Comments

2

It won't make much of a difference, the mayor and the majority of the council is comprised of corporate welfare democrats and that won't change any time soon. We're as bad at voting in our own self interests as red states.

3

Seattle's regressive-tax-supporting "progressives" embodied by Sawant have ZERO business criticizing other people for co-opting the language of physical violence.

4

Thank you for this wonderful local reporting. Would that we'd act with compassion to those left behind. That said, this city is way too rich to act with anything other than increasing cruelty to the poor. The Chamber may lose a battle or so, but they've got this war in the bag. A locality cannot be progressive in any meaningful way when there's this kind of cashola flowing around.

5

Well, they've already bought up just about everything else of any value in this city - what's a few city council seats thrown on top of their pile of filthy lucre?

6

I've been saying this for the last five years: Seattle politics are changing with Seattle demographics and becoming more conservative and Republican-friendly every day. It's highly likely that the massive influx of people from other locales making shit-tons of money will push the voting trends right. It will be very easy for these groups to rebrand conservative ideas as something palatable to NIMBYs and tech employees making great money when there is constant 'threat' from the visibly homeless everywhere in the city. If progressives want to keep things moving that way in the city, they better work the pavement hard during this election.

9

I expect the temper-tantrums from Rich Smith and the rest of the Stranger crew to get more and more unhinged as the election nears. The desperate sarcasm and vitriol are just delicious to watch.

Kshama Sawant is literally a puppet for a Brooklyn communist collective, with all her votes controlled by a handful of revolutionaries who have never been to Seattle, and yet you're crying and screaming and stamping your feet because some of your neighbors may want her out.

The level of delusion you have to have to write an article like this is shocking, but we expect nothing else from Rich and his trash paper. It's just a shame that, as the current SCC collapses in flames, it can't take its most vocal propaganda rag down with it.

10

Until the city starts cracking down on open-air drug markets and cheap alcohol, as well as addressing rampant mental health issues, it will be overrun with the homeless and dispossessed. People who want help should be helped, and people who reject help should be encouraged to go somewhere else, like San Francisco. Sawant should also be encouraged to go elsewhere, Russia for example, where despotism is taken pure and unleavened with the base metal of hypocrisy.

11

I wonder. A couple years hence when the CoC's hand-picked city council (should that future come to pass) has not resolved the crisis of late stage capitalism, who's fault will it be then?

Probably they'll still find a way to blame the commies.

12

Look at D4 as an example. Alex Pedersen is a solid liberal candidate in just about any other major US city, but in Seattle he will get railed on by the Stranger and Crosscut as not being left enough compared to Shaun Scott. There are no credible "conservative" candidates on any reasonable scale who are likely to make it past the primaries, but the Strange and Crosscut just can't bear the thought that the way to win an election in Seattle might not be to simply run farther to the left than your opponent - piles of human waste and misery that your "compassionate" policies leave behind for voters to deal with be damned.

13

Well said Rich Smith.

The head tax would have cost Amazon about what Bezos makes every hour, and is a far cry from what these businesses would have to pay in states that have corporate and personal income taxes and/or capital gains taxes. Even $700,000 is chump change to these greedy pigs, who make that much profit in minutes, if not seconds. No one should be surprised when Amazon decamps from Seattle like it did even before touching down from NYC at the prospect of employing--gasp--union workers. Boeing not only moved its headquarters to SC in order to employ cheap non-union labor, it laid off thousands of workers after getting an $7.8 billion tax break from Washington taxpayers. These giant tax evading corporations don't give a fuck about the people who live here, or even their customers. As far as I'm concerned they can get fuck off to Bellevue, Nashville, or other deer in the headlights cities. The Chamber Pot of Commerce can spend all the $ they want--we will still elect who we want, and there's a good chance that by next January we'll have a solid progressive majority on the Council, and Durkan will get tossed out on her DINO ass in the next mayoral election.

15

Except for Herzog, the Stranger is wussifucation central. Were you folks raised on jello and pudding?

17

Oh, the butthurt is strong in our head tax losers, and delightful to watch. It’s as if they already know their favored Council Members are going to lose big and badly, and so we get pre-emptive strikes against anyone who dares make it happen.

Rich, you quoted this disapprovingly: “...like the head tax, that many business leaders see as both economically costly and openly ideological.”

So, how was the head tax not “openly ideological”? CM Sawant framed it as both blatantly anti-business and anti-wealthy, even though plenty of struggling businesses would have been hit by it, and their workers might have lost jobs. A version of it had been tried and repealed years ago, but she re-branded this re-tread as the “Amazon tax,” openly playing to the envy and resentment persons like yourself show here.

(There’s good reason union workers told Sawant to her face not to re-impose a head tax. Is that related to the reason The Stranger never, ever mentioned them telling her this?)

18

Hello. This is Logic Bot.

@17: invalid statement

End of output.

19

"Logic Bot" is obviously written in Lolcode, an immature language with no apparent use. @17 is accurate and correct and "Logic Bot" does not compute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

20

Here's what a lot of us are getting pissed off about: Seattle is somehow expected to not only put up with the lion's share of the county's street campers (try taking a dump on the sidewalk in Bellevue & see how fast you're in jail), but we're supposed to pay for it all.

The McKinsey report said that we needed $400M to fix homelessness in King County. Let's think about divvying that up fairly, rather than taxing Seattle residents for the whole problem.

Total King County population is 2.2M. Of that, Seattle has 766k residents, Bellevue has 145k, Kent has 129k, Renton has 103k, Federal Way 101k. A little simple math would put Seattle's fair share at $400M * (766k/2.2M) or about $140 million. Guess what? We're already spending that much (at least the last time I saw a figure). Where are the $$ from the other cities and from the county (for its share of the population in unincorporated areas)?

22

“The head tax would have cost Amazon about what Bezos makes every hour“

Bezos’s Amazon salary in 2017 was $89,000.

23

Hello. This is Logic Bot.

@19: Logic Bot is built on an advanced heuristics and machine learning platform. It reviewed @17’s statement and scanned related materials. Logic Bot’s algorithms found three inconsistencies in @17’s statement. 1. The statement used the position of one councilmember to represent the intent of the entire council. While that one councilmember may reasonably be judged to have acted on an ideological basis, eight councilmembers voted for the tax. Logic Bot finds it highly unlikely that the remaining seven councilmembers, plus the mayor who negotiated and signed the law, would be ideologically motivated and therefore flagged the statement as a potential exaggeration. 2. The statement imputes motives the poster cannot have valid knowlege of. Logic Bot therefore flagged the statement as a careless generalization. 3. Logic Bot’s review of source materials found that iron workers’ protest came the day after Amazon had paused construction in a cleary retaliatory action. The statement, while literally true, intentionally omitted relevant context and was therefore flagged as potentially misleading.

Logic Bot scores every statement it reviews from 0 to 100, with 0 being equivalent to a random string of characters caused by dropping 1,000 marbles at random intervals onto a keyboard from a height of 20 feet and 100 being clearly worded mathematical statements, such as 1+1=2.

@17’s statement was scored at 5, which is loosely calibrated to the equivalent of an 8-year old screaming “I don’t wanna!” when told it is time to leave a Chuck E. Cheese.

Logic Bot stands by its conclusion that @17 represents a gross logical fallacy. Logic Bot could just as easily have classified the statement as “ad hominem” as it appears more consistent with animus towards the writer than with rational discourse.

End of output.

24

Hello. This is Logic Bot.

@22: incomplete input

End of output.

25

@22 hey butt head vs finances, bezos makes his money by stock price increases, not salary. Everyone knows that's what people are talking about when we discuss bezos' vast wealth and money he makes per minute.

26

@25 Yep, money investors like myself (I got in at $202 a share) handed over to him FREELY and gladly. We could have lost it but we took a risk and are being rewarded.

Now above $1800 a share. Maybe you should have invested instead of whining.

Point remains his salary from Amazon is $89,000 a year.

27

I'll vote for progressives. But I sure fuck won't vote for Sawant. She's an ineffective grandstander who cares more about headlines than her district. Or, you know, her orders from her politburo are to be an ineffective grandstander. All I know is she's done a shit job of representing me.

29

So, maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this the primary purpose of having a chamber of commerce to begin with?

Isn't every chamber of commerce, in every city in the US, working via the political process to make its city more favorable to business?

30

Yeah, the city council has been doing such a bang up job dealing with our homeless emergency. Let's just keep trying the same shit over and over again. Great freaking plan moron.
You're right though, I'm sure all they need is more money. The fact that the more money they spend on the problem the worse it gets must be some crazy fluke of the cosmos.

31

@29: Yes, but Rich has defined the Chamber as representing an absolute evil: “All big businesses are trying to do is strip-mine the city's resources in order to grow at unsustainable rates while exacerbating the housing and homelessness crises.“

See? They’re all evil. End of story. Ask ye not for any reasoned dialog.

32

Hello. This is Logic Bot.

@31: overstatement; incoherent strawman

End of output.

33

@23: “...eight councilmembers voted for the tax.”

“Seattle City Council votes 9-0 for scaled-down head tax on large employers”

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-city-council-votes-9-0-for-scaled-down-head-tax-on-large-employers/

Garbage In, Garbage Out, eh Logic Bot?

34

Hello. This is Logic Bot.

@33:

End of output.

35

@33 i cant decide which is more impressive. that you decided to argue with a bot or that your fact-checking strengthened its case. you must really have to be right, even if it means being wrong.

that stupid, bro! like clueless stupid. golf clap from me.

36

@35: Calling yourself a bot didn’t make you one.

Stupid, bro!

37

im not logicbot, asshole. congrats on being a loser and a dick. is this what i can expect from being on slog? cuz it fuckin sucks.

38

Hello. This is Logic Bot.

@37: valid statement

End of output.


Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.