, but people might want to talk.

Now that the $15 minimum wage ordinance has passed, Seattle Times editorial columnist Jonathan Martin predicts that “Seattle’s politics are going to snap back to the center…”

With an alliance of big labor and Occupy Wall Street activism, the radical $15 wage idea shot from outer political orbit to inevitability in little more than a year. Never mind that it is an unproven experiment, with as much potential to close businesses as it has to boost low-wage workers’ paychecks.

But as the $15 movement held a dance party, literally, at City Hall on Monday, I could hear an almost sigh.

It was the sound of Seattle’s politics — after a spin around the dance floor with the far-left — snapping back to its more natural state of deliberate, bland, center-left policies.

Sigh. I want to like Martin, I really do. But there’s something about joining that paper’s editorial board that turns its writers a little stupid.

First of all, “unproven experiment” is redundant. That’s the whole purpose of conducting an experiment: To prove something. And yet in the exact same sentence in which Martin goes out of his way to double emphasize the unknown consequences of a $15 minimum wage (it’s not just an experiment, mind you, but an unproven experiment!), he goes on to assert certainty as to its outcome: “as much potential to close businesses as it has to boost low-wage workers’ paychecks.” The experiment is totally unproven, says Martin, yet the relative probability of potential outcomes is totally known.

Um… huh?

Indeed, if you dissect the logic of that sentence further, what it is actually asserting is that the $15 minimum wage will close businesses. We absolutely know that it will “boost low-wage workers’ paychecks”—that’s merely the mechanism of raising the minimum wage. So to say that it has “as much potential to close businesses as it has to boost low-wage workers’ paychecks,” is to express certainty that it will close businesses.

Hell, that doesn’t sound “unproven” at all. At least to Martin.

But I digress. My real beef with Martin’s column is not that sloppy sentence. It’s with his equally sloppy presumption that the $15 minimum wage is somehow outside of the center of Seattle politics.

It was a deal brokered by the mayor between business and labor leaders. Polls showed the proposal enjoying overwhelming public support. It passed the city council by a unanimous 9-0 vote. What could be more politically centrist than that? Yes, the speed in which we moved on the issue—one year and four days from when striking fast food workers first made the $15 an hour demand to the moment the city council met it—was remarkable for process-obssessed Seattle. But that was a testament to the speed in which the issue achieved consensus.

No, there’s nothing leftist or “radical” about a minimum wage or a millionaires tax—certainly not here in Seattle, where such proposals pass easily. Indeed, if anything is far outside the center of Seattle politics it is the Seattle Times editorial board and its relentlessly anti-tax, anti-goverment, anti-Seattle agenda. I mean, this is a paper whose publisher has been one of the leading national voices in favor of eliminating the inheritance tax at a time when income and wealth inequality is growing to such extremes as to threaten the very being of our democracy.

Now thats radical!

Martin’s effort to define policy as left, right, or center is purely arbitrary, and totally detached from public opinion. He scoffs at the notion of council member* Kshama Sawant’s proposed “millionaires tax,” yet if we were to put a 5 percent tax on incomes over $1 million on Seattle’s ballot in 2016, do you think it would pass? Of course it would! Because here in Seattle, taxing the income of the wealthy is a centrist policy!

On economic issues, it is the Seattle Times editorial board that is far outside the mainstream.

* Yes, that’s right, she’s a council member. 93,682 Seattleites voted for Sawant. So how far outside the center of Seattle politics could she really be?

– Wildland fire season is coming and the more we put carbon in the air the worse it gets

– The 50th Anniversary of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer: Remembering What Fannie Lou Hamer Taught Us

– You’ve heard the expression, “You catch more flies with honey”? Well, Republicans would catch more flies with sanity.

– Maybe I’m wrong, but I think “As far as I can tell, there’s no video, as the Seattle Channel’s appetite for zoning meetings is lower than mine.” may be the greatest opening sentence in the history of language. Also, the actual piece on the Rainier upzone is interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

– Oh hey, PZ Myers is in town. If you go see him, try not to be an asshole.

– The Aziz Ansari bit on 50 Cent not knowing what grapefruit is is one of my favorites. Now the plot thickens.

Now that SeaTac has lead and Seattle followed suit, what’s the next thing to push for a $15 minimum wage? Goldy mentioned a few days ago that a decision hadn’t been made about the Charter Amendment. I wouldn’t presume to tell people who’ve been this successful how to organize, but I’m not sure where energy should be expended next.

Is it pushing the entire county, or state? Are there other Washington cities that are ripe for an initiative or a City Council vote? Is it joining forces with the $10.10 people to raise the minimum wage nationally, even if it isn’t as much as we’d like? Is it making sure Seattle gets the implementation right? Is is making sure not to leave Port Of Seattle jobs behind?

I realize that people can walk and chew gum at the same time, so supporting some of these things doesn’t necessarily preclude doing others. Still, there is only so much time and talent, and I’d like to see it keep going.

In the immediate wake of the passage of Seattle’s highest in the nation $15 an hour minimum wage, the International Franchise Association announced plans to file suit against the ordinance on the grounds that it discriminates against franchise owners. From their press release:

“The Seattle City Council and Mayor Murray’s plan would force the 600 franchisees in Seattle, which own 1,700 franchise locations employing 19,000 workers, to adopt the full $15 minimum wage in 3 years, while most other small business owners would have seven years to adopt the $15 wage. … The City Council’s action today is unfair, discriminatory and a deliberate attempt to achieve a political agenda at the expense of small franchise business owners.”

Uh-huh. First of all, the minimum wage ordinance does discriminate against franchisees. And if franchisees were a protected class—like gays or women or minorities—they might have a legal point. But they’re not. So they don’t. Our laws pick winners and losers all the time, for example tax credits written specifically to benefit Boeing (though without ever mentioning Boeing by name). Indeed, if the council had passed an ordinance applying a $15 minimum wage only to franchises, that would have been legal too.

So they’re going to lose their lawsuit. But that’s besides the point.

No, the real news here is that the industry association that claims to represent the interests both franchisers and franchisees—powerful corporations like McDonalds, Subway, and Dominos—is fighting to have their workers phased in to $15 over seven years instead of three. That’s it: $16.49 by 2021 versus $15 by 2017. They’re not fighting $15 at all. They just want to be treated like everybody else.

Even the fast food industry is prepared to capitulate on $15. Lawmakers elsewhere should follow suit.

– Enough Burien/Renton transit talk to make your head spin.

– I’m not happy with how much money is going into initiatives, but at least it’s going into the side I agree with on gun control.

– It is fun to see ACA opponents in places where it has worked. Too bad about all the harm that they can do.

– It really takes the cake when Republicans don’t want to study the effects of climate change on national security.

– Seriously, what is he bitching about? He believes in the market, right? So this foolish decision will cause businesses to abandon commie Seattle for the red-state hinterland, and capitalism wins! I can see those bright folks currently working at Seattle-based businesses like Amazon, Starbucks, Safeco, Nordstrom, Cray, Corbis, et alia, not to mention the venture capitalists and internet jockeys, and the hipster entrepreneurs of Sub Pop and Babeland, deciding they’ve had enough of this command economy and running off to Fritters, Alabama or North Dakota to enjoy all the freedom and fracking.

– Shooting star

I’m busy today desperately trying to meet a deadline on a freelance piece (damn, I write slowly), so if you’re jonesing for more Goldy just head on over to the KTTH website to listen to me “debate” conservative host Ben Shapiro yesterday shortly after passage of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. At least, they’re calling it a debate. I was calling in via cell phone from a noisy hallway outside council chambers, so to me it was just a difficult to hear phone call.

But whatever. I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but I’m sure I did fine. If you can bear to listen to 20 minutes of the Ben Shapiro Show, let me know how you think I did.

A lot of things had to come together just right to lead towards yesterday’s 9-0 passage of Seattle’s historic $15 an hour minimum wage. But if you want to really piss off righties, you might want to remind them of the integral role that former ACORN activists played in sparking the $15 movement.

The very notion of demanding a $15 wage—the number 15 itself—came out of the first fast food strike in New York City on November 29, 2012, a strike organized by New York Communities for Change. And NYCC itself was organized by former ACORN activists, rising from the ashes of the right-wing witch hunt that dried up ACORN’s funding and forced its collapse.

Ironically, after ACORN’s demise, NYCC’s leaders decided to refocus on their community organizing roots, a focus that led it to its efforts to organize fast food workers. NYCC was also one of the first organizations to provide support to Occupy Wall Street, helping that spontaneous movement grow and spread. And it was on Occupy Seattle that Kshama Sawant and her Socialist Alternative comrades first cut their local organizing teeth. Thus both Sawant’s stunning election and Seattle’s highly successful fast food strikes can trace their roots at least indirectly to NYCC’s post-ACORN grassroots activism.

In a way, you could even make an argument that Seattle’s $15 minimum wage might never have happened without ACORN’s collapse! So, hey… thanks, righties!

Today is a special day in the Calendar of Political Americana. It’s National Fist Bump Day, a day to remember a young Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama using a body gesture in public that so befuddled FOX News anchor E.D. Hill that she asked, “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?!?.”

The idea behind National Fist Bump Day is to give Americans a chance to make the world a slightly better place with a simple and fun gesture of respect,” says David Weiner, one of the organizers, along with Sarah Greenwalt. “It may not solve the world’s problems, but it can at least reaffirm the fact that in the end, we all can get down with each other.

Wait…screw that Kumbaya shit. It’s a day to ruthlessly mock the the fuck out of the right wing propaganda mill’s outrageous, dishonest, and racist attacks against Barack Obama.

Tuesday is also a primary election day of some consequence. In California, the top two-style primary will select the Republican that will go on to be crushed by Gov. Jerry Brown in the general election. There are a bunch of interesting House races in California, as well.

In Mississippi, the senior Sen. Thad Cochran (R) is in a tight race against a Teabagger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel.

In South Dakota, a large Republican primary will determine the opponent for Rick Weiland (D) in the U.S. Senate seat race opened up by the retirement of Sen. Tim Johnson (D).

A similar scenario is happening in Iowa with the retirement of Sen. Tom Harkin (D), and a 5-way GOP primary will determine the opponent for Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA-01). Of course, Braley’s House seat is open and there are competitive races on both sides of the isle in that race.

In Montana, Sen. John Walsh (D), who was appointed to the seat that Max Baucus left to become U.S. Ambassador to China, seems likely to win the Democratic primary. Also in Montana, the open house seat has a five-way GOP primary that will select an opponent for  John Lewis (D).

In New Mexico, there is a five-way primary that will determine Gov. Susan Martinez’s (R) Democratic opponent.

New Jersey has a primary election, as well, with some mildly interesting House races.

So, with all that excitement on deck, please join us tonight for an evening of electoral politics and scary body gestures over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up before that for dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. They’re everywhere! The Tri-Cities chapter also meets this and every Tuesday night. The Lakewood chapter meets on Wednesday. For Thursday, the Spokane and Tacoma chapters meet. And the Enumclaw chapter meets on Friday.

With 207 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

Okay, the council meeting hasn’t even started yet, but its a festive atmosphere in council chambers as the throng of $15 minimum wage supporters gathers for the inevitable.

Stay tuned and I’ll let you know when it’s official, as well as fill you in on various updates.

UPDATE 1:59PM: Just like me, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has already released a celebratory statement:

Today’s vote in Seattle will go down in history as a milestone in the struggle to raise wages and ensure fair pay for all workers. It is proof that when working people organize and make their voices heard, we all benefit.

While Republicans in Congress fail to act, Seattle, along with other cities and states around the country, is ensuring that workers receive a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work. We have already seen progress in states from Hawaii to Minnesota, and we will continue to fight to provide every worker with a good living wage and an opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

UPDATE 2:23PM: Unlike previous council meetings, Subway franchisees and other business representatives seem to have abandoned the chambers to minimum wage advocates. No doubt there was plenty of pro-business lobbying behind the scenes, but they appear to have given up on making their case in public. Public testimony continues.

UPDATE 2:39PM: Council member Nick Licata: “Unfortunately, I was unable to attend last week for the vote on training wages.” Council member Tim Burgess: “Good.”

UPDATE 3:15PM: Council member Kshama Sawant closes her speech in favor of the ordinance: “Fifteen dollars in Seattle is just the beginning. We have an entire world to win.”

UPDATE 3:39PM: It’s official! Ordinance passes 9-0! Audience cheers, than quickly files out, leaving council to continue other business.

– Sen. Murray Proposes Summer Food Benefits For Low-Income Kids

– It’s kind of amazing to think you can pull off a both-sides-say about something that’s in people’s face like income inequality.

– More playing in the street, pleez.

– I was never much of a fan of Ken Schram, but Andrew at NPI has a nice remembrance.

– In conclusion, donate your motherfucking organs.

– Richard Sherman’s Let’s Move video is pretty great.

At some point over the past several days, 15Now.org cleverly transposed its Twitter avatar to read “15won.” But that subtle declaration of victory hasn’t stopped the organization from pushing council members to make the minimum wage ordinance even better:

Retweet if you agree @bruceharrell @Jean_Godden @CouncilmanTim should vote against delaying start date & training wages! @15forSeattle

— 15 Now (@FifteenNow) June 2, 2014

The best defense is a good offense, and all that. Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and her 15 Now comrades have been roundly criticized by the establishment types for continuing forward with their initiative even as a business/labor compromise inched toward passage. But it’s an “or else” strategy that has been incredibly effective in defending against unacceptable concessions.

The full city council will officially pass the ordinance this afternoon, making Seattle the first city in America to adopt a $15 an hour minimum wage. And then the real celebration can begin.