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During her successful campaign for Seattle City Council I pooh-poohed critics who denounced Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant as unelectable due to her party’s stance in favor of collectivizing the Fortune 500. She was running for city council, for chrissakes. It’s not like she was going to make collectivizing Boeing a councilmanic priority.

But the collectivization thing does rub a lot of people the wrong way, striking them as both un-American and impractical. And while I generally share that skepticism, that won’t stop me from making the following bold proposal: Collectivize Comcast.

Comcast is fast becoming a dangerously large corporation with the economic power, media might, and political influence to twist public policy contrary to the public good. While perhaps not quite yet a monopoly in the old Ma Bell sense of the word, its dominant position as a broadband provider threatens to saddle American businesses and consumers with slower speeds and higher prices than much of the rest of the world enjoys. Comcast’s push to end net neutrality could impose a toll on innovation, while its self-interest in sucking profits from the infrastructure it has rather than investing in the infrastructure we need must be viewed as nothing less than a tax on US economic competitiveness.

Besides, everybody hates Comcast. So let’s collectivize it.

And by “collectivize,” I don’t mean taking their assets by eminent domain or some extraordinary property grab. I mean collectivizing the American way: via a hostile takeover of a public company… but financed by US taxpayers rather than hedge fund managers or LBO conmen.

At about $50 a share, Comcast currently has a market capitalization of just under $130 billion. Offer $60 a share—a 20 percent premium—and a majority of shareholders would likely sell out in a heartbeat. And you don’t even need to buy all the shares. Just enough to control the board. For a federal government that’s created trillions of dollars in new money via “quantitative easing,” that sort of cash would be chump change.

And we don’t even want all of Comcast. Once taxpayers seize control of the company we can recoup some of the cost by selling off all the parts we don’t need: NBC/Universal, its professional sports teams and stadia management business, and other valuable properties. All we want is the broadband business—a public utility—as the basis for building a national, publicly-owned broadband network.

It’s not as outrageous a proposal as it may at first sound. The federal government bought controlling interest in GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac when they faced collapse, because our leaders determined it to be in the public interest. Well what could be more in the public interest in the 21st century than assuring open and equal access to an affordable, high speed Internet?

Besides, just talking about collectivizing Comcast has value in itself. Remember, everybody thought Sawant was crazy for campaigning on a $15 minimum wage, and a year later, Seattle is on the verge of passing one. Debating a public takeover of Comcast seriously, by whatever term of art we choose, would be an exercise in going on the political offensive. And if executives at Comcast and other telecom giants begin to feel some genuine pushback, perhaps they’ll think twice before pushing their anti-competitive agenda too far.

Yeah, yesterday’s poll finding 73 percent support in Seattle for a $15 minimum wage is a union-sponsored survey producing a union-friendly result. So take that with a grain of salt. It is also a survey that was structured and released so as to support the minimum wage compromise that Mayor Ed Murray hammered out between labor and business leaders, and is now under consideration by the city council. Again, context.

But EMC Research is a reputable polling firm, and 550 likely voters is a decent sample size, so it would be silly simply to dismiss these results as biased. On the core question—do you support setting Seattle’s minimum wage at $15 an hour?—voter preference is unambiguous:

I’m not saying that millions of dollars of TV ads portraying small business owners warning they’ll close up shop or move out of town won’t nudge the needle. But that’s an awfully heavy needle to nudge. So defeating $15 at the polls would be a dubious proposition.

Even more dubious? Persuading city council members—all of whom are up for reelection in 2015—that there won’t be a price to pay for undermining this very popular proposal. Richard Conlin was ousted by a socialist after casting the lone vote against paid sick leave. I’m not sure there’s anybody on the council who relishes the thought of being branded as the anti-$15 minimum wage candidate.

That said, if there’s anything that I’ve heard from the council that unsettles me it’s the chatter about exploring whether to make the tip and/or benefit deduction permanent. There is a certain logic to a tip credit that I imagine might be compelling to the Bagshaw, Burgess, Clark, Rasmussen camp. Meanwhile, Harrell is particularly being pressured by minority and immigrant business owners to soften the deal on their behalf.

But a permanent tip credit would virtually guarantee a competing $15 Now initiative with at least partial labor support, so with only 23 percent of respondents voicing support for a permanent tip credit or benefit deduction, council members who value their jobs should think long and hard before undermining Murray’s grand bargain.

No, there’s nothing definitive about this poll, and yes it was commissioned by pro-minimum wage groups. But if the business community had polling that refuted the core premise that support for a $15 minimum wage remains very strong, they would have released their polling numbers too.

Council members who value their jobs should be very wary of ignoring these results.

A new poll conducted by EMC Research on behalf of labor organizations finds 74 percent of Seattle voters support a $15 minimum wage, up from 68 percent support in January (PDF). Also, voters find socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant more credible than the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Restaurant Association.

More thorough analysis in the morning, but for the moment I’m busy drinking this:

– Yes, bikes can be bad drivers too.

– Looking forward to specially colored bus lanes.

– This is kind of old, but (a) thank goodness Musab Mohammad Masmari plead guilty, even if it wasn’t to a hate crime and (b) the history of the attacks on Neighbours was interesting and scary.

– The story is a welcome corrective to the bromide that “government should be run like a business”–as though business is some unassailable fortress of morality.

– What I love most about this story is the assumption that aliens would want to be baptized Catholic. I mean maybe, but it seems like they’ve got their own thing going on. Did they come to Earth just to get baptized? Do they not have their own belief systems?

– Get better soon, Kathleen Hanna

As expected, Mayor Ed Murray announced today a Seattle-only tax package that would buy back 90 percent of bus service reductions financially strapped King County Metro has proposed for in-city routes. The $60 vehicle license fee and tenth of a cent sales tax increase would raise approximately $45 million a year—$42 million to restore and preserve Seattle bus routes, and $3 million towards a “Regional Partnership Fund” intended to attract matching funds from surrounding cities to spend toward preserving intercity commuter routes.

This is of course the same tax package rejected by county voters in Proposition 1 last, relying on the same “transportation benefit district” authority the state grants cities and counties. (I’ve dubbed it Proposition 1.1.) The only real differences between the two measures are that Prop 1 would have spent 40 percent of revenue on roads, whereas Prop 1.1 is dedicated entirely toward transit—and of course that Prop 1.1 will be voted on only in Seattle, where voters overwhelmingly favored Prop 1 by a better than two to one margin.

Murray was prodded into pushing forth his own proposal by a competing initiative to buy back Seattle bus service via a $30 million a year property tax increase. “We are thrilled that Seattle voters will have a chance to vote to preserve their bus service this fall,” initiative sponsor Ben Schiendelman of Friends of Transit replied via email. “With several progressive revenue sources available, we hope the council will take a serious look at all funding options before putting transit on the ballot.”

Schiendelman says that his organization has suspended signature gathering. Mission accomplished.

As for me, I’m agnostic as to the revenue source, as none of the options are great. “It is not ideal,” admitted Seattle City Council member Tom Rasmussen at this morning’s press conference. “We sought a motor vehicle excise tax from the state. They failed us.”

They certainly did.

Murray and others repeatedly stressed that this was just a temporary solution until the legislature grants Metro a viable regional funding option. But I’m not so sure. Given the thrashing Prop 1 took by county voters, I don’t know that a more progressive MVET would have passed either. And I’m not hopeful that we’ll get MVET authority out of Olympia until the Democrats retake control of the state senate, an iffy prospect this November. “This is really up to voters,” offered state Senator Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle). Good luck with that.

But the good news is that there appears to be strong support within Seattle from both the electorate and our elected leaders to tax ourselves to maintain crucial bus service. So while the suburbs may suffer, Seattle will attempt to at least take care of its own.

TANGENTIAL ASIDE: What is up with Seattle Times headline writers today? “County, city take variety of routes on bus rescue“…? No, they’ve taken the exact same route: cities buying back bus service hours. Not as bad as the Obamacare headline, but do the headline writers bother reading their own paper?

Oh no! “Insurers propose up to 26% increase in health-plan rates,” the headline on the front page of the Seattle Times website warns. Goddamn Obamacare ruining everything! Except, read the actual article and…

The proposed rate changes range from a decrease of 6.8 percent — from Molina Healthcare of Washington — to an increase of 26 percent from Time Insurance, a national company with relatively few Washington policyholders.

Most rate-change requests, particularly from larger insurers, were in the middle ground, with most asking for increases from about 2 to about 11 percent.

To anyone who has had individual insurance, premium increases are not surprising: Records show that, on average, insurers have proposed rate increases for individual plans from about 9 percent to more than 18 percent every year from 2007 to 2013.

So that one 26 percent rate hike proposal was an outlier—almost double the next highest request—that affects few Washingtonians, while the average rate hike request is actually lower than that during the previous six years! Yay for Obamacare! But you wouldn’t know that from the incredibly biased and misleading heading.

I mean, they could’ve written their headline to read “Insurers propose up to 6.8% cut in health-plan rates,” and been just as accurate. But they didn’t.

This is actually a really important election year story. Republicans have been looking to the rate hike requests as an election year opportunity to spin Obamacare into a disaster for consumers. But if the rate hike requests are actually coming in lower than in previous years, then that is at least preliminary evidence that the exchanges are pulling in enough healthy Americans to balance the costs.

So thanks, Seattle Times editors, for attempting to spin relatively good news on one of the first post-Obamacare rate hike requests into an anti-Obamacare national headline.

UPDATE: So how do other headline writers interpret the news? “A Washington State Health Insurer Plans to Cut Rates in 2015,” declares the Wall Street Journal, taking the opposite (and arguably sexier) spin. Pretty embarrassing for the Seattle Times.

UPDATE, UPDATE: As Richard points out in the comment thread, the editors updated the article at 10:35 am, changing the headline to the far more neutral: “Most state health insurers seek rate boost: Proposals compared.” Score another victory for Seattle Times Voluntary Ombudsman David Goldstein!

Tuesdays are made for politics. So please join us this evening for some politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and 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 earlier for dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state chapter of Drinking Liberally over the next week. The Tri-Cities, Vancouver, WA, and Redmond chapters also meet on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Bellingham chapter meets. For Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets. And next Monday, the Aberdeen, Yakima and Olympia chapters meet.

With 215 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.

For legislative bodies, I’m of the opinion that individual legislators really ought to subsume their constituents’ needs to the need of the whole. So yeah, state legislators should advocate for the areas they represent, but they should do what’s best for the state when the two are in conflict. After all, they’re state legislators. And yes, I realize in practice it doesn’t work that way for most politicians. So I’m glad that Ed Murray has for the bulk of his career in government had a regional/statewide view of problem solving.

Still, now that he’s no longer a legislator, he should probably knock it off. I mean, finding regional solutions are great if they benefit Seattle. But if they don’t benefit Seattle, there’s really no point in him doing them.

So now that there’s a plan to save transit in Seattle, I hope that he can find more times when Seattle needs to, or it’s just Seattle’s best option to, go it alone. Sure it would have been in Seattle’s best interest to be better connected to the suburbs. And it would be better for the planet if the rest of King County used buses more. But the rest of the county’s rejection of buses means it’s in Seattle’s best interest not to tether ourselves to the rest of the county on transit.

Seattle is big enough and different enough politically from the rest of the state and the county that sometimes the best thing is to go it alone. I realize that might offend the mayor’s sensibilities. But he wanted to be Mayor and not Senate Minority Leader, so his job isn’t to form the best coalitions, it’s to lead one city.

By all accounts Mayor Ed Murray is expected to ask the city council to send to the ballot a measure to buy back in-city Metro bus service cuts via a $60 car tab fee and tenth of a cent hike in the sales tax. Sound familiar? That’s the exact same tax that was rejected by King County voters last month in the form of Proposition 1, because it’s the exact same taxing authority also granted to the city via a transportation benefit district.

Call it Proposition 1.1.

I suppose this funding option is as good as any other, especially considering that Prop 1 passed here in Seattle. Even better, it’s Ed’s idea rather than Ben’s, so that means Prop 1.1 will enjoy Ed’s enthusiastic support. Which is fine. I don’t really care who gets the credit for things as long as good things get done. And buying back Metro bus service cuts is a good thing.

That said, I just can’t help but feeling a little wistful over the fact that just couple years ago Seattle voters rejected a similar car tab measure targeted toward expanding transit service—precious taxing authority we’ll now be using merely to preserve transit service. That’s not much of a step forward. Also, it is of course a shame that suburban and exurban Metro riders will be totally dicked over by these cuts.  But what are we to do? Suffer in sympathy?

Feisty and I just went for a walk, and I took the opportunity to stream Philadelphia sports radio station 97.5 The Fanatic on my phone. Because I’m a diehard Philadelphia Eagles fan, and I was interested in hearing Philly sports talk’s take on the Eagle’s draft. But all any of the callers wanted to talk about was The ESPN Kiss: Missouri linebacker Michael Sam’s emotional embrace of his boyfriend after getting the news that the St. Louis Rams had made him the first out player drafted by an NFL team.

Most of the callers were pretty damn mad. Or disgusted. Or both. Which I guess is a sad commentary on how much anti-gay prejudice remains in mainstream America.

But here’s the thing: host Mike Missanelli forcefully defended the kiss, repeatedly calling out his callers on their bigotry. “If Michael Sam chooses to kiss is boyfriend on national television, what rights does that take away from anyone else?” Missanelli rhetorically asked his audience. “Zero,” he answered. Indeed, Missanelli didn’t just defend Sam’s public display of gay affection, he ridiculed his callers for their outrage, repeatedly comparing it to the outrage people used to express at seeing a black man kiss a white woman.

This is sports talk. In Philadelphia. A disproportionately white, middle-aged, blue collared, Catholic (Italian & Irish) audience. And the hosts are calling their listeners bigots for objecting to a televised gay kiss.

The next generation of sports fans are going to be influenced by these talkers. And that’s progress.

It’s not often that I find myself passionately on the same side of a controversial issue with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Times editorial board. Then again, there really shouldn’t be anything controversial about net neutrality.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has suffered a barrage of criticism since he proposed allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to cut deals with content providers to pay more for faster service.

Wheeler’s pay-for-prioritization proposal means the end of net neutrality, the idea that all Internet content is treated equally — free of toll booths or fast lanes.

Imagine if, let’s say, HA suddenly started loading a quarter as fast as the Seattle Times—or perhaps not at all—because I couldn’t afford to pay Comcast and Qwest the “prioritization fees” necessary to get my content to their customers  via their fast lanes? No wait. I don’t have to imagine. I’ve already been through something like that in a prior venture.

When I first started up my software company in the early 1990s, large software retailers like Egghead, Computer City, and CompUSA all bought direct. We got crappy terms, and it was often a hassle (Computer City had us ship directly to individual stores, sometimes ordering as few as two copies per store), but at least we had access to the market.

But it was right around that time that an explosion of consumer titles and a wave of consolidation started changing everything for small independent publishers. One by one the major retailers stopped buying direct, instead insisting on buying through one of two or three distributors. But we were too small to get into distribution. The two largest distributors demanded annual six-figure “market development funds”—essentially a retail channel entrance fee. A second tier distributor took us on before quickly going bankrupt, stiffing us on tens of thousands of dollars in accounts receivable.

But wait. It gets worse.

Once we lost access to brick and mortar retail, the mail order catalogs, which had previously accounted for more than 70 percent of our sales, started jacking up the “co-op advertising fees” to independents like us who had no other options. An eighth of a page ad that cost us a few hundred bucks a month in 1993 could run as much as $8,000 a month by 1996. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a market for our rhyming dictionary software, it’s that we could no longer afford to access to it. So products like ours disappeared from the market until the App Store model democratized the software industry more than a decade later.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough. When I first started blogging a decade ago, I had every disadvantage but one: equal and unfettered access to readers. And so I was free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, winning what readership I could based on the quality of my content rather than the whims (or extortion) of some gatekeeper. This relatively low barrier to entry is one of the things that has made the Internet so transformative. But take away net neutrality and you will ultimately create a sort of broadband apartheid—a separate and unequal Internet forever in the grasp of those who levy the tolls, and those few who can afford to pay them.

Save the Internet!

– The funny looking building that I write too many posts about is turning 10 this week.

– Congrats Daddy Constantine.

– For all the chatter about the law’s unpopularity, the fact remains that Obamacare is not only more popular than the Republican repeal fantasy, it’s also more popular than Republicans.

– Glad to see crisis pregnancy centers having trouble with their deceptive advertising.

– When did appeals to realism become a trump card in pop culture criticism? And when did we agree that a certain kind of Internet commenter is the final arbiter of what is real and what is not? (has a blurred out, but maybe still NSFW picture)

Last week’s contest was won by Theophrastus. It was Bonn, Germany.

This week’s a random location from the Google Maps views, good luck! (you may have noticed that the redesign allows for larger images in these posts from now on, thanks Goldy!)

And Happy Mother’s Day!

Jeremiah 20:14-18
Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?

Happy Mother’s Day! Discuss.

University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be taken in the NFL draft, when the St. Louis Rams selected him in the seventh round, the 249th pick out of 256.

At 6-1, 261 pounds, Sam is considered undersized for his position and not a great fit for the Rams’ 4-3 defense, so he’d have to be considered a long shot to make the team. But still, his high-profile draft selection breaks an awfully important barrier for gay athletes weighing the career implications of coming out of the closet. So kudos to the Rams for using a draft pick to make this statement.