HorsesAss.Org

While writing about Boeing threatening to leave the Puget Sound, I’ve had some thoughts batting around my mind about corporations more generally. I think all major (and most minor) corporations have 4 obligations. 3 that I think are necessary to their survival, as well as just decency and one that’s important but not really in the same way. Corporations have obligations to their shareholders and their investors. They have an obligation to their workers. They have an obligation to their customers. They also have an obligation, although probably not at the same level, to the community where they’re based.

I know this sounds naive, and it probably is. Still, I think those obligations, even though they’re sometimes in competition with each other, make corporations worth having as instruments in society. Obviously, we put a lot of emphasis on shareholders and investors. Probably too much, but they do play a role. And if they’re getting paid a reasonable amount for bringing a return on investment, then fine.

Still, businesses must have an obligation to their employees. When companies like Boeing threaten to leave, we keep hearing about the jobs they provide. But we rarely ever hear about an obligation to provide good jobs. When companies are lagging in this, unions, or government regulation like workplace safety and a minimum wage can force a minimum standard. But I think corporations have an obligation to the people working for them to treat them as something more than just cogs.

They also have an obligation to their customers. Ultimately, they’re making a product or service for someone or some group. When I use a good product, it reflects well on the company that made it, and when I have a bad product it feels like a bit of a betrayal. I think that’s part of the reason that people are sensitive to bad customer service.

Finally, and more generally, businesses have a duty to the communities where they’re located and where they do business. When companies give to charity, we call it “corporate citizenship.” As long as we understand that’s a metaphor, and corporations can’t actually be citizens, that’s fine as far as it goes. Still, there ought to also be an obligation not to pollute and to pay their taxes. Basically, it ought to be better for the community that a corporation locates there. Otherwise, why have them?

I don’t really know what my point is here, but I think the discussion is too much on shareholder value or return on investment, and not on the other things that companies ought to do.

Don’t be caught off guard when Uncle Ernie unloads about Obama’s death panels and the U.N. coming for his guns. Please join us for an evening of politics and a pint at this evening’s Thanksgiving warm-up edition of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday evening at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our normal starting time is 8:00pm.

Can’t make it tonight? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. The Tri-Cities chapter meets tonight and every Tuesday night. The Bellingham and Burien chapters meet on Wednesday. And next Monday, the Yakima, South Bellevue and Olympia chapters meet.

With 212 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting near you.

– President Obama was in town over the weekend.

– I wonder if the public transportation data for Thurston County would look the same for the rest of the state.

– Obamacare remains a great deal for Boehner and his contemporaries, and while eliminating the law altogether might save Boehner a small amount of money if he re-entered FEHBP, it would be a huge liability for a much greater number of 64 year olds without Boehner’s wealth and job security.

– I don’t know why the grade-school hero fantasies of conservatives are allowed to et the terms of all of our political debates. But that’s how we do things.

– Like so many aspects of American life, holidays have become 2-tiered

– And speaking of, I don’t know about the rest of the bloggers here, but I don’t think I’ll post anything on Thursday or Friday.

I-502 got more than 54% of the vote in Pierce County. So naturally, you’d think that politicians in the county would be, if not eager, at least willing to zone marijuana businesses. You’d probably not think they would support banning any business until the Federal government decides to legalize marijuana. Maybe somewhere like Franklin County where it lost more than 61% of the vote. But not a Puget Sound county where a majority of voters supported legalization at the ballot, surely.

Well, a majority of the Pierce County Council voted to not allow any marijuana businesses. Fortunately, it was vetoed by the exec (Tacoma News Tribune link; hat tip to Sensible Washington on Facebook).

Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy has vetoed the County Council’s ordinance that prohibits licensed marijuana businesses from operating until the U.S. Congress removes marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances.

McCarthy said the county’s ordinance conflicts with state law. She said the county must comply with state law, which permits the licensing of marijuana businesses.

[…]

An override requires five of seven council votes.

[…]*

The council adopted the ordinance Nov. 5 by a vote of 4-3.

So yay. It probably won’t be overridden.

Still, it seems strange to me that people are so hesitant to support marijuana legalization where it’s popular. I mean I get that drugs-are-bad is the default position that a lot of people have. And the Federal government is a big scary thing people can point to. But I-502 was passed with popular support and the sky hasn’t fallen. It’s time for people to stop fighting it.

[Read more…]

– The Seattle Weekly has an interesting piece on Rosellini’s FBI file.

– Obama is better than George W. Bush. Still it’s still too many deaths in wars.

– Oh, and hey, a deal with Iran for 6 months.

– But the GOP has no plan if ObamaCare works. They have no plan for the sick, the healthy, or their own political future. What that should do is twofold; It should tell you clearly that we’re going to win and it should terrify you. The Republicans are in the midst of madness and with it comes a blindness that will destroy them. Let’s hope they don’t take the rest of us with them.

– Are you being persecuted?

– I’m glad KEXP is going to be DJing the New Year’s Eve at the Space Needle but this article seems to think that Pearl Jam and The Ramones are what’s hot in the streets. What?

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Barstow, CA.

This week’s is related to something in the news from November, good luck!

Hosea 3:1-3
Once again the Lord spoke to me. And this time he said, “Hosea, fall in love with an unfaithful woman who has a lover. Do this to show that I love the people of Israel, even though they worship idols and enjoy the offering cakes made with fruit.”

So I paid fifteen pieces of silver and about ten bushels of grain for such a woman. Then I said, “Now you are mine! You will have to remain faithful to me, though it will be a long time before we sleep together.”

Discuss.

So…the Vice President walks into a sub shop.

Cheney on Cheney:

• Sam Seder: Cheney attacks Cheney; Cheney loses
• Ann Telnaes: Gay marriage and the Cheney family.
• Young Turks: Liz Cheney v. Mary Cheney.

Lawrence O’Donnell with Bill Maher: North American politics:

Young Turks: FAUX News Freaks out over Oprah race comments.

Bashir: Why Sarah Palin is a ‘a racist, world-class idiot’.

The “Constitutional Option”:

• O’Donnell: Unprecedented G.O.P. obstructionism forces Senate Dems to “go nuclear”
• Chris Hayes: Enough is ENOUGH!
• The Senate goes nuclear.
• Jon: The “Nuclear Option” Is kind of a dumb nickname
• Maddow: GOP obstruction sparks nuclear reaction.
• Chris Cillizza The nuclear fall-out
• Sharpton: Right wing media’s lunatic reactions to U.S. Senate’s ‘nuclear option’ vote
• Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: Democrats detonate the filibuster nuke. Who wins?
• Young Turks: Going nuclear.

Sarah Silverman on first meeting Obama.

Young Turks: The Obama “one nation under God” fake controversy.

“Walmart Poor:”

• Stephen: Walmart’s employee food drive.
• Young Turks: Walmart food drive for poverty-level employees.
• Sam Seder: Walmart holding food drive for employees.
• Thom: We are subsidizing low wage employers.

Sam Seder: Caller humiliates Rush Limbaugh.

Ann Telnaes: Selfies we’d like to see.

The Audacity of Affordable Health Care for Everyone:

• Sharpton: Republicans map out waves of “malicious attacks” over ObamaCare
• Bill Maher with some new rules for ObamaCare haters.
• Fallon: Obama apologizes for health care roll-out and other things.
• Ann Telnaes: Tiny Cruz Care
• Obamacare: or herpes.
• Mark Fiore: A message from Health Insurers of America.
• Michael Brooks and Cliff Schecter: The conservative parts of Obamacare are the problem.
• Ari Melber: Three reasons why ‘ObamaCare’ is working!

Stephen: On Russia’s gay Olympics ban.

Hundreds of gallons of highly radioactive waste leaking into groundwater at Hanford.

Bashir: U TX Young Republican’s totally no-racist Catch-An-Illegal-Immigrant ‘Game’.

Fifty Years Ago, A Tragedy:

• President Obama on President Kennedy’s legacy and the American Spirit:
• Robert F. Kennedy: JFK’s Legacy Pt I
• Robert F. Kennedy: JFK’s Legacy Pt II
• Robert F. Kennedy: JFK’s Legacy Pt III
• Robert F. Kennedy: JFK’s Legacy Pt IV
• A nation remembers JFK.
• Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: JFK’s legacy and the remaining questions.

ONN: News of the Week.

Christie’s Governors: The extreme class of 2014.

The News to the North:

• Ron Burgundy sings Rob Ford’s campaign theme song.
• Rob Ford’s wife responds….
• Daily Show tries to answer the question: Who is still supporting Rob Ford?!
• Rob Ford runs and plows down councilwoman.

Stephen: Oklahetera!

White House: West Wing Week.

Maddow: Right wing abandons facts to bash Obama:

Congressman Coke Hypocrite (R-FL)

• Young Turks: Don’t mix coke with a vote to drug test welfare recipients
• Sharpton: What ‘cocaine-Republican’ Trey Radel’s drug bust can teach us.
• Jon: Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL) drug hypocrisy.
• Hip Hop crazy congressman’s coke problem.

Ed: How Ohio Republicans are planning to rig the 2014 vote.

Maddow: Marriage equality spreads.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Contained in this snarky piece about Murray’s transition is some serious talk about the $15 minimum wage.

I asked Murray about the $15 minimum wage, an issue he ended up campaigning on and which has a lot of traction in the city, with Kshama Sawant’s win and the win in SeaTac. On the trail he didn’t give a real timeline for how to get there, but today he said, “We’ll begin our process immediately… We’re having our discussions in the transition team already.” He wants to “bring people to the table” (a politician? Who knew?!), and says “if we end up in a labor-business war, it won’t happen.” He also wants to be “especially sensitive to our small neighborhood businesses—like the Pike/Pine corridor,” he laughed.

I’m going to take that as a positive sign that stuff can get done quickly, and not that it means that the Chamber of Commerce or other bidness groups get a veto. He did run on it, and presumably in 4 years will want it as an accomplishment not as a place where a challenger can stake out a position to his left. And, you know, it’s the right thing to do and popular. And he’ll have at least one City Council member pushing him pretty hard on it.

Unlike my colleagues here at HA, I have clear, full memories of the events of 50 years ago. Darryl was just three years old at the time. It was years before Lee was born, many years before Carl was a twinkling in anyone’s eye, and possibly even before Roya’s father arrived.

In November 1963 I was 13 years old, an 8th-grader at Heritage Junior High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Just after we’d gotten back indoors from band practice (we were scheduled to play at halftime of the high school’s football game the next day … a game that was never played), the unimaginable announcement came over the loudspeaker as we were putting away our instruments.

Everything between that moment and arrival at the front door of my house has vanished from my memory. No recollection of gathering up my belongings, of boarding the school bus, of the half-hour ride with dozens of other dazed 12- and 13-year-old kids.

Once I got home, however, along with my entire family I was glued to the TV for days. We were a Huntley-Brinkley family, so we watched Frank McGee on NBC rather than Cronkite’s CBS. We saw President Johnson’s brief speech at Andrews AFB. We saw Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby. We saw Kennedy lying in state in the Capitol rotunda. We saw the funeral procession, with muffled drums, the caisson, the riderless horse, the international leaders from far and wide, John-John’s salute, the burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Like everyone else, we were in shock. And we were still in shock on Thanksgiving, six days after the assassination. We celebrated (if that’s the appropriate word) the holiday with relatives who lived in the DC suburbs. Over that weekend, we went to Arlington to pay our respects to the President. On that cold, blustery, sunny morning, we filed slowly and silently past the raw, freshly-turned soil of the grave. We had to be careful not to trip over the gas pipe (not yet buried) feeding the eternal flame … not an easy task with tear-filled eyes.

Since I started blogging almost 11 years ago, I’ve written a number of essays about what the assassination of President Kennedy means to me. On my own Peace Tree Farm blog, there’s Forty years (2003), The end of the innocence (2004), and 43 … and 46 (2006). My DailyKos diary on the subject is JFK and the “Where were you when…?” moment (2008). And I wrote The tricks that memory plays two years ago here on HA.

November 22, 1963 remains a central, seminal event in my life. For me, that is the day the Sixties began. The sudden, wrenching events in Dallas led directly to the immense discontinuity between the staid, black-and-white Fifties and the counter-cultural, many-colored Sixties.

How might American and world history have been different if JFK hadn’t been shot? Would there have been a Nixon, a Reagan, a Dubya presidency? Would the Vietnam War have been shorter or less lethal, or even been short-circuited completely? On the other hand, could John Kennedy have strong-armed Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare? We’ll never know, unless we can somehow jump into the alternative universe in which Oswald worked somewhere other than the Texas School Book Depository, or the one in which he stayed in the Soviet Union, or just the one in which he missed his target in Dealey Plaza.

I wish we lived in one of those other universes.

I go to the House and Senate GOP caucus websites fairly often to look for pieces to make fun of. It’s where I found Baumgartner’s piece the other day. But somehow I’d missed that they went with an offensive picture for another featured story. They had a press release about how they’re opposed to human trafficking. It’s an important issue, but they fubbed the execution.

Basically, despite the fact that most victims of human trafficking are women of color, they chose to illustrate it with a stock image of a white lady being grabbed by black hands (Spokesman-Review link).

This morning, the Senate Republican Caucus web site was down, and the photo was removed, although a spokesman for Committee Chairman Mike Padden said that was probably a coincidence. The hearing was more than a week ago, Eric Campbell said, and the site was rotating features to get more current things up.

[…]

We should note that this is a “stock photo”, one that has been used other places to illustrate sex trafficking or child pornography, primarily on web sites with ties to religious organizations. In some versions of the image, the hands over the mouth don’t seem to be quite as dark as in the above image.

It’s tough to figure out why the GOP has a problem attracting minority voters. And to be clear, I don’t think whoever put it up was acting out of malice: They probably just googled human trafficking, that came up, and they called it good. But they didn’t have any black folks in the office who’d see it before it came up to say, “google that a little harder.”

Goldy deflects some of the flack coming at Kshama Sawant for suggesting the Boeing workers take over production, and start producing things that aren’t used for war. The piece is fine as far as it goes, but I think he misses the biggest problem with this kind of dismissive commentary: it doesn’t give us any idea of what a takeover might look like.

Now I have certainly no idea what a worker takeover at Boeing by its workers might look like. The best guess off the top of my head is something like Mondragon. Or maybe she has something completely else in mind; Mondragon isn’t a panacea. And in any event how the state, or others, might move from Boeing making unreasonable demands to whatever she’s pushing wasn’t discussed. It was a short speech at a rally, and there’s only so much nuance you can give. So there are more questions than answers.

But, gosh, the best people to get those answers are reporters. Rather than writing dismissive pieces, they could ask her for details. I mean they could eventually get to dismissive if that’s their position, but it would be nice to know what she’s actually proposing and how she expects to get from point A to point B before dismissing it.

Now to be clear, I don’t think I agree with her (again, to the point that I understand what she’s proposing). The best thing is probably for Boeing to realize that they need the Puget Sound workforce. But if that doesn’t happen, and Boeing continues the slow decline of their Western Washington workforce, there will be people in the region with manufacturing skills, and no job. It might make more sense for them to start something collective rather than hope that some other big company will come to the rescue, and if this discussion makes them realize that there are other options, well, I’d rather not have pundits — especially ostensibly lefty ones — shutting that discussion down.

– Two Ed Murray things. I love this story of him helping a fallen cyclist (Seattle Times link). Also, here’s the transition webpage if you’re interested.

– It’s not as if the GOP aren’t marketing BS to the public on a daily basis. But I always hold out hope that people running for office won’t be so obvious about it. Color me naive.

– Does anyone care about the WA Dem Chair race? I tried to write about it, but nothing really came together. I could give it another try if y’all care.

– It was the 150th anniversary of The Gettysburg Address this week, and the biggest deal about it is that Obama was asked to read one of the versions of it. Also, how does it compare to President Whitmore’s speech from Independence Day? I’m glad you asked.

– WARONCARZ

– I would hate to be a former Zimmerman juror today. I’d also hate to be Sean Hannity, but that’s true every day.

Unlike most Seattle Democrats, Reuven Carlyle is willing to push an agenda pretty hard. Unfortunately, often times (privatizing public education and the Boeing giveaway for example) he pushes a terrible agenda. At other times, like defending King County against the state trying to vacuum up all of the money, he’s better. So, while most Seattle Dems inspire apathy and a wish that they would use their safe seats for something better than acting as placeholders, Carlyle actually has bold proposals. This is one that I like.

But Carlyle believes lawmakers and the public deserve to know how much a company like Boeing pays in state taxes, especially if that company comes to the Legislature asking for special consideration in the tax code.

Washington is certainly not alone in guarding corporate tax information. Oregon and Idaho do the same. But in Wisconsin, anyone can fill out a form and request a company’s—even an individual’s—net tax information.

Sounds good to me (although I’m not sure about individuals, or really how that would work in our sales tax heavy state). But it seems reasonable to know how much business are paying. And I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that we don’t know.

Last night The Occupy Committee to End Homelessness in King County Coalition held a camp in at Westlake Park to bring attention to Seattle’s homeless problem (and our lack of will to implement any solutions). It’s a brave thing when last night was freezing or near it. But I suppose for many of them, it’s not much of a choice.

I walked through it last night, and it was a few dozen people in sleeping bags. Then I walked home past people sleeping in doorways.

Anyway, they’ll follow it up with a march to Seattle City Hall where the Committee to End Homelessness in King County are meeting. The coalition is demanding, among other things, that we as a community divest from banks that have been active in foreclosures and that we build more affordable housing.