[I planned to write this post two weeks ago, but then international travel got in the way. In the interim, my book Track Changes won the British Science Fiction Association award for best long non-fiction. You can read more about that, and the now-open voting for the Hugo awards, where Track Changes is also nominated, on my blog.]

In the summer of 2024, the estate of Michael Crichton sued Warner Brothers for breach of contract. The estate had been in negotiations with the studio to produce a sequel to 90s megahit hospital series ER, which Crichton created. After negotiations broke down, WB greenlit a show called The Pitt, starring ER alumnus Noah Wyle and produced by two of that show’s former showrunners, John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. The estate’s claim is that The Pitt, which is set in a Pittsburgh emergency room where Wyle’s character is the chief attending physician, is just an ER reboot with the serial numbers filed off.

The Pitt aired its first season on Max in the winter and spring of 2025, and having watched that season, I have to say that the Crichton estate has a strong case. And since I don’t actually care about Hollywood legal shenanigans, let’s talk instead about why that is a remarkable and unlikely achievement. These days, ER is probably best remembered for launching George Clooney’s stratospheric career, or for killing characters by dropping helicopters on them, but besides being a hit on a scale that simply doesn’t exist on TV anymore, it was also a major stepping stone in the 90s ramp-up to what eventually became known as the Golden Age of TV. There were hospital shows before ER, but what it brought to the table was a raft of formal innovations—cinematic-style shooting techniques, high-octane storytelling, and a deliberately contained setting (in its early seasons the show rarely left the emergency room, and details about the doctors’ and nurses’ lives were scarce)—as well as seriously skillful writing. A typical ER episode would weave together the stories of one-off patients who show up in the emergency room and then move on, follow up on patients whose sagas were more complex, dip into the staff’s personal dramas, and tie all these storylines together into something that not only felt like a single, complete episode of television, but that usually left you feeling breathless and wrung-out by the time the credits rolled.

In the era of steaming TV, these achievements are at once commonplace and vanishingly rare. The technical aspects that once made ER look like nothing else on TV are now mostly par for the course, while the ability to write a coherent episode—much less craft one out of multiple storylines—is nearly a lost art. It was hard to imagine that a show in 2025 could capture what made ER special, and yet within a few minutes of watching The Pitt‘s premiere, it was clear that this had happened. To be sure, there are places where the newer show falls short—in particular, the dialogue is sometimes clunky and over-obvious, with characters delivering what feel like PSAs rather than organic speech. But for the most part, watching The Pitt feels very much like tuning into the latest episode of ER back in the 90s—the same intense, propulsive shooting style (Film Crit Hulk has a very good essay about the deceptive simplicity of the show’s trauma scenes; how they convey an immense amount of information and emotional impact while remaining entirely coherent, usually without ER‘s go-to pulse-pounding music and raised voices); the same well-crafted, episode-focused storytelling; the same feeling, at the end of each hour, that you are both exhausted and desperate for more.

What’s particularly impressive is how The Pitt does all this while also setting itself the goal of talking about how medicine has changed in the last thirty years, and how that reflects changes in the society and country outside the hospital. It feels almost like a thesis statement for the show when, halfway through its premiere episode, an elderly patient is transported to the emergency room ensconced in a halo which is operating an arm that presses rhythmically on her chest—an automatic CPR machine. Other technical innovations are either constant background presences—the increased use of computers and tablets to keep track of patients—or suddenly startling—did you know that if you need to quickly start a fluid line, there’s a device that lets you do that by drilling directly into the bone? Often when doctors on the show perform risky or unorthodox procedures, they cite papers that turn out to be real, published case studies.

For the most part, however, the changes The Pitt charts are of a darker variety. Wyle’s character, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, has to shepherd nurses, residents, and a gaggle of newbie doctors on their first day of an emergency medicine rotation, not to mention an endless stream of patients complaining of everything from scrapes and bruises to full-body burns and injuries from being pushed under a subway train. But at the same time he also has to juggle the hospital’s demands that he raise patient satisfaction scores even as management refuses to hire more nurses. To manage patients who will spend their entire hospitalization in an emergency room bed even as a whole ward remains closed because the hospital hasn’t allocated funds to staff it. To fob off a private equity firm looking to take over the unprofitable emergency department by advising doctors to pad their charts.

In many other ways, too, the state of America in 2025 is reflected in what occurs in The Pitt‘s emergency room. The ER’s dedicated, no-nonsense charge nurse (Katherine LaNasa) is attacked by disgruntled patient who was previously raving about how he now lives in a “third world country”. Patients scoff at masks and vaccines. An attending who is a veteran brings techniques he learned on the battlefield to a mass casualty event. And looming over it all is the lingering trauma of COVID, of the intense demands made on medical teams, and of the losses they suffered.

The Pitt‘s one innovation on ER‘s structure—what will presumably form the backbone of WB’s defense against the Crichton estate’s lawsuit—is the fact that the whole season takes place over the course of a single shift. This poses some storytelling challenges. For one thing, even without the aforementioned mass casualty event, the single shift that the series follows encompasses a simply dizzying number of complicated traumas and tragic cases—as a real emergency room doctor told Vulture halfway through the season, if any real shift was like this, all doctors would quit their jobs. For another, it means the scope for character growth and change among the show’s main cast is necessarily limited, and reserved mostly to the new doctors who spend the day figuring out emergency medicine from the ground up—nervous, nerdy medical student Whitaker (Ludwig‘s Gerran Howell) who slowly reveals a steely core; confident hotshot Santos (Star Trek: Picard‘s Isa Briones) who struggles to accept that she still has things to learn. For the more experienced characters, the season does more work revealing their characters and relationships than developing them, and one wonders how sustainable this will be going forward. (For that matter, the format of a single shift per season practically demands that some of the cast will not return next season, which will be difficult for a television production to do.)

At the same time, the compressed structure can help put audiences in the characters’ headspace, and bring home the reality of the kind of work they do. Patients can feel incredibly important and urgent for the two or three episodes in which they appear, and then like a distant memory just a few hours later, because to the doctors, as well as to us, so many other cases have turned up to demand our attention. The first half of the season is spent accompanying two shellshocked parents (Brandon Keener and Samantha Sloyan) who rush their son to the emergency room with a fentanyl overdose, as they first come to terms with the fact that he is brain dead, and then adjust to the idea of donating his organs. By the time they leave, they feel like main characters, and yet by the end of the season they’ve almost been forgotten in the rush of other cases.

Other times, stories are left unfinished. A concerned mother brings her son to the ER on false pretenses because she fears he’s planning to commit a crime; at the end of the shift, Robby observes that the boy will probably spend his entire 72-hour psychiatric hold in the ER, and who knows whether that will do him any good. Most startling is the handling of the mass casualty event. For two hours, the show—and the emergency room—transform into a field hospital, as over a hundred severe cases are treated with furious, and sometimes ruthless, efficiency. And then the cases stop coming, the blood is mopped up, and everything goes back to normal. The sprained wrists and spiking fever cases wander back in, and you realize that what felt like a culminating storytelling event is just one part of the day, after which everyone has to get on with doing their job. For some of the doctors on The Pitt, this is a reality they can still cope with; for others, it may be more than they can bear.

Much of the conversation that The Pitt has inspired since becoming a runaway success (the show has already been renewed for a second season, which its producers promise to deliver next year) has focused on its uniquness in the current television landscape. “It’s a streaming show that feels like a network show” is the narrative that has emerged, and inasmuch as that’s true (and it is mostly true) that is a black mark on the entire streaming ecosystem, and its failure to create a model that attracts and retains audiences. But I don’t think that’s the conversation The Pitt itself wants us to have. I think it would rather leave us thinking about how there are scores of talented, hardworking, dedicated people who show up every day to clean up the mess that occurs when every other system has failed, and how, as those systems fail more and more, those people will eventually fall away. A show with the reach and visibility of ER could make a critical mass of people think about these issues; let’s hope The Pitt can as well.

The post The Pitt appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

sonofsamsara:

Down a hallway and tucked into the basement of Harborview Medical Center, an affordable and unexpectedly delicious culinary scene unfolds every day.

What looks like a typical hospital cafeteria is, in fact, one of Seattle’s most surprising hidden food destinations. The Harborview cafeteria, however, is not a total secret.

“We get outside guests just come here to eat the food because they appreciate it and always tell us how good it is compared to other hospitals,” said Chris Tharpe, retail manager at the medical center.

The cafeteria’s growing fanbase includes everyone from hospital staff and patients’ families to construction workers and local residents making the trip just for lunch.

The driving force behind Harborview’s surprising deliciousness is Executive Chef Vanessa Gray, who brought a bold vision—and a non-traditional résumé—to the job.

“I come from sports and entertainment… I wanted to make our cafeteria a fun place to eat with surprising food, not the same thing, hamburger, hot dog, pizza, kinds of things you see in a lot of cafeterias,” Gray said.

Her kitchen focuses on fresh, made-from-scratch meals instead of the frozen, pre-packaged fare common in institutional settings.

Each month, the cafeteria features rotating menus that reflect Seattle’s rich cultural heritage. The effort is led in part by Susan McBride, Director of Nutrition and Food Services.

“This one is Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander month, Black History month,” McBride tells CHS as she lays out menus for each month… “we have dishes that are representing different countries within that geographic area. The Native American Heritage Month features recipes from different tribes,” McBride said.

Gray emphasized that the team strives for authenticity. “If I take a recipe straight from a chef, then we try to do a bio to show that that chef is the one who created that item,” Gray said.

Big Volume, High Standards
Feeding thousands of people daily means scaling up without sacrificing quality.

“We’re cooking in batches as much as we can, so that we’re not having a lot of food just sitting in and holding,” said Gray. “It’s mainly about the constant turnover of food.”

Gray has to find a recipe she likes, simplify for her staff, then convert it to feed several hundred people.

Gray also noted the sheer volume of meals prepared each day — “About 1,400 a day… 1,500 to 2,000 out in the cafeteria” plus another 1,200 patient meals.

Among Harborview’s most legendary items? The Thursday scones.

“They’re famous. People come in, they buy like bags of them… we tried from scratch, and people wanted the old scones back… they’re gone by like 9am,” McBride said.

Making them fresh means starting the process well before sunrise: “2:30 AM on Thursday morning,” she added.

Though the cafeteria isn’t open 24/7, it comes close. “We open at 6 AM and we shut down like at 7:30 PM,” said McBride. But even overnight staff are fed: “We have a late night meal service that is three hours in the middle of the night… more like chicken wings and kind of the fun, fast stuff.”

And when it comes to eating in the middle of the night? “People like to eat different things the middle of the night than they do in the middle of the day.” Chef Gray tells CHS.

In a city where affordable meals can be hard to come by, Harborview’s pricing stands out.

“We have a $5 meal deal… entree, a side and a beverage,” said McBride. “The other two entrees… will be $7.50 to $9.”

“We have a long history of trying to have a really diverse menu that just hits a lot of different palettes and is representative of all the cultures that come to Harborview and work at Harborview”, McBride added.

The team’s sense of care goes beyond the menu. “We just go the extra mile for our customers,” said Tharpe.

“I think it’s just Harborview is a special place,” said Gray.

For those willing to step away from the usual lunch spots, Harborview’s cafeteria offers more than just a good meal—it offers connection, care, and yes, scones worth setting an alarm for.

Harborview Cafeteria is open to the public and located on the basement level of the medical center at 325 9th Ave. Learn more at uwmedicine.org.

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Featured Essays Daredevil: Born Again

Daredevil: Born Again Offers a Much-Needed Corrective to Relentless Copaganda

Pushing back on decades of misleading media representations of law enforcement.

By Joe George

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Published on April 23, 2025

Credit: Marvel Television

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Midway through the season one finale of Daredevil: Born Again, the mayor of New York City delivers a powerful speech about the dignity of the city’s police force. Positioning himself as someone who understands “the rank and file… down there on the streets, risking their lives to keep New York safe,” the mayor berates his opponent’s moral cowardice.

Scenes like this happen every day on television, but Daredevil: Born Again puts a unique twist on the concept. It’s not just that it occurs in a series about Marvel superhero Daredevil (Charlie Cox), a blind lawyer who uses his enhanced senses to fight crime. Nor is that the mayor is Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), the one-time Kingpin of Crime who has found new power as the elected leader of the city.

No, the twist is that Fisk’s valorizing of the police is presented as deeply sinister. Against the wishes of his opponent, NYPD Commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston), Fisk has put together a special Anti-Vigilante Task Force and authorized them to use lethal force as they see fit. He justifies his actions not in legal or rational terms, instead grounding his argument in manipulative pathos, insisting that cops have such a hard job keeping people safe that they should be able to act as they see fit, even killing with impunity.

The scene ends with a gory climax, as the cops watch in shock and awe as Fisk crushes Gallo’s head with his bare hands. But as over-the-top as it gets, in one key aspect the scene is incredibly realistic—it’s one of many instances in which Daredevil: Born Again boldly reminds viewers that for many citizens, the criminal justice system fails to provide either safety or justice.

Copaganda on Patrol

The idea of a renegade police force taking hold of the city might seem like a wild concept, a storyline ripped from the pages of an old Marvel comic book, but the focus on police is arguably one of the more mainstream aspects of Daredevil: Born Again. Police and law enforcement have long been fixtures of American popular culture, so prevalent that almost half of all dramatic television produced in 2020 was about cops.

Going far beyond a matter of taste or a mere cultural trend, the prevalence of cop shows and movies has real effects on the way we think about law enforcement. According to scholars such as Alex S. Vitale and Mark Neocleous, modern policing, first in the UK and then in the US, began as a method to oppress immigrants, non-white citizens, and the working class. Yet, thanks to these shows and movies, which has become known as “copaganda,” people are conditioned to think of law enforcement as a necessary social good, something that can and must exist for our protection and well-being, despite mounting evidence that the police do not stop crimes and often make situations less safe.

Copaganda is as old as moving pictures themselves. When Berkley Police Chief August Vollmer came to power in the early 20th century and instituted the reforms that would earn him the title “the Father of Modern Policing,” he took aim at the media, criticizing movies featuring the comedic Keystone Cops and appearing in one of the first examples of movie copaganda, the 1926 serial Officer 444.

In 1949, one of Volmer’s protégés, L.A. Police Chief William Parker, followed in his mentor’s footsteps by working with Jack Webb to create Dragnet, which soon became a television show in 1951. In addition to establishing the procedural model that continues to this day, Dragnet also put an emphasis on greater realism. Each of the episodes purported to be based on a case file from the LAPD (with the permission of Parker and his associates) and each episode portrayed Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday and associates as consummate professionals, heroes who effectively kept citizens safe from danger.

The model established by Dragnet can still be see in use today in hits like the Law & Order franchise, Chicago P.D., and Blue Bloods, with the same attitudes and narratives reflected even in so-called reality shows like Cops, which tends to valorize police officers even when they disregard and violate rules of conduct while taking down “bad guys.”

Even after the Black Lives Matter movement brought greater attention to police brutality against Black citizens and called for a massive reappraisal of copaganda, TV shows and movies about heroic cops continue to hit our screens. Daredevil: Born Again might seem to follow suit with sympathetic characters such as no-nonsense hostage negotiator Angie Kim (Ruibo Qian) and retired cop-turned-Matt Murdock associate Cherry (Clark Johnson, formerly of Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire)—both, it’s worth noting, are people of color. However, these good apples are completely outnumbered, buried under an avalanche of disturbingly bad apples, making Born Again a welcome corrective to the familiar narrative we’ve been taught to expect and accept.

Crime and Punishment

As Kingpin prepares for his grisly work against Gallo, the leaders of his task force come face to face with their true inspiration, Frank Castle, aka the Punisher. “I’m a big admirer of your work,” says the task force’s leader Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley), hoping to convince Frank to join them. “Everything you do, you can do with us,” Powell tells him, promising that Frank can continue to execute those he considers guilty with impunity.

Frank Castle may be a fictional character, first introduced in a 1973 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, but the scene feels utterly realistic. For years, American police officers have adopted the Punisher’s skull logo, sporting it on their personal belongings and sometimes even their cars and on-duty uniforms, against department regulations, claiming as a hero a brutal vigilante who murders at will. Even though Punisher co-creator Gerry Conway has spoken out against the practice and the character of the Punisher himself called out the practice in the pages of Marvel comics, it still continues today.

It’s particularly powerful, then, to see this version of the Punisher, as played by Jon Bernthal, mocking the corrupt police for modeling themselves after him, precisely because of that history, and the utter pervasiveness of copaganda in most popular entertainment. “Buncha clowns,” Castle mutters to himself before telling them off, screaming “You think you know me? You think you know my pain?” With those questions, Castle forcefully underscores the show’s point: anyone who would try to live like Frank Castle must be broken, like him.

The showdown with the Punisher is just one of many depictions of violent police in Daredevil: Born Again. The first major arc involves Daredevil, in his civilian identity as Matt Murdock, defending a man named Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes), who has been charged with killing a police officer. However, the officer in question died when Ayala stopped him and Powell, both undercover, from beating up a witness. Ayala simply saw two men brutalizing another and came to help, and when one of the aggressors accidentally fell into an oncoming subway train during the fracas, Powell immediately pinned the blame on the do-gooder.

The two-episode arc shows off a different side to Matt’s heroism, underscoring his resourcefulness as a lawyer and, of course, how his superpowers help him to gather evidence. In every instance, Matt finds himself stymied not by some costumed supervillain, but by police officers, both in and out of uniform. It’s not just Powell but the entire force who choose to stand by their fellow officer and hold the Blue Line rather than seeking true justice. Even after Matt proves his client’s innocence and helps him go free, Ayala is executed in the streets by a cop.

Was he killed in revenge for speaking out against the cops? Was he killed because the cops believe he’d killed one of their own? Was he murdered just because the cops hate him? It isn’t clear and doesn’t matter. The point is that the cops kill who they want.

That point is driven home even further by two shorter vignettes throughout the season. In one, a Black man named Leroy Bradford (Charlie Hudson III) is transported to Rikers Island for stealing a couple boxes of caramel corn from a bodega. The sequence, in which Matt uses his considerable charm to get Leroy’s sentence reduced down to ten days, serves to underscore our hero’s eroding faith in the law. We also see two cops munching on the caramel corn that Leroy stole and didn’t open, mockingly snacking on the merchandise that was used to justify taking away a man’s freedom. Bradford’s story illuminates the various ways in which the system is rigged against some members of society.

The other example serves to show that the systemic corruption of law enforcement extends far beyond Fisk’s clearly villainous task force to the uniformed police who patrol the city. In the finale, we witness a regular beat cop shooting an unarmed man looting a store. When the cop’s partner questions him over the killing, he simply pulls a knit cap over the dead man’s face and declares that his unarmed victim was a “masked vigilante.”

The fact that even these random, unnamed cops defy the law so flagrantly—shooting and killing unarmed people, and framing them as violent offenders, knowing that they will almost certainly be absolved of any blame, as we’ve seen time and again in real life—demonstrates that it’s not just Fisk’s handpicked officers that feel empowered to act with impunity. Born Again is not interested in assigning blame to a few very bad apples—in this story, the rot runs deep, from the very top all the way down through the rank and file. The system is irreparably broken, and there are no easy fixes—only hard questions, and the dire need for a sincere, constructive conversation about establishing a just and humane approach to public safety.

Devil’s Advocate

Some might argue that Daredevil: Born Again is overly sensational in its depiction of police, and that’s fair. After all, this is a Marvel superhero show, and the first season ends with Fisk declaring martial law, sending his task force to lay siege upon the city. Others will point out that the season finale’s closing montage, in which Daredevil gathers with supporters to plan a season two counterattack, does include some cops on his side, including the aforementioned Cherry and Kim.

However, when balanced against the oppressive, hulking weight of decades of shows and movies that depict the police as an inherent good without question, even when cops brutalize witnesses, disregard the law, and kill the innocent, Born Again is still an insufficient corrective, even at its most outrageous. In order to properly assess the effects of policing in our cities and communities, we need to be able to ask relevant questions, recognize systemic problems in policing and the justice system, and seek a clearer perspective on what’s wrong, and the endless stream of copaganda has muddied those waters for far too long.

It may be uncomfortable for many viewers to consider Born Again’s portrayal of most, if not all, cops in a negative light, and to see law enforcement depicted as broken and corrupt. But here in 2025, after over a century of glowing portrayals that focus heavily on acts of service, bravery, and sacrifice while ignoring or minimizing the darker realities of police brutality, misconduct, systemic racism and abuse, it’s time for those realities to take center stage. This certainly isn’t the first show to feature police corruption and officers who believe they’re above the law—not by a long shot. But usually, that corruption is seen as an aberration—the assumption is that the system might break down from time to time, but the good cops will inevitable win out, restoring law and order. It’s only recently that we’ve been invited to question the validity of that convenient, comfortable framing of reality, and whether it reflects the world we see around us.

Leave it to Daredevil, a show about a blind man seeking justice, to help us begin to balance the scales.[end-mark]

The post <i>Daredevil: Born Again</i> Offers a Much-Needed Corrective to Relentless Copaganda appeared first on Reactor.

Marches and “fast food strikes” like this one in 2015 outside the First Hill McDonald’s were part of the push for the new minimum wage

By Domenic Strazzabosco

April marks the tenth anniversary of Seattle taking a new path on its minimum wage. On April 1, 2015, the city became the first in the United States to enact a $15 minimum wage and a process to lever the wage higher to account for rising costs and inflation. As of January 1st, Seattle’s minimum wage sits at $20.76 an hour.

It has been a long climb to get here. A look around Capitol Hill shows some of the impact.

CHS checked out local postings to see what employers were offering new workers come the decade anniversary of the legislation.

Glo’s Diner, now next to Cal Anderson Park, is looking for a line cook and pays $21 an hour, just over the minimum, and the position is included in the tip pool. Menya Musashi Tsukemen & Ramen offers slightly more at $22 an hour, plus tips. Salt & Straw’s Seasonal Scooper position pays exactly the minimum wage, $20.76, and calculates that the average tip rate is $7.89 an hour.

Outside of the service industry, the Member Experience Sales Associate role at Orangetheory Fitness on Broadway pays $21 an hour, and the posting notes other benefits like a 401K and the potential for PTO and medical insurance after an “initial measurement period.”

Meanwhile, a Food & Beverage Lead with Seattle Rep pays $23.01 to $25.12 an hour, while an Administrative Assistant for affordable housing developer Community Roots Housing pays $24.50 to $26.50, depending on experience.

Both the Minimum Wage Ordinance and Wage Theft Ordinance were passed on April 1, 2015. The former immediately increased the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour (it was slightly over $9 an hour in 2014) with yearly increases, while the latter ensured that employers paid all owed wages and tips to employees.

Lan Chase, who is paid minimum wage at his job at Goodwill on Belmont, says that although the annual increases are nice, it never feels like enough. Soon after Chase received a pay increase at the new year, he was notified by his landlord that rent would be going up.

“Maybe for the first couple of months it’s nice and you’re able to put a little bit away because the cost of everything else hasn’t gone up yet, but after a little bit—after that initial raise and everything else around you starts to adjust to that—you’re not really able to put a lot away,” he said.

Chase said that his friends who make a few dollars an hour more seem more comfortable living in the neighborhood. He said that if minimum wage were somewhere between $23 and $25 an hour, minimum wage workers would feel more financially secure and be able to set money aside and save up for things.

Blue, who was involved with organizing the Fight for 15 movement starting back in 2011, said something along the same lines. Thirty dollars an hour is what she says would be an appropriate minimum wage to make life in Capitol Hill affordable.

“If you have to cut your profit margin down, that’s fine, pay your workers,” Blue said. “My personal philosophy is if you can’t afford to pay a living wage, you have no business being in business—point blank.”

The movement began with calls for “$15 Now”. It took Seattle seven years to get there.

Unanimously approved by the Seattle City Council in 2014, Chapter 14.19 required businesses in Seattle to incrementally raise their minimum wage each year until reaching $15 per hour over seven years. At the beginning of 2021, Seattle’s minimum wage increased to $16.69 per hour for large employers with more than 500 employees and small businesses with less than 500 employees finally reached the $15 an hour mark.

Flanked by Sawant’s Socialist Alternative wage advocates, Seattle’s mayor signed the minimum wage ordinance into law at a table in Cal Anderson Park in 2014

District 3 Councilmember Kshama Sawant held the minimum wage victory as the core  accomplishment in her decade on the city council.

In 2013, the Seattle Central and Seattle University economics professor included a promise of a fight for a $15 minimum wage in announcing she would take on incumbent Richard Conlin for his seat on the Seattle City Council.

By 2014 following Sawant’s victory at the polls, then-Mayor Ed Murray joined Seattle officials in applauding passage of the legislation as the city’s political establishment embraced the higher wage.

It is sometimes a tenuous hold. Last year, current District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth backed off a proposal to permanently extend a tip credit put in place ten years ago to protect the city’s small businesses during the phase-in of the higher minimum wage tied to inflation. The expiration meant hourly pay rates for the many small businesses subject to the credit leapt about $3 an hour in 2025.

While many predicted a massive wave of shutdowns in the city’s food and drink industry, there has not been an obvious increase in closures. The proposal was a reminder for many that the fight for the city’s minimum wage won’t ever really end.

From a worker’s view, the end of the tip credit and higher wages is hard to argue with. Chase said he doesn’t see how anyone could see expiration as anything but fair. He doesn’t think that being paid the minimum should depend on whether or not you receive the tips you’re hoping to get.

Recent data shows that the average Capitol Hill apartment costs about $2,100 per month, while working a minimum wage job at Seattle’s current rate comes out to $4,023 a month before taxes. Seattle’s current rate of $20.76 an hour is the highest for any major city in the United States and the fourth highest overall, coming in behind Burien, Tukwila and Renton, respectively.

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I’m into Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour. It is the one thing that genuinely gets me excited in a good way about modern politics.

Because, and I know I’m not alone in saying this, enough is enough. It’s time for the next version of Occupy. Things have gotten way WAY worse, and not better at all, in terms of the the power of the very rich dictating to the rest of society since the original Occupy.

And when I see media coverage of them speaking in places like Montana and Utah and Idaho, I’m thinking to myself, about fucking TIME some folks on the left talk to the people of these states about the way things are actually working against the working person.

So it came as a big surprise when I heard some folks on MSNBC talking about this. One of them was a TV journalist who just interviews people all the time about politics, and the other represented the Democratic party. I don’t remember their names and so I can’t find the clip, but it went something like this:

Journalist: why are Bernie and AOC in Utah? Isn’t that a super red state? They have no chance to help elect a Dem! There’s not even a viable candidate nor an election!

DNC rep: Well, my theory is that they are there to get media coverage, and after all we are talking about them.

Journo: Oh, that makes sense.

This, to me, is a great illustration of one of the many things that the Democrats have really really wrong. At some point in the distant past, they stopped thinking about voters. Instead they started looking at numbers, and polls, and focusing very narrowly on incremental elections and surgical strikes into purple states.

In other words, I don’t think it occured to either of these people that Bernie and AOC are actually there to talk to actual people with actual problems, and trying to persuade those folks by paying actual attention to them and their problems, even though they are not going to be living in a blue state tomorrow.

This blindness to how people actually are makes the poll-watchers super blind to what really matters in terms of changing people’s minds. And it’s a widespread illness for so many folks you see on TV. They literally don’t see the point of talking to people who live in red states. And that’s why the red states get deeper red and will continue to if those folks are in charge. Yeesh.