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.
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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.
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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!).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.