Councilmember Cathy Moore’s plan to eliminate the requirement that Councilmembers recuse themselves in the face of conflicts of interest is off the table for now.

Moore announced Friday morning that she withdrew her bill to rewrite the city’s ethics code so that a Councilmember would have to publicly disclose a financial conflict of interest only when discussing or voting on legislation, rather than disclose and recuse themselves from the entire process, as the rules currently state.  

The proposal was deeply unpopular with the public. Scores of public commenters showed up to City Council and Seattle Ethics and Election Committee meetings throughout May to voice opposition to the plan and criticize Councilmembers for damaging trust in government at a time when it’s already so low.  

Former Councilmember Kshama Sawant and members of her Workers Strike Back organization showed up weekly to excoriate the Council during public comment, often breaking into chants and shouts that several times led to Council President Sara Nelson holding the remainder of a meeting remotely on Zoom.  

Moore’s bill appeared to face a rocky path to passage. Just two Councilmembers — Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon — voted in favor of the bill during the May 22 Governance, Accountability & Economic Development committee meeting. The other three committee members — Nelson, Joy Hollingsworth and Bob Kettle — abstained.  

The bill was expected to head to the full Council for a final vote on June 3. Councilmembers Dan Strauss and Alexis Mercedes Rinck are opposed to the bill. Mayor Bruce Harrell also publicly opposed the idea, opening the possibility that Moore’s bill would need a 6-3 vote to avoid a mayoral veto.  

In a statement Friday, Moore said she did not take the decision to withdraw her bill lightly, but that her “conversations with colleagues have made it clear that we require more time to ensure we get this right.” 

The idea to rewrite ethics rules grew out of two instances last year when Councilmember recusals helped stymie the passage of legislation.  

In early 2024, Nelson proposed scaling back new minimum wage standards for app-based delivery workers. Former Council appointee Tanya Woo was advised to recuse herself because her family owns a restaurant. The legislation stalled and never went to a vote.   

Later that year, Hollingsworth proposed legislation related to tipped wages for restaurant and service workers. Woo was again advised to recuse herself, as was Nelson, who still has a stake in Fremont Brewing, which she co-founded. Hollingsworth rescinded the bill amid backlash from unions and others.  

In November, Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Election Commission, outlined a proposal to require disclosure rather than recusal. Barnett said he’s uncomfortable being in a position to influence policy decisions, pointing to his experience working in Boston and New York where ethics rules don’t require recusal.  

Both Barnett and Moore argue that public disclosure of conflict of interest is a sufficient remedy because voters can use that information to try to vote a Councilmember out of office every four years if they’re unhappy with the elected official’s ethical choices.  

Additionally, Moore said that recusal disenfranchises residents since they are left without a district representative should their Councilmember recuse themselves. Residents are also represented by two citywide Council positions, however.  

Moore has maintained that her proposal to remove the recusal requirement is unrelated to any forthcoming legislation. But the Council may consider changes to renter protections this year, and both Rivera and Solomon own rental properties, meaning they might have to recuse themselves.   

On Friday, Moore indicated that she plans to continue working on the ethics legislation.  

“As the Council further discusses the appropriate policy choice for our city, it’s my hope that we can collaborate to find a standard that both upholds the accountability of elected officials and preserves the integrity of our system, without impeding the essential functions of local government,” Moore said in a statement.  

Topics: Seattle City Government

The American Dialect Society named "enshittification" its word of the year in 2023. If you aren't familiar with the term, you might feel like they chose it a couple years too early. Enshittification came alive the year before when writer Cory Doctorow coined it. He was trying to describe how the tech industry makes products that get worse over time. Companies like google, meta, and amazon have poisoned their services in similar ways. Enshittification, he wrote in the aforementioned Financial Times, "is a three-stage process:"

First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.

It could've been the word of the year this year, too, is what I'm saying. It feels like even outside of tech, things have been enshittifying over time. How long has "planned obsolescence" been in our cultural vernacular? Our last TV seemed to die within weeks after its 1-year warranty expired. I found this sad but prescient post by Christian Sarkar about the enshittification of government. It left me wondering, what might enshittification look like in the nonprofit world?

#notallnonprofits

The disclaimer isn't here to protect my own business. These characteristics, this process, doesn't happen in every nonprofit. I've met and worked with a lot of nonprofits! But I have seen these dynamics play out or begin to play out. Some folks think of these as hazards of doing business, but they don't have to be. I write this less as a callout post and more of a humor-tinged thought exercise.

How might Doctorow's timeline appear at a nonprofit? How do some nonprofits risk enshittification?

1. Solve a problem that everyone supports. Most nonprofits start out by filling a gap that people recognize exists. This generates broad support for what is likely an easy sell. "We give trash bags to people who need trash bags."
2. Dominate the market. As the nonprofit starts doing good work, the natural impulse is to do more good work. This means more funding, then more fundraising, to stay in the black. Taken even further, this could feed a desire to dominate a particular industry. Going for scarce funding means being the best at what they do. "The state's largest distributor of trash bags to the bag-insecure, since 2025."
3. Grow too big. The expectation is that donors will continue to flock to us forever. Foundations will break through our wall Kool-Aid Man style to shower us with cash. But those donors and foundations often want to support what's new, not what we've already done. Nonprofits add services, enter new markets, and often scale up staffing last. The added stress on workers can lead to churn as people escape low pay. "95% of what we spend goes towards trash bags, not salaries".
4. Cut services. It's hard to fund everything! When funding plateaus, programming and staffing slow down to meet it. Or entire programs close down. Staff lose their jobs or face restructuring. The people who rely on those services lose access. With funds and trust dwindling, the nonprofit may try a pivot, shed staff, or even shut down.

avoidification

How could we avoid this trap? According to Doctorow, there is are four cures for tech companies who want to break free. I'll apply his recommendations to a nonprofit that finds themselves in this swirl.

Competition. In tech, competition can prevent businesses from taking advantage of their customers. What if nonprofits are healthier in an ecosystem of organizations like them?

Regulation. Legislation has kept companies from tacking on bogus fees or cheating us out of money. What if we required a nonprofit to refer a person who'd lose services before they could cut them off? Or what if fair competition practices kept one nonprofit from dominating their market?

Self-help. Doctorow writes how a for-profit behemoth could prevent its own enshittification before it starts. It needs leaders within it to say, "no, we're not going to do that to our customers." Nonprofits could try a similar values-based decision-making model. If cuts are inevitable, it's a decision for all parties to make, not just one boardroom.

Workers. When a nonprofit's working conditions get tough, good people leave. Not enough workplaces have unions. Not enough invite input from every level when they face a big decision. If the people at the top want to enshittify their organization, someone at the bottom should be able to stop it.

engreatification

The best thing about cycles is that we can break the negative ones. We don't have to follow the curve or play the game. Who do we matter to? What do they need? What do we need to feel good about the work we do?

Let’s debunk one of the biggest myths about management: 

(Image: The Reef)

They missed 4/20 but Capitol Hill pot shop The Reef was back open in time to celebrate Memorial Day weekend.

The E Olive Way at Denny shop reopened this weekend after three months and $300,000 of work to rebuild and reinforce its 1926-era storefront. The protective sidewalk bollards are back in place. The business also continued to pay employees through the closure.

“When our Capitol Hill location was forced to close, our top priority was taking care of our team,” David Olivas, director of operations at The Reef, said in the announcement of the grand reopening. “We were able to keep our staff on payroll so no one lost income from hours, but their ability to earn tips was impacted.”

CHS reported here in February after a group of thieves used a car to ram the storefront, partially ripping open the 99-year-old masonry building in a middle of the night burglary, the third time, The Reef says, it has been targeted.

The damage left the building leaning precariously and forced the temporary closure of Denny until emergency permits to stabilize the property were secured.

Smash and grab pot shop break-ins continued to plague the pot industry in Seattle but the cash-only businesses aren’t being targeted for the reasons you might think. Former policy director for Seattle City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth and co-owner of the Hashtag Cannabis shops Logan Bowers says cash is not the issue and that most stores aren’t being targeted for their cash any longer. “The problem is it’s so easy to steal cars, the perceived risk is so low (rarely caught), and maybe COVID made them crazy, they’ll do it for trivial amounts of product,” Bowers said.

Police were looking for the suspects and two SUVs reported leaving the scene of The Reef break-in and likely involved with another smash and grab in SoDo only 30 minutes later that same Friday early morning. No arrests have been announced in the cases.

Burglaries and break-ins also continue to be a challenge beyond the cannabis industry with broken glass part of the price of doing business around Capitol Hill. In 2022, the city launched a Storefront Repair Fund to help businesses pay for vandalism or damage. Funding for that program is now closed, the city says.

This weekend, The Reef was focused on getting back to business — and getting back to work. The store opened in the summer of 2018 as the first I-502 retail pot shop on E Olive Way and the third pot shop shop on Capitol Hill.

“Reopening this store isn’t just about repairing a building; it’s about restoring a vital source of income and community for our employees. We’re thrilled to welcome everyone back and get our Capitol Hill team thriving again,” Jaime Levitt, general manager of the Capitol Hill location, said.

The Reef is located at 1525 E Olive Way. Learn more at seattle.thereefstores.com.

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Provocative point here in this Dissent review of the Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

What is the point of our moral ideals in a world where people can endlessly express care and concern for others—those living in zones of everyday poverty or spaces of terror like Gaza and Tigray—but do nothing in practice?

This question haunts Omar El Akkad’s new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a powerful account of our failures to stop the war in Gaza. What makes El Akkad’s book especially striking is the doubts he comes to harbor about his own profession, writing, and how it shapes our moral convictions. When Kamala Harris can stand at the Democratic National Convention one night and say she wants to end the war and then send bombs to continue it the next morning, is there any logic left to making moral arguments? In El Akkad’s painful refrain: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?”

El Akkad takes us up to the point of utter resignation before ultimately reasserting the value of this work. The journey itself, the willingness to tarry with this nihilistic possibility, is what gives this book its strength. He does not leave us in hell but insists that we recognize we are already in one.

For many of us outside the halls of power, writing remains one of the most visible means of fighting back. Even as El Akkad doubts its utility, he still writes a book that he hopes might eventually change how people treat one another—both morally and materially. He scrapes language, stories, and every element of his imagination to find some way of writing and speaking that might finally push the powerful from vague invocation to concrete action. His book is urgent as much for its potential success as for its insistence that we grapple with the painful limitations of the world of ideas and values to which many of us have dedicated our lives.

….

So he keeps telling us stories, hoping they might help get us there. He tells us of his family fleeing Egypt for Qatar, and then Qatar for Canada. He tells us of his dreams of the West, of free speech and democracy and liberalism as an embodied way of life where he can choose how to be, what to say. He tells us that he has no false consciousness about the cruelties of where he came from, that he knows it is ruled by autocrats who have no more concern for Palestinians than the extent to which supporting them subdues domestic rebellions.

Then he tells us about the path he has taken to become disenchanted with everything his younger self sought and held dear. He learns quickly that, in his privative phrasing, one finds the “harbor never as safe as the water is cold.” And he sees that Western liberalism is not a development of fiction, of narrative’s capacity to expand our ability to see through the eyes of others. Rather that very idea is itself a fiction: “the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self” comes with a “dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefitting from the systems that oppress them.”

El Akkad refers to the belief that our empathy makes us righteous even as we benefit from an uneven world as a “fortress of language.” Such fortresses “pen” some lives in a permanent elsewhere, caged on the other side of morality—“a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed.”

For the young El Akkad, it was “enough” for there to be pockets of liberalism accompanied by a general desire for freedoms to spread noncoercively. It was the job of morality to care about other people and the job of governments to put that care into action. But he learned all too quickly that there was a profound geographic fracture in our moral vision.

Everyone cares, of course, about the child being bombed. The penury of being human is that too often what follows is a second moment, a hideous and repressed moment that we rarely dare to speak aloud, when people think, “Oh, but if some child has to be bombed for the world order to continue, I don’t want it to be my child.” The deepest problem of moral scarcity that El Akkad traces occurs not when one cares about a limited number of people. It is rather this belief that life can only be good for some, that one side will always be consumed.

If we don’t confront and overcome this second moment, the goal of politics is no longer seeking justice, but rather ensuring the right to consumption—while maintaining the language of justice. “It is not without reason,” El Akkad writes, “that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on earth [Yemen] to keep a shipping lane open [the Strait of Hormuz].” Never mind that ships in the strait would not have been targeted if, instead of bombing Yemen, the United States stopped sending bombs to Israel. This is the perverted moral calculus of our age. Some lives must be made good, no matter the cost to others, no matter the logic or truth of any of it.

So I guess here’s the question–does your empathy matter at all? Or does it just make us feel good and thus is another part of the individualist fundamentalism of contemporary liberalism?

The post Does Empathy Matter? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.