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Swim at your own risk?

The family of a man who drowned a year ago in the swimming pool at the Quality Inn & Suites Seattle Center has filed a wrongful-death suit against the owners of the hotel, claiming poor maintenance made the water unusually murky and contributed to a botched rescue operation by firefighters.

[…] The hotel operators, Seattle Hospitality Inc., last Friday filed a third-party complaint seeking to draw the city of Seattle into the suit as a second defendant, claiming the Seattle Fire Department failed to conduct an adequate water rescue and didn’t find Deboch in the pool after firefighters were summoned to the hotel.

Except it’s hard to perform an adequate water rescue when the water is so filthy that you can’t see the victim.

[…] Seattle firefighters arrived within 2½ minutes of the call, according to Fire Department records. They searched the pool using a rescue hook and thermal-imaging camera but found no sign of Deboch.

A Fire Department report states that firefighters “believed they were visually able to confirm that no victim was in the pool” and thought they could see the pool’s bottom.

A civilian also got in the pool to search for Deboch, but no firefighters entered the water, according to the report.

I worked three summers as a lifeguard (i.e. pool boy) at swimming pools at four different residential apartment buildings in Philadelphia, and I can tell you that we would’ve been fired had we allowed the water to get anywhere near that sort of condition. We checked chlorine and pH levels throughout the day, and would clear swimmers out of the pool if the chemicals ever got out of whack. Murkiness wasn’t even an option.

“There were more than a dozen people allowed back in the pool to swim,” Micah LeBank, the attorney representing Deboch’s family, said in an interview this week. “The hotel let people get back into that murky water and swim around, unable to see the body.”

That’s disgusting.

When Deboch still wasn’t found, his friends searched the pool again.

Tom Fleming, a 51-year-old off-duty firefighter vacationing at the hotel, joined in the search and cleared the pool of swimmers, according to the Fire Department report.

The Seattle Times reported last year that after about a 10-minute search Fleming felt something in the center of the deep end of the pool. He asked the hotel to turn off the pump and was able to pull up Deboch’s body.

“You could not see him until you got him 18 inches to the surface,” Fleming told The Times last year. “I was fishing around and even though he was at the very bottom, he was not always in the same spot. Finding a victim in a pool in that condition is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Granted, water clarity at indoor pools is more difficult to maintain due to the lack of natural oxidation from sunlight, but that’s no excuse. The hotel was clearly negligent.* And their effort to make taxpayers liable by pulling the fire department into the lawsuit is offensive.

Given the time that had already elapsed, firefighters might have been able to pull the victim from the pool without permanent neurological damage, had they been able to immediately locate the body. But the cloudy water made a timely rescue—about a 10 minute window—all but impossible. From the facts presented in the press, there is no question that improper pool maintenance impeded firefighters’ ability to do their job.

Swimming pools are potential public health hazards, both due to the drowning risk and the spread of disease causing organisms like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and E. coli. That’s why they’re so heavily regulated. So if a hotel is going to seek a competitive edge by offering guests the amenity of an indoor pool, then the hotel has both a moral and legal obligation to properly secure and maintain it.

The hotel should settle with the victim’s family and leave Seattle taxpayers out of it.

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* My former editors at The Stranger never would have allowed me to use such direct language, for fear that the use of such a legalistic term like “negligence” might leave the paper vulnerable to a defamation suit. But my own personal experience as a former pool maintenance professional leaves zero question in my mind that it is negligent to allow guests into water so cloudy that they could swim for three hours without noticing the dead body at the bottom of the pool. And as a blogger, I feel that it would be negligent of me to shy away from bluntly speaking the truth.

After 37 years, longtime Ballard staple Louie’s Cuisine of China is closing, and I blame Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage! Although probably, its closure had something more to do with this:

The property was sold last month for $2.49 million, property records show.

In fact, restaurants and other businesses close all the time, and for all kinds of reasons:

Louie’s expected closure comes three months after the landmark Frontier Room, around since 1954, closed in Belltown. Last year the legendary Alki Tavern closed, and Funhouse music club was closed in 2012 to make way for a seven-story building near Seattle Center. Claire’s Pantry, a Lake City staple since 1974, closed in February 2013, and Piecora’s Pizza on Capitol Hill closed in April after 33 years.

In March 2010, the first restaurant in the Red Robin chain closed in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.

Brace yourselves. In the coming years we’re going to hear all kinds of stories about businesses closing because they can’t afford to pay Seattle’s minimum wage. If $15 was already in effect, we’d be hearing it about some of the businesses above. But correlation is not causation, so you can cast all these anecdotes aside.

It will take a decade or more to truly suss out the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage by comparing local economic trends to both historical data, and to economic trends in other locations. But that won’t stop the scare stories from coming.

– Designing Streets for Safety [h/t]

– I’m not sure if Sawant would have voted against Kathleen O’Toole if she was the deciding vote (maybe, but it wasn’t the vote she needed to take). But it’s nice to know there will still be some pull to the left on police issues.

– The problem Burk faces however is that the Genesis texts don’t mention genitals or chromosomes as markers of gender, nor do the Genesis texts have a notion of what is essentially mid-nineteenth century biological essentialism. Burk has taken an ancient Israelite mythopoem and has attempted to force onto it a rather vague construct of “biology,” thus obfuscating what would otherwise be a theologically rich text. Like creationists, Burk has attempted to treat the biblical narratives as a science textbook, having assumed that the biblical authors are able to speak biological truths across different times and different cultures. I would recommend Burk actually research gender, biology, and sociology, and how various societies construct their notions of gender, before he writes definitively about it.

– Why does anyone still listen to Donald Trump?

– World Bicycle Relief Red-Bell 100

– If a puppet government falls in the desert and the whole world is around to witness it, does it make a sound?

– I think the HA comment threads are worth at least two or three leaf boats.

I suppose I’ve had a hard time articulating exactly why I’m so irritated at the way Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar have been allowed to bully their way into the Seattle market. But fortunately, economist Dean Baker does a much better job:

If Uber and Lyft force a re-examination and modernization of taxi regulation in San Francisco and elsewhere, they will have provided a valuable public service. However it can’t possibly make sense to have a stringent set of regulations for traditional cabs, while allowing Uber and Lyft to ignore them just because customers order these services on the Internet.

If we go the route of ending the requirement that taxies need medallions, there is also the question of what we do about the sunk costs for people like my cab driver, who is currently out $250,000 from buying a medallion. On the current path, these medallion owners will just be out of luck. Their life savings will be made worthless by young kids who are better at evading regulations than immigrant cab drivers; so much for the American Dream.

It is worth considering this issue in light of the larger issue of the growing inequality we have seen over the last three decades. Uber, like Amazon, has allowed a small number of people to become extremely rich by evading regulations and/or taxes that apply to their middle class competitors. Amazon and other Internet-based retailers have used their tax advantage to put tens of thousands brick and mortar stores out of business.

This is a pretty simple story. In a country where rules are enforced or not enforced to benefit the rich and screw the middle class, you will have increasing inequality and a middle class that is seeing few of the benefits of economic growth.

What we are witnessing is a giant transfer of wealth from tens of thousands of mostly middle class medallion owners nationwide into the pockets of a handful of clever, law-evading entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists. Uber’s gambit that local governments would not crack down on its illegal operations has paid off handsomely—it now enjoys an implicit market capitalization of $17 billion.

“This is not supposed to happen in a market economy,” says Baker:

To encourage efficiency, we would want a proper set of regulations and taxes and have them apply equally to everyone. The point is to encourage people to make profits by providing better products or lower cost services, not to get rich by finding clever ways to evade regulations.

There’s much more to Baker’s piece, and you really should read the whole thing.

The best thing about the Seattle Times hiring Erik Smith, is that finally there’s somebody on the paper’s editorial board with the courage to give a voice to Seattle’s downtrodden business community:

A rare voice on minimum wage

Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks, explains why he supports a referendum campaign that would send Seattle’s minimum-wage ordinance to the ballot.

That’s Smith’s column and kicker. Really. Because there is nothing rarer in American politics than the voice of a rich white guy.

Seattle’s business community didn’t put up much of a fight when the City Council passed its highest-in-the-country $15 minimum-wage ordinance this month — at least not the united opposition that might be expected in a city of lesser size.

Um, there’s a difference between not putting up much of a fight, and losing. And they didn’t completely lose, either. No, Seattle’s business community didn’t win a permanent tip credit or “total compensation”, or the lower $12 minimum wage for which many business leaders belatedly fought. But they did get what amounts to an eleven-year phase-in before all Seattle workers will earn the inflation-adjusted equivalent of about $14.50 an hour in cash take-home pay in the year 2025.

But at long last, Howard Behar has had it with that talk of “sticking it to the man.”

“First of all, it’s not just the man anymore,” he says. “It’s the man and the woman. But is that what we think this is about? We’re trying to get somebody?”

Well then, he should stop watching re-runs of The Mod Squad, because I’m not sure I’ve heard anybody actually use that phrase since the early 1970s. I mean, I love “the man” as an apt metaphor for the way society actual works, but then, I’m old. I’m over fifty. “Sticking it to the man” is about as much a part of modern American parlance as “groovy” or “the cat’s pajamas.”

And no, $15 was not about “trying to get somebody.” It was about trying to get somebody a living wage. The rhetorical focus was always on the plight of the working poor. That’s why fast food workers became the symbol of the movement.

If anyone is the man, it is Behar. He is the former president of Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffeehouse chain with more than 20,000 outlets worldwide. Though Starbucks is one of the world’s most recognizable brand names, it was not vilified during the campaign by union organizers and political activists in the same way as favorite corporate targets McDonald’s and Wal-Mart.

So wait. Behar is “the man”…? And nobody talked about “sticking it” to him…? Now I’m just confused.

The company prides itself on the fact that it pays a bit more than the current minimum wage, provides health insurance for its employees and recently implemented a college tuition benefit.

Starbucks baristas average less than $9 an hour nationwide, only 42 percent of employees are actually covered by Starbucks’ health insurance (less than Walmart!), and it turns out the company’s much ballyhooed tuition benefit program isn’t all that much of a benefit. Starbucks is far from the worst company in the world to work for, but it isn’t a charity.

Yet, with a corporate headquarters about a mile from Seattle City Hall, the company is affected by the raised minimum wage as clearly as the smallest espresso hut along Highway 99.

And your point is… what? Starbucks should get a volume discount?

In criticizing the Seattle plan, Behar is not speaking for the chain he helped build from 28 stores before his retirement as president in 2007 — his only direct financial interest in Starbucks is the one share of stock he keeps framed on the wall.

No, he’s speaking for his class. I’m no Marxist, but this is clearly a class struggle. And as multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

A lifetime spent in business tells him the Seattle plan will hurt the low-wage earners it aims to help by raising the cost of living, and driving light manufacturing and distribution jobs beyond the city limits.

Ah, he’s just looking out for the little people. God bless him.

But while I don’t dismiss Behar’s business acumen, there just isn’t any data to support the claim that minimum wage hikes—even massive ones—have a substantial impact on employment.

That is why he is a major contributor to Forward Seattle, the organization gathering signatures to place a referendum on the November ballot to undo the ordinance. Behar agrees the wage should rise, but says the city ought to phase it in over a much longer period of time, perhaps at twice the rate of inflation until $15 is reached, for businesses of all sizes, uniformly.

So let’s do the math. Assuming our current annual inflation rate of about 1.75 percent (and that may be on the high side), it would take 14 years—not until the year 2028—before workers finally earned $15 an hour. But by then, $15 would only be worth about $11.78 in 2014 dollars. So in real dollars, Behar is proposing a $2.46 an hour raise phased in over a decade and a half.

Behar’s voice is important because so few in Seattle’s big-business circles have been willing to say a word. In smaller cities, small business dominates the Rotary clubs and the chambers. The silence from many Seattle-based business organizations reflects the fact that this is a regional headquarters city for so many large corporations. Some shrug — they pay more than minimum wage — and by taking a stand in Seattle they could bring picket lines elsewhere in the country.

You’re kidding, right? Twelve of the 21 non-elected members of Mayor Ed Murray’s Income Inequality Committee represented business, including the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Seattle Hotel Association, Nucor Steel, and Space Needle owner/hotelier Howard Wright. Alaska Airlines and the car rental, lodging, and restaurant industry spent a record $227 per vote in their failed attempt to defeat SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage initiative at the polls! The International Franchise Association is spending $1,000 an hour to file ridiculous lawsuits in an effort to bully other cities from moving forward. You call that silence?

“Business leaders are scared to death,” Behar says. “Because you know in today’s world what happens when they speak up? They are accused of being greedy, they are accused of not caring about people.”

Oh, boo fucking hoo! Workers are scared to death of being fired for attempting to unionize, but Behar is scared that some people might say he’s mean? Talk about asymmetry.

Behar calls the Seattle plan unjust and immoral — some reasons familiar, others not.

“Unjust and immoral?” You mean like paying somebody a poverty wage? You mean like the service industry practice of denying workers more than 29.5 hours a week so that they don’t qualify for benefits? You mean like the wage and tip theft that is rampant in the industry?

The Seattle plan will require big companies, chains and franchisees to raise wages faster than mom-and-pop operations, the idea being that big corporations can afford it. Franchisees are, of course, small-business owners themselves, a fact the Seattle ordinance ignores. And Behar notes that in a chain, each store is considered a stand-alone business and each is expected to turn a profit.

So, either Seattle chain outlets will raise prices in Seattle, just like mom-and-pop stores will — or, perhaps worse, they might allow that store in Cincinnati to subsidize the one in Seattle, and keep prices low until shakier independent merchants close their doors.

My god, when will America wake up to the holocaust that is befalling our nation’s persecuted big businesses? If only they had unlimited financial resources to buy high priced lobbyists, expensive advertising, and credulous editorial boards to defend their interests.

And, while the proposition was sold with the idea of reducing income inequality, the shock on the local economy will mean higher prices for things bought locally — buying power of a higher minimum wage is reduced.

So first we’re told we’re supposed to heed Behar’s warnings due to his “lifetime spent in business,” and then he throws this incredible piece of economic bullshit at us? Does he think we’re stupid?

If labor was the only cost of doing business, this argument might largely hold true. But of course, it’s not. Labor is about a third of the cost of a Big Mac. So if the entire cost of raising the minimum wage were passed on to McDonald’s consumers (and it won’t be), you’re looking at about a 19 percent price hike over the same period of time McDonald’s workers see their wages rise 56 percent.

Low-wage workers clearly come out ahead. And that’s just with burgers. The inflationary pressure won’t be zero, but big monthly expenses like electricity, utilities, cable, phone, and of course housing will see little direct impact from a hike in the minimum wage.

Behar says a proposition with such a dramatic effect on the city ought to bypass a council where special-interest groups hold sway. “The idea this got a fair hearing is garbage. Labor was going out the back door and business was sitting in the lobby.”

Again… you’re fucking kidding me, right? Is he really making the argument that corporate money doesn’t have enough influence in politics? That if Behar were still president of Starbucks, the mayor and every council member save Socialist Kshama Sawant wouldn’t take his phone call in New York minute?

The vilification of big business to promote an unworkable economic ideal hits him in the gut: “If we are a just society, we treat everybody the same.”

First of all, perhaps some people vilify big business leaders as “greedy” and “not caring about people” because capital-as-victim narratives like this make them come off as greedy and not caring about people? Just a thought.

Second, if Behar is really advocating for a “just society,” one in which we “treat everybody the same,” perhaps he should start with reforming Washington State’s most regressive tax system in nation? This is a system in which the bottom 20 percent of earners (you know, Starbucks baristas) pay 16.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, whereas the wealthiest 1 percent (you know, Howard Behar) pay only 2.8 percent.

Does this sound like a just society in which we treat everybody the same? Of course not. And yet Behar has chosen to use his voice to champion the moneyed interests that benefit most from the status quo.

In a city where no one has spoken for big business on the issue, Behar does seem to be the man.

No one except all the big businesses I mentioned, and of course, the Seattle Times editorial board. Relentlessly. But nice attempt at an emotional bookend, Erik.

– Will the Supreme Court Ignore the Evidence? Facts vs. Beliefs in the Hobby Lobby Case

– The Spokesman-Review should probably do a better job of getting pictures.

– Let’s Build The Ballard Spur!

– I honestly couldn’t have told you who was the Seattle School District Superintendent, but now he might be leaving.

– My Real Change vendor keeps asking me to go to his church, but this is neat too.

Remember how opponents warned that a $15 minimum wage would surely cost the city thousands of jobs, hurting the exact same low-wage workers the ordinance was intended to help? Well, in Seattle’s booming hospitality industry, not so much:

The former Red Lion Hotel in downtown Seattle sold Thursday for $130.7 million, or nearly $410,000 a room, the highest price ever paid in the metro area, according to hotel experts.

But the record price for the 319-room hotel, now known as Motif Seattle, could quickly be surpassed by the pending sale of the 120-room Hotel 1000: Two groups are buying it for $63 million or about $525,000 a room, according to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal, which didn’t identify its sources.

“It is the highest price paid (per key) ever for a hotel in Washington state,” said Chris Burdett, senior vice president of CBRE Hotels in Seattle, which was not involved in the transaction.

The record-price deals for downtown Seattle hotels are the latest good news for a surging hotel market that’s kicked off a wave of new construction. Downtown Seattle has roughly 12,000 hotel rooms; the construction of R.C. Hedreen’s mega-convention hotel and smaller hotels could add another 3,000 rooms to the inventory.

Wait. I thought the $15 minimum wage was supposed to destroy capitalism as we know it. And yet in the immediate wake of its passage, investors continue to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into an industry that is one of the city’s largest employers of low-wage workers. I’m so confused!

And it’s not just here in Seattle. Just weeks after SeaTac voters passed their $15 minimum wage, Cedarbrook Lodge, one of the initiative’s most vocal opponents, announced a $16 million 67-room expansion. It’s like the industry’s mouth is saying one thing while its money is saying something entirely else. Weird.

I can only conclude one of two things. Either paying hotel housekeepers and other low-wage workers $15 an hour won’t squeeze all the profits out of Seattle’s labor-intensive hotel industry, or all the smart capitalists investing hundreds of millions of dollars into our soon-to-be-living-wage hotel industry are in fact incredibly stupid.

Finally, I can move back to Philadelphia!

PHL Local Gaming — one of the five contenders for that ever elusive casino license in Philadelphia — has announced a potential new feature for its LoSo Entertainment Center: a 615-foot-tall Skyspire with rooftop restaurant and observation deck, both of which would be reached by gondola. The tower would be designed to look much like Seattle’s Space Needle, though it would be 10 feet taller (take that, Seattle!).

Except for the casino part, it sounds great.* Though personally, rather than the Skyspire, I would opt for the Polercoaster, which instead of those stupid gondolas would wrap the tower with a 615-foot vertical roller coaster!

* Note: Not really.

In a press release about the budget forecast there’s, a paragraph about McCleary where Representative Terry Nealey says:

“The demands by the state Supreme Court for the Legislature to meet educational funding requirements under the McCleary decision will likely lead for new calls during the 2015 session to raise taxes. That would be devastating to our state’s economy. The correct course of action is to fund education first within the budget and let the economy heal by resisting job-killing tax increases. If we stay the course, Washington’s citizens will have more job opportunities, our state will reap the benefits of higher revenue, and we will be able to meet our constitutional requirements as it relates to education.”

This is a broader press release about how the revenue forecast increased $157 million for the biennium. But we’re billions behind. As long as 2 billion or so is more than 157 million, we’re not just going to be able to grow out of our problems.

But I will meet Rep Nealy part of the way: Yes raising taxes can have a deleterious effect on the economy. That’s true. But what the GOP never acknowledges is that so does cutting government services. So I would like to hear how the state could cut the difference between what grew or what the state can expect to grow and what’s needed to fulfill the McCleary obligations. Because suddenly making massive cuts to social services will also affect the economy in a negative way.

Hell, even the largely mythical wringing efficiencies from the government or cuts to wages and pensions would hurt the economy as it would mean less money being pumped into the economy. Government spending drives the economy in its way. Obviously, when we have a balanced budget, those efficiencies are generally balanced out by the taxes that have to be paid to fund them. But that’s the point: we’re going to have to look at spending and at taxes if we want to fix McCleary without doing too much damage to the economy. And since we’ve been mostly cutting in the past years, it may be time for more taxes.

– Where the Growth is Happening

– For a town that is really proud of being progressive and pro-lady and pro-gay and pro-brown-people and pro-equality, we have still got some truly rotten, stinking, embarrassing, hateful slop festering just barely under the surface. And it’s down to all of us to talk about it and act on it.

– I’m just going to say it: Boo Canada.

– This WaPo piece on a Heritage Foundation panel hating Muslims has been going around, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to it.

– Summer Meltdown

– It almost sounds crazy to write this, but 45 years ago today, the Seattle City Council tried to destroy the Pike Place Market.

No doubt Starbucks’ new tuition reimbursement program is better than a kick in the teeth, and I suppose the company deserves some credit for doing more than many of its competitors. But forgive me for not sharing in the credulous headlines. First of all, the program isn’t nearly as generous as first reported. Second, if limiting low-income students’ options to taking online courses from a single university is the “new model” for higher education that Arizona State University president Michael M. Crow envisions, I seriously doubt it will do much to address our nation’s growing opportunity gap.

It’s hard to suss out the exact details of the program from Starbucks’ publicly available documents (pdf), but it appears that the cost to the company will be far less than the $30,000 per employee benefit some headlines have touted. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Starbucks expects to spend an average of $3,250 per student per year in upfront scholarships (presumably per academic year rather than calendar year, as these are per credit grants), plus reimbursements to juniors and seniors of “however much it needs to cover any other unmet tuition costs.” Tuition reimbursements will only be paid to employees after completing 21-credit blocks—the company says that the “vast majority” of employees will receive less than $5,250 in tuition benefits in any given year.

But at between $480 to $543 per undergraduate credit, ASU’s online classes don’t come cheap. The 120 credits necessary to get a four-year Bachelors degree, comes to about $15,000 a year for a full-time online student—a couple thousand dollars a year more than resident tuition and fees at the University of Washington. So it’s not a bargain. Starbucks and ASU expect that most students will qualify for federal grants and other financial aid—hence the lower than sticker price cost to Starbucks for juniors and seniors—but even upperclassmen expecting full reimbursement will likely have to take out student loans to cover upfront costs.

If you’re a Starbucks employee just a semester or three shy of a college diploma, this program could prove a boon. But for freshmen and sophomores, not so much. Community college credits are cheaper, even accounting for the Starbucks subsidy, plus come with the added benefit of a live classroom and campus experience. Nothing against distance learning as a supplement to a traditional college education, but it hardly seems worth paying a premium for online courses.

I doubt most Starbucks executives would choose an online-only college education for their own children. So why should that be good enough for their employees?

So yeah. Starbucks’ “College Achievement Plan” is better than a kick in the teeth. It’s not nothing. And other highly profitable companies should be ashamed for not making at least as much effort to better the lives their workers. But it does relatively little to address the core problem facing low-income youth today: Low wages and skyrocketing tuition costs.

To put this into perspective, Starbucks’ estimated average cost of $3,250 in tuition subsidies per student per academic year would be the equivalent of paying a full-time student an additional $3.12 an hour on a part-time 20-hour week. But for a full-time barista earning only 3 credits per term (ASU tells students to expect to put in 18 hours a week in work per 3-credit class), Starbucks’ tuition benefit drops to only $0.78 per hour. The benefit for most Starbucks workers who take part in the program will be somewhere in between.

By comparison, Starbucks baristas average less than $9 an hour in pay nationally, a little higher here in Washington State. Thus a $15 minimum wage would do far more to make college affordable than Starbucks’ complicated tuition benefit program, while giving workers the choice of which college or university to attend, and more than just the 40 areas of study that ASU offers online.

The flip-side to this equation is that programs like this wouldn’t be necessary at all if we had not abdicated our responsibility to adequately fund our state college and university systems. “If it’s all about state legislatures appropriating more money, guess again,” says Crow cynically, but that’s awfully self-serving coming from the president of a university that just signed an exclusive deal with Starbucks to provide online degrees to potentially tens of thousands of workers.

Many of today’s lawmakers worked their way through college at a time when one could. Higher pay and lower tuition is the key to making college broadly affordable again, not corporate altruism.

The only thing keeping us from making a public university degree affordable again is the will to tax ourselves to pay for it. The revenue isn’t there because taxes as a percentage of income are at an all time low. We can afford to pay to properly educate our young the way we did in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s if we once again choose to adequately tax the wealth and incomes of billionaires like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Skyrocketing tuition is the result of a policy decision, not a natural disaster. If we as a society choose to make higher education affordable again, we can.

But we don’t.

And that is why, far from excited by Starbucks’ announcement, I came away rather depressed. For however altruistic Starbucks’ intentions may be, and however many workers might ultimately take advantage of the program to complete their degrees, this is a model that ultimately takes away options from America’s youth, while easing pressure on the current generation of decision makers to give future generations the same educational opportunities that we enjoyed.

I am not an attorney, so when I initially characterized the International Franchise Association’s $15 lawsuit as “hilarious,” “laughable,” and “frivolous,” I suppose my lack of a JD was permission enough to shrug off my analysis. But I’ve yet to hear a real lawyer disagree.

Labor and employment attorney Dmitri Iglitzin described at least one IFA claim as “crazy talk.” And writing on his own blog, University of Washington School of Law lecturer David Ziff responded to various IFA arguments with offhand dismissals like “frivolous,” “non sequitur,” and “Wowsa. Seriously.”

But one of the more interesting analyses—and a somewhat unsettling one—comes from attorney Ian Millhiser, the Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Writing at ThinkProgress, Millhiser originally titled his post “The Completely Bonkers Lawsuit Seeking To Kill Seattle’s Minimum Wage & Repeal The Twentieth Century,” before revising it to something a bit more lawyerly. So he agrees with me that that arguments are facially bonkers. Read the whole thing.

But it’s that part about repealing the Twentieth Century that really caught my attention.

So the Seattle lawsuit relies on arguments that are either silly, dangerous or both. It calls for a wholesale transfer of power away from the American people. And it would repeat some of the worst mistakes of American governments’ past. Indeed, many of the arguments raised in the plaintiffs’ complaint are so absurd that they raise an important question — why should anyone care that this lawsuit was filed? People file silly lawsuits all the time. One guy once filed a federal suit against “Satan and his staff,” claiming that “Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused [his] downfall.” But there was never much risk that a federal judge would issue an injunction against the Devil.

The answer to this question is that the Seattle lawsuit does have one thing going for it that the guy who sued Satan did not. It is being litigated by Paul Clement, the conservative superlawyer that we have rather archly referred to as the “Solicitor General of the Republican Party.” Clement is the go-to lawyer for Republican interest groups seeking to implement Republican policies through the judiciary, and he has a knack for making ridiculous legal arguments sound plausible to conservative judges. Recall that Clement nearly convinced the Supreme Court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, largely relying on a legal theory that one very conservative judge mocked for having no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

As Millhiser points out, lawyers are usually reluctant to sign their names on to such outlandish legal arguments. But…

Clement, however, is such a successful attorney in large part because he has his finger on the pulse of the conservative legal thinkers who dominate the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a better judge of how far he can push the justices than nearly anyone else in the country. And, if he thinks that the kind of arguments that he makes in his brief can be made with a straight face, then that is saying something quite significant.

The conventional wisdom, based not just on speculation but on the justices’ own statements, is that the Roberts Court is quite conservative but it certainly isn’t prepared to revive the judicial overreach that pervaded the Lochner Era. One of the best lawyers in the country, however, appears to have concluded that this conventional wisdom is wrong. If Clement turns out to be correct, that should frighten anyone who works for a living.

Understand that for the IFA’s arguments to stand, the court wouldn’t just have to find the franchise provisions unconstitutional, but minimum wage laws in general. Everywhere. Local, state, and federal. For that was the status quo between 1905 and 1937, the era in which Lochner held sway.

So yeah, based on the past 75 years of jurisprudence, the IFA lawsuit is indeed hilarious, laughable, and bonkers. But that’s assuming the ultra-conservative Roberts Court isn’t radical enough to toss out our nation’s entire regulatory structure.

What the headline says:

The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday ordered lawmakers to explain why they haven’t followed its orders to fix the way Washington pays for public education.

The court has ordered the state to appear before it on Sept. 3 and show the court how it has followed its orders in the 2012 McCleary decision or face contempt.

Of course, the legislature is in contempt of the court’s order on McCleary, but the court doesn’t really have any good options to enforce it. Of the remedies Chief Justice Barbara Madsen lists in her rather terse order summoning “the State” to appear before the court at a September 3 “show cause hearing,” only the first is appealing, none would be effective, and several would realize the Republican wet dream of using McCleary as an opportunity to starve the rest of state government.

1. Imposing monetary or other contempt sanctions;
2. Prohibiting expenditures on certain other matters until the Court’s constitutional ruling is complied with;
3. Ordering the legislature to pass legislation to fund specific amounts or remedies;
4. Ordering the sale of State property to fund constitutional compliance;
5. Invalidating education funding cuts to the budget;
6. Prohibiting any funding of an unconstitutional education system; and
7. Any other appropriate relief.

I’m all for imposing contempt sanctions. Throw the house and senate leadership in jail, if you can. That at least would be a spectacle on a scale worthy of the impending crisis. But simply forcing the state to spend money it doesn’t have would only pull billions from social services, higher education, and other critical programs, while selling state property in order to fund current expenses is nothing less than one generation ripping off all those generations that precede or succeed it.

No, the only solution is more revenue. And if the court can’t effectively order the legislature to raise taxes (or eliminate tax exemptions), then there’s no solving this crisis.

A few months ago I asked if state Democrats were prepared for the impending McCleary disaster? Of course, it was a rhetorical question. The answer is clearly “No.”

The International Franchise Association didn’t just file one of the most hilarious lawsuits ever in their futile quest to overturn Seattle’s new $15 minimum wage ordinance, they also created a pathetically lazy video to support it! As the folks at Working Washington quickly discovered, every single person shown is taken directly from the popular stock footage library, Pond5:

1. Young asian woman smiling face
2. Young hispanic man smiling at camera
3. Portrait Of Young Happy Handsome Man In Glasses
4. Friendly Female Barista In A Coffee Shop Serving Customers
5. Young Pretty Woman Working As Florist In Shop And Smiling (Note: they color-adjusted the apron so it’s Starbucks green!)
6. Attractive Female Business Owner On The Phone Behind The Counter Of Her Shop
7. African American Woman Close Looks Up Smiles Into Camera
8. Man Looking At Seattle Skyline

That’s pretty much a laundry list of politically correct inclusiveness picked straight from the Pond5 catalog. Not a single actual real business owner or worker in the bunch.

So how much did the IFA spend to hack together a video like this? My guess is a lot. One of the signers on yesterday’s absurdly crappy complaint was former Bush Administration Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, who reportedly charges more than $1,000 an hour for his service. So no doubt the IFA paid top dollar for this crappy video too.

Which raises the question: If America’s franchises can afford to pay $1,000 an hour for crap like this, why can’t they afford to pay $15 an hour to their own employees?

– With how often I talk about how gross coal trains are, we can also remember that oil trains are also gross, and maybe we should have better disclosure.

– What the everloving fuck, Pat Robertson?

– I’m not as big on calling out a history of not voting by candidates. Policy ought to trump that. If the candidates are similar, it’s maybe a tiebreaker. But a campaign making excuses in a way that makes it seem they don’t understand they’re in a vote by mail state is maybe worse.

– Eric Cantor got what he deserved: A political fraud’s stunning demise

– Oh hey, the Backbone Campaign are having a fundraiser. It looks like fun.