Museum of History and Industry workers are unionizing: Workers at Seattle’s premier local history museum announced yesterday they intend to join the Communication Workers of America, citing “opacity in decision making and ineffective leadership from executive management, lack of benefits for part time and on-call workers, chronic understaffing, unsustainable workloads, minimal professional development or training, and wage stagnation despite rising living costs and unmet promises of improvement.”
In addition, “Workers report that trust in senior leadership, as well as staff morale, has steadily declined as major hiring decisions and organizational changes have been made with little to no staff input. They further allege that workers who have raised concerns around ethics, staff capacity, and institutional sustainability, have experienced retaliation.”
Employees walk out at Washington’s largest employer (which is Washington): As promised, Washington’s unionized state workers walked out en masse yesterday in protest of the state refusing to raise wages during recent rounds of contract negotiations. Governor Bob Ferguson pledged not to raise taxes and instead cut costs heading into an economic slump to cover the rising cost of state services. This is austerity spiraling 101, but there’s someone he forgot to ask.
Seattle teachers strike tomorrow if no deal reached today: A similar story is playing out in Seattle schools, which are supposed to open for the new academic year tomorrow if only the school district would answer the demands of local teachers. We’re entering the mud-slinging phase as both sides try to convince struggling parents that it’s the other’s fault. Spoiler alert: It’s the school district’s fault, not the teachers’. Yell at the government.
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown: There’s been a goose murder. The case is a mess. Conspiracy theories are flying like feathers. Right near MOHAI, when they’re organizing? A suspect in a Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace “No Nerds, No Birds” shirt during the union’s contract negotiations with Boeing? And the victim is a Canada goose, in this geopolitical climate? This ain’t no matrimonial snoop job. The Stranger’s own Nathalie Graham has the story of the private detective on the case, Naia Okami.
“I’m not your typical gruff ex-cop. I’m early 30s. I dress emo. I listen to emo music. I’m in alt-communities. I don’t look like I do this sort of work, but I do,” she says.
“Chaotic ambush by bounty hunters” is not the kind of thing you want to read about your neighborhood: Nor do you want to hear bounty hunters yell “Tase him again, Tase him again!” as an RV careens toward your property. North Seattle residents were not so lucky last week. Seattle police appear mostly concerned with explaining how none of this is their fault, per the Seattle Times. As a quick reminder, bounty hunting is not something that other countries do. It is crazy American gun culture nonsense, which is why the only other country where it’s legal is our long-suffering Philippine colony.
Candidate for Senate walks back lie that he “saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes: Former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers did not in fact see the body with his own eyes. As the chair of the House intelligence committee at the time of bin Laden’s assassination by the United States, he instead saw a photograph. The Guardian reports “Rogers said—days after the raid—that the photograph he’d seen made it clear that Bin Laden was dead. But he said he supported Obama’s decision to not make the graphic images of the raid public.”
The photos were too graphic to release because, according to The Intercept, Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill (whose DUI charge I covered as a cub reporter in his hometown of Butte, MT) ritualistically mutilated bin-Laden’s corpse in grotesque SEAL tradition by blasting his brains out all over his face.
Interbay has a lead problem: Not as bad as Butte’s, where a copper smelter that electrified America dumped it onto everyone’s kids for years, but bad enough there’s signs all along a street near Fisherman’s Terminal warning about it. Lead is especially bad for kids, it messes with their developing minds. None of this is good for the kids at the daycare across from Dyno Battery. Details in the Seattle Times.
A proper deep dive on the Gravel teens now working for OpenAI: Remember that annoying viral socialist political campaign backing the ancient former US senator from Alaska Mike Gravel for president? Well, the two teenagers behind it now work in the AI industry, according to a thorough CNN look at their dumb asses. This is a good reminder: Do not trust overly-online leftist political actors disconnected from real social movements, they are not “close to the people,” as Mao once said. They cannot unite the peasantry and free China.
Trump socializes Venezuela’s oil for Americans: Speaking of failed left-wing social movements no longer close to the people, Bolivarianism is not looking so hot these days. Gustavo Petro is out in Colombia, and over the weekend the Trump administration announced a new partnership with the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela that basically amounts to the US Department of Defense stealing the country’s oil because Trump thinks it will make shortages from the Iran War negligible (this won’t work). This is all, of course, downstream, down the Orinoco, to the shores of Tripoli of the US kidnapping Venezuela’s democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro. He posted a jail selfie over the weekend.
Somehow Kaiser Wilhelm has returned: This is how reactionary mainstream politics have become.
It was the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this weekend: The nicest people in America’s greatest city took the brunt of the storm, which you can get an eyewitness view of in the fantastic documentary Trouble the Water free on Kanopy with an equally free Seattle Public Library card. The hurricane coincided with the beginning of the school year, so my introduction to high school was watching footage of the devastation and thinking “wow I feel bad for whoever has to clean that up” only for it to turn out to be me a few years later. RIP to AmeriCorps NCCC’s Southern Region base in Mississippi, another victim of DOGE. You were the second-most progressive thing the federal government ever did in Vicksburg.