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Amazon Tries to Buy Seattle Election, Prevent Small Tax on Million Dollar Salaries

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In 2019, Amazon tried to buy the city council election. Their bet on right-wing candidates blew up in their faces. Now they are at it again. They just dropped $100,000 into the February special election, along with $35,000 from their puppets at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber. The big corporate donor PAC has already forked out more than half a million dollars so that you will be duped into voting for Proposition 1B. by Ron Davis

Amazon is at it again.

In 2019, Amazon tried to buy the city council election. Their bet on right-wing candidates blew up in their faces. Now they are at it again. They just dropped $100,000 into the February special election, along with $35,000 from their puppets at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber. The big corporate donor PAC has already forked out more than half a million dollars so that you will be duped into voting for Proposition 1B. 

Don’t be duped. Vote YES and vote 1A.

Half a million is a lot of money for the few people who show up for a February election. Of course, it is only a February election because Sara Nelson’s city council brazenly and egregiously violated Article IV, Section 1B of the City Charter when they purposefully delayed it so the electorate would be smaller and easier to purchase with deceptive mailers

All this follows an ugly few months for Amazon and its centibillionaire founder. First Bezos brazenly interfered with journalistic independence at the Washington Post, muzzling a Kamala Harris endorsement. This was followed by a censored cartoon that depicted Bezos and his billionaire buddies groveling at Trump’s feet with their bribes. This was of course because they were forking out a million each (two million in Amazon’s case) to curry favor with Trump. Amazon went on to openly drop the biggest known bribe on Trump so far and this time directly to the Trump family. $40 million for the rights to produce a documentary about Melania. 

Why Amazon is Trying to Buy Another Election

What corruption has Amazon cooked up to this time? Trying to kill more funding for affordable housing–in this case, “social housing.” 

Social housing is common in Europe–mixed income, permanently affordable, publicly owned housing. You may recall that last year Seattle voters passed an initiative that created a public developer dedicated to building this kind of mixed, middle income housing. This means it will serve everyone from those in serious financial straits to home care aides, fast food workers and delivery drivers to firefighters and nurses. Under city law, we had to create the agency first, and now we’re doing the funding part.

Proposition 1A would provide funding through a nickel-on-the-dollar payroll tax on money a person earns over $1M each year, and the first million bucks is free every year. Since our taxes are almost the very worst in the country when it comes to tax rates for working people (very high) compared to rich people (very, very low), this should be a no-brainer. 

But almost the entire Seattle City Council is opposed to the Democratic Party’s State Platform’s demand that we fix our ugly tax code. So they needed to daze and confuse us with something that sounds vaguely pro-affordable housing, but actually doesn’t tax the rich, raise revenue, or really do social housing at all. 

Enter proposition Proposition 1B, the gaslighting option. It is designed to make you think Seattle’s right wing loves affordable housing and taxes! Look, see, they want to provide $10M a year in support and send some nice postcards to tell you about it! 

A closer look shows this is BS. 1B kills the mixed income model. Even worse, in classic supervillain fashion, it takes that $10 million away from other affordable housing for people who are desperately poor. Per usual, the aim is to pit working people against one another.

Even former State Democratic Party Chair Tina Podlowdoski chimed in and slammed it. If a mainstream Dem who can party-build in conservative, rural parts of the state thinks you are right wing–maybe it is time even moderates realize Amazon and the Chamber are playing them for fools. 

What Amazon’s Money Has Bought: Pretty Postcards with Lots of Lies

The postcards they are sending out with all this money are mendacious and deceitful. I quickly debunked almost all of them in this video

If you know someone who is wavering from all the propaganda and needs more–I’ve also gone a bit deeper into debunking their claims in a piece with the Urbanist. I had to also hit some of their latest whoopers from the newest mailers in a piece on Rondezvous, my semi-eponymous newsletter

The key things to remember when considering their postal propaganda.

  1. Social housing advocates were always super clear that we needed money for the agency, and the people sending the postcard know that and are openly lying about it.

  2. The 1B backers don’t support 1B because they support affordable housing–they support it because they hate taxes on rich people. 1B prevents new funding for affordable housing. And existing affordable housing providers oppose 1B and support 1A. (In fact, The Housing Development Consortium (an endorser) represents 200 affordable housing providers in the Puget Sound region–pretty much all of them!). 

  3. The social housing developer proudly plans to provide units for working and middle class Seattle families, and this is a feature, not a bug. The higher rents subsidize the rents of the lower-income families. And when the Amazon mailer claims that 3% of the units are low income, it is openly fraudulent. The current plan is for the majority of the units to meet the federal definition of low income

  4. Related - the corporates feign great humanitarian concern for the down and out in their latest mailer (1A provides more housing for people making a bit more than the median income than it provides for people making 30% of median income–OH MY HEAVENS). They fail to mention that 1B prevents a bunch of funding for affordable housing, including people making 30% of the area median income. They also conveniently avoid the fact that most of the social housing is for families making only 60% - 80% of the average local income. That’s the bus drivers and teachers you are screwing over there, Jeff.

  5. The social housing developer has multiple, rigorous layers of accountability built into its governance. Their hysteria about a “lack of accountability” from Proposition 1B’s backers is nothing more than complaints about their inability to defund it through their puppets on the city council, as they recently did with more deeply affordable housing.

  6. If Amazon and the Chamber were honest, their mailer would not say that the social housing developer has never built affordable housing. It would instead say, "The social housing developer is a brand new legal entity. Since it is new, it hasn’t yet produced housing, because we have not yet funded it. But that is completely irrelevant and we are fools for bringing it up. Because that new legal entity has hired an extremely experienced leader who has a long history of building and managing half a billion dollars in housing at other legal entities."

Any remaining doubts? Check out the endorsements:

Every single Democratic Party Legislative District group in the city. The Labor Council (tons of unions) and the Building Trades (more tons of unions). Unions representing teachers, grocery workers, UW researchers, city employees, hotel workers, electricians, and a bunch more individual unions. Environmental organizations, human service providers, mainstream and lefty political groups. Affordable housing providers, businesses, politicians, news organizations.

Vote Yes and Vote 1A and get ten friends to join you.

 

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rocketo
1 day ago
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The Call Is Coming from Outside the House

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Who’s funding the 1B campaign? by Hannah Murphy Winter

Who wants to crush a big business tax in Seattle? Turns out, it’s not Seattleites. 

Next Tuesday, Seattle voters will finish voting on Proposition 1, our first shot at a social housing model. The original proposition—1A on your ballot—proposes a tax on businesses whose employees take home more than $1 million a year. That tax would fund the Seattle Social Housing Developer, which would acquire and build housing that would reliably serve Seattleites who make anywhere from 0 to 120 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), while guaranteeing that everyone’s rent is 30 percent of their income. (We like this idea and think you should vote for it.)

Unsurprisingly, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce isn’t stoked on a new tax on businesses and raised a campaign against it—1B on your ballot—which would attempt to pull from Jumpstart funds (which are already earmarked for entirely different types of low-income housing) and undermines the funding model that makes this social housing so unique. 

The campaign for 1B has been very visible, especially in our mailboxes, with oversized mailers covered in claims that it’s “for the rich,” or quotes alongside Mayor Bruce Harrell’s face. But who’s funding that campaign? According to The Stranger’s analysis of the campaign donations, almost two-thirds of their funding isn’t even coming from Seattle. It should be obvious that 1B isn’t a people’s initiative, but it’s not a Seattleites’ initiative, either. Let’s dig into it. 

By the Numbers

Okay, let’s start with the big picture. The campaign for 1A, run by House Our Neighbors, has raised $584,740 in itemized campaign contributions, with an average contribution size of $2,367. The campaign for 1B, run by People for Responsible Social Housing (read: the Seattle Chamber of Commerce), raised $425,150, with an average contribution size of $13,286. (I hope we’re all reading that in Bernie Sanders’s voice.)

The average campaign size gives us a sense of who’s funding the proposition: 1A has 182 donors who gave less than a thousand dollars; 1B has four. 

Long Distance Campaigning

Most remarkable, though, is how little of 1B’s funding is coming from inside Seattle: 61 percent of their funding comes from Bellevue, Redmond, Mercer Island, Fort Worth, Texas, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. 

Proposition 1 is a City of Seattle initiative, so other cities shouldn’t have a horse in this race. But looking at where they’re coming from, the $261k in donations is all about protecting big business. Businesses like Amazon, Microsoft, and T-Mobile (totaling $220k in non-Seattle donations) hope to avoid the new tax; And those out-of-state donations? $21k of them represent the real estate industry. 

Meanwhile, 1A is overwhelmingly funded by Seattleites: 83 percent of their funding has come from inside the city. That, and the fact that they’re funded largely by small-dollar donations, tells us what your gut is probably already telling you: Proposition 1A is a Seattle-grown solution, funded and supported by the people who actually live here. The opposition? A corporate-backed effort bankrolled by big business and out-of-town interests who would very much prefer not to pay their fair share.

Voting ends next Tuesday, February 11. See our voter guide here.  

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rocketo
2 days ago
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The Grammys Were Worth It for Doechii’s “Nosebleeds” Alone

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The Grammys Were Worth It for Doechii’s “Nosebleeds” Alone

Doechii’s 2025 Grammy win for Best Rap Album was, as she noted in last night’s acceptance speech, just the third time a woman had taken home the award, after Lauryn Hill with the Fugees in 1997 and Cardi B in 2019. That says more about industry obstacles for women rappers—prejudices ranging from misogynoir to colorism—than about the quality of their work: How is it possible, for instance, that Missy Elliott never won that trophy? As Doechii said to young Black girls watching at home: “Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you… tell you that you can’t be here, that you’re too dark, or that you’re not smart enough, or that you’re too dramatic, or you’re too loud. You are exactly who you need to be to be right where you are.”

The Tampa rapper has been on a tear of star-making performances lately. Even if you were dazzled by her appearances on Colbert and Tiny Desk, and had an inkling of what might come, her Grammys slot was still jaw-dropping in its artfulness and scale. Then there’s the fact that she had “Nosebleeds,” a song dropped mere minutes after the ceremony ended, locked and loaded to debut for the win—any win—she imagined herself landing. The timely release strategy speaks to her beautiful, pure self-belief, and the way she harnesses it for her wildly creative cadences. With a rubber-band beat by Danish producer Jonas Jeberg, the track serves as a kind of epilogue to last year’s instant classic “Denial is a River,” beginning with her harried breathing exercises that close the earlier single. 

If “Denial” was a chronicle of life’s chaos, this is the comeback track after getting her shit together. She paints another visual that puts you right in her mind, imagining herself walking to the stage and accepting her award while also narrating her internal monologue. She’s also showing off her agility, flipping between points of view on each bar as she zigzags her flow. When she stops the song to deliver an acceptance speech, thanking “Mommy, Blake High School, and all the bitches I surpassed,” her braggadocio can hang with the best of ’em (the end of that bar is “I knew it”). She references Kanye West’s 2005 Best Rap Album speech, mirroring the unmuddled bluster of a talent on the come-up. Her style on “Nosebleeds” is deeply rooted in hip-hop tradition, recalling 1980s playground freestyles while carving out her own new path. This also, excitingly, includes a sweetly sung outro about paying her dues over a fizzy drum’n’bass beat. 

Last November, the Tampa journalist Cleveland “PapiCleve” Rowe asked Doechii what advice she might give to her younger self. “I literally have no advice for myself,” she said, looking directly into the camera. “I ate that. That little girl is exactly who she needed to be, to be here right now. I’m fucking perfect. I ate that. No notes. Ten outta ten.” It’s characteristic of Doechii to cap off a win with another win, and it’s becoming clearer that her only real competition is herself. 

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rocketo
4 days ago
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“I literally have no advice for myself,” she said, looking directly into the camera. “I ate that. That little girl is exactly who she needed to be, to be here right now. I’m fucking perfect. I ate that. No notes. Ten outta ten.”
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The Eggshell Skull

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Note: This week’s musings relate to my struggle with disordered eating and body dysmorphic disorder. If you find this topic unsettling or otherwise uninteresting, you may want to scroll down and skip to This Week’s Recipe Inspo, 3-Ingredient Bagels! 😉 Last week, on my Instagram stories, I talked about the eggshell skull doctrine in law. In...

<p>The post The Eggshell Skull first appeared on The Korean Vegan.</p>

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rocketo
5 days ago
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We Need Corny Star Trek Now More Than Ever

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Featured Essays Star Trek

We Need Corny Star Trek Now More Than Ever

Idealism, not cynicism, is how we persist in building a better future.

By

Published on February 3, 2025

Credit: CBS

Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Drumhead"

Credit: CBS

Captain Jean-Luc Picard sees something foreboding on the horizon. It’s not the threat of a Romulan saboteur, whose potential presence drives Starfleet command to send retired admiral Norah Satie (Jean Simmons) to the Enterprise to investigate. Rather, it’s the turn towards totalitarianism that Satie threatens as she gives into her fear of an enemy among us.

“You know, there some words I’ve known since I was a school boy,” Picard tells Satie during a hearing of the suspected saboteur. “The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged. I fear that today.”

More than a clever rhetorical turn, in using the words of his opponent’s father against her, Picard’s statement returns all of the Starfleet personnel who are present back to first principles. Yes, they’re scared. Yes, things look bad. But that’s all the more reason to hold to our ideals.

“The Drumhead,” in which Picard issues his warning, isn’t just one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s one of the best Star Trek entries of all time. So it might be a little unfair to compare “The Drumhead” to the recent movie Star Trek: Section 31, which is already on its way to infamy as one of the worst Trek stories ever.

And yet, the issue here isn’t a matter of quality, but rather of theme. Where Section 31 takes a cynical approach to heavy themes, “The Drumhead” conjures up the possibility of Starfleet becoming a totalitarian army and responds with hope and optimism…

We need that classic Star Trek optimism now more than ever.

Star Trek: Section 31 may spin off from the more recent Star Trek: Discovery, but it has its roots in classic Trek stories. It stars Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, the one-time Empress of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe, the alternate reality introduced in the Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror.” Georgiou joins members of Section 31, a black ops division of Starfleet introduced in Deep Space Nine, the most morally complex series in the franchise.

Georgiou joins a ragtag Section 31 team to track down the Godsend, a superweapon she created as Terran Empress. She and her teammates may violate Federation treaties to complete their mission, but the movie argues that the ends justify the means. As executive producer and showrunner Alex Kurtzman has been saying on the press tour for Section 31, the movie suggests that the “optimistic utopia isn’t possible without people operating in the shadows to make it possible.”

It’s easy to see why Kurtzman and his fellow creators might take that point of view. Almost sixty years since the voyages of the Starship Enterprise began in 1966, we seem farther than ever from a future where humanity overcomes racism and sexism and capitalism and truly bonds together. Even canonical low points in Trek’s human history—World War III in the 1990s and the mass inequality that sparks the Bell Riots in September 2024—can seem like a more realistic version of our future than the founding of the Federation.

Of course Trek as a franchise needs to respond to humanity’s lack of evolution over the last several decades. The whiz-bang approach of J.J. Abrams’ 2009 movie is one of the more innocuous examples of this change. So is the sliding timeline introduced in Strange New Worlds, which showed that Khan Noonien Singh, who was one of the major belligerents in World War III, is still a seven-year-old in 2012 and not a grown man in the 1990s. But Section 31 is the most notable example of a terrible response to the realities of our disappointing present. Section 31 makes Star Trek cynical, glib, and violent, as if optimism is too corny and passé for modern audiences.


Boldly Going Where Trek Is Needed Most

One of the most trenchant criticisms of modern Star Trek I’ve encountered comes not from any online uber-fan or pop culture critic. Rather, it comes from Nathan J. Robinson, founder and editor of Current Affairs. In his book Why You Should Be a Socialist, Robinson laments, “Lately, even Star Trek has given up.” He compares Star Trek: Discovery to the dystopias of The Hunger Games and Ready Player One, stories in which the human spirit has been defeated and people have retreated into paranoia and isolation.

Lots of people were complaining about Discovery when Robinson’s book released in 2017. But his complaint has nothing to do with Burnham’s connection to Spock or whether there was “too much crying” on the show. Robinson mourns the loss of utopian fiction, arguing that we need such stories precisely because they aren’t real. Utopias can “stimulate the imagination in useful ways,” Robinson writes. “When we ask what would an ideal society look like and sketch the result, the exercise can help us come up with ideas that might actually be practical in our own world. I actually think that lacking a utopia can be just as dangerous as having one, because if you don’t have a guiding star for your journey, you won’t know whether you’re going in the right direction.”

Robinson’s right to point to Star Trek as a once-reliable provider of utopian vision. In “Arena,” Kirk relies on trust and logic to overcome his fear of the bestial Gorn captain to see not an enemy, but a fellow captive, finding that they can work together. The Romulans debut episode “Balance of Terror” sees one of the Enterprise crew turn to xenophobia and paranoia upon realizing that the enemies look just like Mr. Spock, earning a stern rebuke from Kirk.

Picard takes it even further in The Next Generation, delivering passionate orations about our highest ideals. Even beyond his warning against giving into fear in “The Drumhead,” there’s the defense of Data he makes in “The Measure of a Man,” urging another Starfleet officer to see the lieutenant not as a piece of materiel to be dissected but as a new form or life to be respected. In the midst of being tortured by Gul Madred in “Chain of Command,” Picard shares a story about a bully, calling upon his captors’ sense of pride and civility instead of simply wiping the baddie out.

Countless more examples can be found across all of the series. Even the original Section 31 story from Deep Space Nine serves more as a reaffirmation of Starfleet ideals, as Dr. Bashir rejects the shadowy organization’s covert ways and Odo sacrifices himself to undo the group’s genocidal tactics.

Are these choices realistic? Anyone who’s turned on the news recently would answer with a sardonic “no!” Are these stories corny? Sometimes, yeah. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting a chance deliver a Picard-esque speech to the current president or his cronies, let alone that the speech would change their minds.

But the fact that we consider solutions based in empathy and community so unrealistic only makes fiction about these ideals all the more important. We live in a world where the government does actually send military groups to commit horrific acts, where political posturing and expediency almost always outweigh any real concern for people’s lives, a world in which kind and professional people who are good at their jobs are consistently overworked and underpaid, and the vulnerable and underprivileged are victimized and reviled. We don’t need Star Trek, of all things, to reflect that reality. We need them to keep going forward, to keep seeking out new life and new civilizations, in the hopes that they’ll inspire and galvanize us when we need it most, and remind us that it’s possible to make our lives and civilizations better.[end-mark]

The post We Need Corny <i>Star Trek</i> Now More Than Ever appeared first on Reactor.

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rocketo
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Time Passages

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Photo: Freshly-decanted red wine vinegar is in clear glass bottles that show its vibrant ruby tones. To the right is the jar with the "mother" that catalyses ordinary wine into a delightfully tangy-sour condiment. The missing ingredient is time.


This week felt like the longest week of my life. By Tuesday afternoon, I found myself thinking: Well, at least it's Friday... Wait, what? It isn't Friday??

What should have been a run-of-the mill schedule turned turgid and turbulent. Small issues became cataclysmic and overblown. The news was decisively bad and the bad shifted to worse. Nothing got done when it was supposed to and like a slow-moving derailment, stress levels increased and burdened an already busy week.

But there's nothing like the promise of Friday to inspire me to get caught up and finish tasks so I can get on to the weekend.

The song Time Passages by Al Stewart was the theme the year I graduated high school, full of hopes and dreams and the kind of blind optimism that only the young can have. In those days, it felt like an ocean of time between summer and Christmas - two seasons that were sure to bring good things. Now, the months between fly so swiftly that I'm longing for things that have just passed me by.

It is easy to so look forward that you're skipping the here-and-now. I try very hard not to do that. A family summer trip last year that I'd anticipated for almost a year was so delicious and exciting that I didn't even want to acknowledge it was approaching because I simply didn't want it to end. Does this actually slow down time? I don't think so, but by refraining from looking too closely at the goal, I began to feel that I was heel-dragging the calendar. 

Some might call it "living in the moment" but appreciating the present isn't as easy as just slowing your breath or staking a point in time. It requires careful attention to milestones but carefree embracing of even the trickling wait times. I take photos in my mind that I can recall later - those suspended seconds where I'm sitting at the table before a meal is served, those minutes where my beloved grandkids cuddle in while watching a movie, the times when I'm surrounded by laughter and voices lilting with contentment. Those are the snapshots that I will have to look back on later, when the actual thing is in the rearview. 

Why does time seem to move slowly when you're a kid and to race relentlessly when you're grown? Is it the running out of the clock or the awareness that there's always so much going on?  So, this Friday afternoon, in the stillness of a warm crackling fire, I will raise a glass of golden honeyed mead to the bygone days and the ones just ahead. I will work at appreciating the easily-overlooked moments and relishing even the in-between.

I've got exactly 422 minutes of this delicious Friday left. Here's a cheers to the years!



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rocketo
7 days ago
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