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The rich just keep getting richer. As of the most recent available statistics, the top 1 percent of taxpayers control one fifth of the nation’s wealth.
CBS’s Dick Meyer calls this the deliberate result of “Trickle Up” economics. And, he asserts, Republicans, Democrats, and baby boomers all support the policies that keep so few getting so much.
Greg Nickels’s big plans for south Lake Union originally didn’t include the Wawona, the 110-year-old Pacific Schooner that’s been docked since the ’70s at what’s now South Lake Union Park.
This week, the Wawona’s fate was apparently decided at a meeting of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Board. Northwest Seaport, the nonprofit that now owns the ship, would have it drydocked, disassembled, many pieces replaced, and reassembled on land near its current pier. The whole operation would take $2 million. Northwest Seaport has only raised $400,000 thus far toward the ship’s long-term restoration. But they’re hoping the SLU area’s higher visibility will translate into higher visibility for their cause.
At the same meeting, representatives of developer David Sabey discussed their plans for the old Georgetown brewery site. Sabey’s people said they won’t even try to preserve the facade of the site’s southernmost building (the former Rainier Cold Storage), which they said was too far gone to restore into anything. They might, however, consider carefully dismantling the building’s front wall so it can be rebuilt in front of some new structure.
Oh, and did you hear Sabey wants to buy, and save, the Sonics and Storm? He’d put up a new arena for the basketball teams on the old Associated Grocers land he now owns near Boeing Field.
Sabey’s current record at preserving threatened Seattle institutions is now 0-1. (He was the last owner of the Frederick & Nelson department store, which had greatly fiscally deteriorated before he came in.) Saving the Sonics would make him a true Comeback Kid.
Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla digitally recorded his first solo album in Vancouver. A recording-studio employee was bringing the finished tracks to Seattle when U.S. border agents seized the hard drive. The hereby-linked AP story says “some music publications hinted” the dispute might have been due to the “politically charged” content on the album. Walla discounts this conspiracy theorizing, noting the agents let tape copies of the songs go through. Barsuk Records says Walla’s album, Field Manual, will be out in January. The feds still haven’t returned the hard drive.
…Seattle Times “expose” piece on Sunday? The one blasting certain local Democratic politicians for approving costly budget earmarks benefitting a big campaign contributor?
Well, prog-blog star Matt Stoller has his own take on the topic.
Stoller’s opinion on these favors ties into his opinion about Rep. Brian Baird, one of the three lawmakers cited in the Times story. (The others are Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Norm Dicks.)
Stoller lists Baird as a “Bush Dog Democrat,” one of several Congresspeople who regularly vote with the right wing on key issues at key moments. Stoller would like more progressive Dems to run against these Congresspeople at the next primary season.
Stoller looks at Baird’s work to force the Navy to buy an unneeded $4 million boat from a local builder as part of a larger “nexus between Bush Dogs and corrupt practices.”
A Seattle Times Sunday editorial rejected the Roads and Transit ballot measure, following its Friday “expose” of Sound Transit light-rail construction costs.
Both pieces were built upon faulty reasoning.
About the supposed revelation of cost overruns, those “wasted” $5 million or so were out of a budget approximately a thousand times that high. Of course construction projects that drag on a decade or more are going to rise in price, especially during Seattle’s condo-mania when everything from concrete to cranes has been in overheated demand. The article failed to mention that if the original Sound Transit scheme had been approved in 1995, let alone the Forward Thrust transit scheme in 1968, we’d have gotten many more miles of light rail at a lower total cost.
And about the editorial’s assertion that we don’t need no new-fangled pubic transportation, that all we need to get around better is more and bigger highways?
The next day, the Monday Times’s big headline gave the startling news that people in Puget Sound country are driving less these days and taking public transportation more. The region’s vehicle population is still growing, but at a third its ’80s rate. And Sound Transit’s ridership has trebled since 2000. And that’s without light rail. Might the Times editorial board be persuaded to change its mind and acknowledge the value of adding more transit? Naaah…
AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM(LINER): Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner will now be at least six months late to its maiden flight.
Boeing says it’s due to multiple snags in the plane’s global outsourced production system.
So much for author Thomas Friedman’s claims about the world (of global commerce) being flat, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat concludes.
Still, don’t expect Boeing to go back to making more pieces of its products itself. Global deals, political tradeoffs to get state-owned foreign airlines to buy the finished planes, you know…
FALLING DOWN: Shortly after the start of Sunday night’s Seattle Seahawks-New Orleans Saints football game at Qwest Field, NBC’s skycam mechanism fell from its high wires onto the field below.
The mishap occurred during a called time out. Nobody was on the playing field when the skycam suddenly became a groundcam.
Once play resumed, about ten minutes later, the Seahawks did all the crashing. The unsung Saints, in their first victory of the season, trammeled the hapless Hawks in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as its 28-17 final score. It was the Hawks’ second nationally-televised collapse in as many weeks.
THINKING GLOBALLY, PICKETING LOCALLY: The P-I Monday headline: “Stripped-down student protesters rush Macy’s aisles.”
The reality: Less flamboyant, more serious, more global.
Six female college students simply walked into the ladies’ room at the downtown Seattle store formerly known as The Bon Marche. They emerged clad in odd, but street-legal, garments assembled from black plastic trash bags. After 15 minutes on the premises, the six left to join 12 other female and male picketers outside.
The protesters’ slogan: “I’d rather wear trash bags than Macy’s sweatshop clothing.”
The protesters’ message: A statement of solidarity with unionized textile workers in Guatemala, who have been locked out by factory management. The factories in question, Cimatextiles and Choishin, make clothes for such U.S. brands as Talbot’s and Liz Claiborne.
DISSED FOR LISTENING TO DISSERS: Gov. Christine Gregoire’s been traveling the state, patiently listening to citizen gripes at town meetings. Republican Party operatives blast the meetings as a big political stunt.
Let’s figure this one out: When the gov, as part of her regular governing duty, hears the voice of the people, that’s “political.” But when, say, undeclared un-candidate Dino Rossi travels the byways to make himself heard, that’s just public service?
…to Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. I believe the standard lefty-blog-O-sphere response is to ponder that, had the ’00 election not been nakedly stolen, we’d have a “peace president” instead of what we got.
Philip Golub believes we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the US as hegemonic superpower, but that the coming decline may be really slow and really dangerous.
…Joe Martin (not to be confused with the All My Children patriarch) delivers a terrific speech to a “Building the Political Will to End Homelessness” conference. Martin’s topics include America’s need for a “theology of hope” that would combine compassion with effective action.
Meanwhile, Real Change has run “A Seattle Manifesto,” Tim Harris’s call for more social justice and less demographic cleansing.
I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’ve been admiring the online scribblings of HorsesAss.org’s David “Goldy” Goldstein. Most recently, he’s lucidly compared the totally-made-up faux-controversy over a newspaper advertisement with the classic play/movie Betrayal.
…(other than Canadian editions of U.S. mags) delineates “How George Bush Became the New Saddam.”
…the rhetorical question of whether Americans are all now living within someone’s insane delusions.
My ol’ emo/folkie musician pals Gary Heffern and Chris Eckman (the latter from the Walkabouts), most of whose recordings have only been issued by Glitterhouse Records in Germany, have released their first domestically-distributed music in years. Appropriately enough, it’s a track (called “Wave”) on Song of America, a three-CD box set compiling new versions of classic American tunes, from “Lakota Dream Song” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” to “I Am Woman” and “Streets of Philadelphia.”
The mastermind behind this master mix? None other than America’s last law-abiding chief lawyer, Janet Reno. (No, unlike her immediate successor, she doesn’t pretend to sing.)
Attended the Washington News Council’s panel discussion at the downtown library Monday evening, entitled “Today’s News: A ‘Webolution’ in Progress.”
The six panelists came from different corners of journalism/commentary (Cory Bergman of KING-TV, Robert Hernandez of the Seattle Times, Josh Feit of the Stranger, Alex Johnson of MSNBC, Chuck Taylor of Crosscut, and Joan “McJoan” McCarter from Daily Kos). The moderator, Merrill Brown, used to work for MSNBC and was now with a Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” site, NowPublic.
But all seven of them are nowadays competing for the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of you, the online reader.
As one who’s seen this medium (or, as one panelist called it, a “distribution vehicle” that can carry umpteen different types of media) grow, I must confess I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know, and didn’t hear many arguments I hadn’t already heard. Buzzwords included: “Aggregation” (i.e., links to stories on other sites), “user generated content” (i.e., unpaid bloggers and videographers), “the end of the news cycle” (i.e., posting new content all the time), the supposed last days of print newspapers (someone suggested that some papers might not last another decade; I say we’re more likely to see some suburban and JOA papers fade out, but local monopoly papers in major markets would decline far more slowly).
The one real disagreement came when an audience member asked how these different organizations would reach out to under-40 readers. The Times guy mentioned recruiting teen volunteer bloggers from the Vera Project to cover rock shows at Bumbershoot. Crosscut’s Taylor, being the ever-dutiful David Brewster acolyte, scoffed at the very idea of needing anything to do with them pesky kids. The Stranger’s Feit gave the loveably cocky reply that his outfit already owns the advertiser-beloved young demographic; it’s built into everything they do. MSNBC.com’s Johnson had the best answer: He’s got a genuine 26-year-old single woman running the afternoon editor’s desk.
You’ll be able to view the whole thing on the state-owned cable channel TVW sometime in the coming weeks.
Yeah, Bush still refuses to admit he was wrong.
Yeah, he plans to keep the war of occupation going forever; he’ll leave our sons and daughters in harm’s way until he leaves office, and set things up so it’ll be darned difficult for the next leader to get ’em out.
Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.
This moment in the national zeitgeist feels like a moment in one of those multi-band benefit rock concerts–that point where the worst band on the bill, the sluggish jam band that tries too hard to be the next Phish only without the skills or the songs or the energy or the talent, ignores the 20-minute set limit all the other bands onthe bill must follow, and instead plays out its entire repertoire, complete with extended egotistical noodling passages.
Everybody’s waiting for the band to shut up and get off the stage already, except the band itself. The band’s members, in the role of a mutual admiration/masturbation society, are so in love with their own imagined fabulousness that they can’t even imagine the whole room not adoring them.
Now, imagine you can’t simply leave the arena. You’ve carpooled with a couple members of the next scheduled band. You can only (1) ignore the jam band from heck as best you can, (2) repeat a silent mantra to yourself of “This too shall pass,” or (3) take action–start a hearty booing section in the audience, toss empty plastic beer cups stageward, bribe the PA operator to cut off the band’s juice.
Like the jam band from heck, the neocon machine refuses to concede anything–not its control of the stage, not its incompetence, not its delusions of godhood.
And, like the jam band from heck, the con-game operators in DC imagine, nay fully Believe, the world will love their music (or history will avenge them) if they just keep playing long enough and loudly enough.
The analogy’s end limit is that the jam band from hell can’t cause hundreds or thousands of brutal, needless deaths and maimings for no practical cause except the enriching of its friends’ bank accounts.
And the jam band from heck doesn’t have 480-some days in which to continue its reign of error.
