Washington Liberals

As Americans, we have a fundamental right to vote and to support candidates, parties, and positions of our choosing.

But voting and political advocacy aren’t just a right. They’re also a weighty responsibility.   Sometimes we support candidates or positions that result in great harm.

For example, during the presidency of George W. Bush, our nation systematically tortured prisoners. This has been known for years, but only recently did the US Senate release a report enumerating the heinous acts performed under the direction of the highest officials in the US government.

Not only did our nation torture, it also initiated a fraudulent war against a nation, Iraq, that was unrelated to the attacks of 9/11. Moreover, that war was planned long before those attacks.  The war resulted in the loss of over 4000 US lives and of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Some reputable estimates are that over a million people died.  The war wasted trillions of dollars and incited anti-American hatred and jihadism.

People who voted for Bush & Cheney bear responsibility for those outcomes. (Not all conservative voted for Bush & Cheney, but most conservatives did, I’m sure.)  People who supported Bush & Cheney in 2004 are especially culpable, because by then the facts had become available about the fraudulence and recklessness of the war.

Do you conservatives apologize for your support of Bush & Cheney? Do you acknowledge the injustice of their acts?

In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama, thinking he’d be a transformative president who would turn a page on the corruption, class warfare, and war-mongering of his predecessors.  Things didn’t turn out that way. Obama  protected the torturers, the war criminals, and the crooks of the financial industry.  He prosecuted whistle blowers. He surrounded himself with Wall Street cronies.  He escalated the war in Afghanistan, instigated drone attacks in several nations, and meddled in the Ukraine and other countries.  He compromised early and often. He failed to lead.  The health care plan he chose as a centerpiece of his domestic policy was devised by the Heritage Foundation.  His passivism and centrism helped the Democrats to get a shellacking in 2010 and again in 2014.

Still, most of the responsibility for the shellacking is borne by Congressional Republicans who opposed every policy initiative Obama proposed, often with unanimity. Republican intransigence, and the opposition of conservative Democrats, resulted in the Affordable Care Act being as bad as it is.  Basically, Republicans forced a bad health care plan on the American people and then blamed the Democrats for problems with the plan.

But Obama can’t just blame the Republicans. He was a poor leader who chose many bad policies. And as Obama recently said of himself, “My policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies … back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.”

This was clear to me by 2010.  So I did not vote for Obama in 2012. And now I regret having supported Obama in 2008.

But the choices in 2008 were not good. Hillary Clinton and John McCain were (and continue to be) more hawkish and more friendly to Wall Street than Obama.   At most I could have made a protest vote, for a candidate with no chance of winning.   Besides, om 2008 I was deceived by Obama’s speeches and campaign propaganda.

So, I apologize to the American people and the world for voting for Obama in 2008, though I plead naiveté and ignorance.   Had I supported Obama in 2012 I would have been more culpable — as were those who supported Bush & Cheney in 2004.

Perhaps many of the conservatives who voted for Bush & Cheney in 2004 knew that he wasn’t so good but figured that he was the lesser of two evils. Indeed, one day in 2006 a Republican coworker came into the office and said, “Yeah, Bush and Cheney have done a terrible job. ” He shook his head and thought for a moment. “But I still wouldn’t vote for a Democrat, because they’d be even worse.”     I really don’t understand that attitude, given how horrible Bush & Cheney were.

We live in a sick society, and our political system is nearly dysfunctional.  People have become so disillusioned with the system that they don’t bother to vote. Turnout in 2014 was the lowest in 70 years.   The candidates our political system delivers for national office are almost uniformly horrible.

Our health care system is insanely expensive and is less effective than that of many industrialized nations.

Our campaign financing system invites corruption, thanks in part to the five Supreme Court justices who voted in the Citizens United ruling that money is a form of speech.

Scientists tell us that global climate change threatens the health of the planet. But many Republicans in Congress think climate change is a liberal myth.

Concentration of wealth and the national debt continue to rise (though the rate of the rise of the debt has slowed down during the Obama administration).   Many corporations avoid taxes by stashing money overseas.   The tax rate for unearned income is lower than for earned income. But Republicans in the next Congress plan more tax cuts for rich people. Is that fiscally and morally responsible?

Washington State has the most regressive tax system in the nation, and the state Supreme Court has held the legislature in contempt for not adequately funding education.  But voters continue to elect Republicans who work to maintain tax breaks and to oppose progressive taxation that would benefit the middle class and the poor.

 

(Raw video, my editing computer is dead)
Stop Police Brutality: Time to build a mass movement!

Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Africatown Center, Columbia City Seattle
Organized by Socialist Alternative

Moderator Ramy Khalil

– Guest Speaker from NAACP

– Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant

– Devan Rogers, Youth Undoing Institutional Racism and Ending the Prison Industrial Complex

– Celia Berk, Youth Undoing Institutional Racism and Ending the Prison Industrial Complex

– Dr. Will Washington, activist against community violence

– Julia Ismael, Africatown Education and Innovation Center

Since Officers Darren Wilson, Daniel Pantaleo, and Adley Shepherd were not indicted, protests have erupted against the violence regularly inflicted on black communities by police. The anger, grief, and desire for a better world are palpable among young people and communities of color. We need to build these protests into a sustained mass movement strong enough to pressure elected representatives to address the racist police violence and brutal economic inequality experienced by people of color and working-class people every day.

Socialist Alternative called this 2nd public meeting to build upon the December 10th public meeting to further discuss effective strategies for this movement.

What tactics at our protests are most effective?

What concrete demands should we and City Councilmember Sawant fight for together? A democratically elected oversight board with full powers over the SPD? Scrap plans to build a new King County youth jail?

How can we uproot the underlying system that breeds police brutality, institutionalized racism, and inequality?

Black Lives Matter!

Part 1

Part 2

The National Archives’ text of the Declaration of Independence reads as follows:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Notice that the sentence in bold is incomplete. It’s grammatical only if the preceding period and dashes are omitted and replaced by a comma. In short, the Declaration of Independence says it’s self-evident that Governments exist, in part, to secure our inalienable rights.  Notice also the final words quoted above.  Government has a positive role:  effecting the People’s Safety and Happiness.

In fact, earlier versions of the Declaration of Independence had a comma and not a period. In total, there are about 70 versions of the Declaration, some with commas, some without.

This argument was made in depth by Danielle Allen in Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.   “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality.”

The issue is timely because revisionist libertarians want us to believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were founded primarily as a reaction against tyrannical government and thus on libertarian principles.  In fact, as is well known by historians, the Constitution was written explicitly to counter the failed experiment in small government embodied in the Articles of Confederation (hence the Constitution’s General Welfare clause, for example).  Even at the earlier time of the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, the founding fathers realized that government has a very positive role to play in effecting the People’s Safety and Happiness.  Federalists such as George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton wanted a strong federal government.   Members of the early Democratic-Republican Party — including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe — favored a smaller role for government.  The battle between small government proponents and big government proponents rages even today.

Welfare State by Goldy

Washington’s Republican counties depend on Western Washington’s money. How can they survive the state budget cuts they demand?

I recently joined hundreds of other activists on a video chat hosted by 350.org to discuss recent developments in the saga of the hotly debated and much delayed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. As you probably know by now, TransCanada wants to build the KXL pipeline to transport diluted bitumen (dilbit) from the tar sands of northern Alberta across the US Midwest heartland to the Gulf Coast for sale on the global oil market. TransCanada needs approval from the US State Department and President Obama to construct a pipeline across the US/Canada border. The approval process has been stalled for years due to persistent grassroots opposition and in recent months held up due to a lawsuit brought by landowners in Nebraska who successfully argued in lower courts that the planned route of the pipeline was illegally drawn and granted the builders improper use of eminent domain. While waiting for the Nebraska Supreme Court to decide whether to uphold the lower court’s decision, the permit for the pipeline’s path through South Dakota expired leaving the oil giant facing the dilemma of having no legal route for the pipeline while oil prices on the global market are plummeting cutting into their profit margin for a product that is the most expensive (and filthiest) fossil fuel to extract, transport and refine.

The most recent bit of political drama in this ongoing saga was played out in the lame duck Congress when Mary Landrieu, the embattled Democratic Senator from Louisiana, bet the catfish farm on a Hail Mary attempt to pass a bill that would have approved construction of the Keystone pipeline. The bill was defeated by a razor-thin margin of one vote, and Landrieu lost her seat in a December run-off to Republican challenger Bill Cassidy. 350.org credits this victory to citizen activists who made phone calls to fence-sitting senators as well as Occupy-style sit-ins at the offices of Senators Tom Carper of Delaware and Michael Bennet of Colorado at which 350 DC activists were arrested.

Organizer for 350.org Duncan Meisel introduced Jane Kleeb, Executive Director of Bold Nebraska. Kleeb informed listeners that the Nebraska Supreme Court decision could come soon, and expressed the belief that whatever the Court decides, the outcome will be bad for TransCanada. If the lower court decision is upheld, there is no legal route for the pipeline through Nebraska, but even if they strike down the lower court, the lawsuit has shone a light on risks to the environment that reveal shortcomings and omissions in the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement which could solidify grassroots opposition and give Obama some political cover for a decision to reject the pipeline. One other possibility is that the Supreme Court could decide that the landowners do not have standing as plaintiffs and that could cause more delays and uncertainly in a legal process that has already held up the pipeline for several months. Kleeb is encouraged that President Obama has recently stated that building the pipeline poses catastrophic environmental risks while offering few jobs or other economic benefit and takes these statements as an indication that the President is poised to reject the pipeline outright if it lands on his desk, as seems likely to happen in the near future.

Next to speak was Dallas Goldtooth, Keystone XL Campaigner at the Indigenous Environmental Network. He described the situation in South Dakota where indigenous Lakota, Dakota and Sioux have strong legal and moral standing in opposing the re-permitting of the pipeline route through their lands. A hearing on January 6, 2015 could see TransCanada’s appeal to extend the permit dismissed on the grounds that the tribes were not properly consulted in the permitting process, a right that is established in federal law and the importance of which was recently cited in a speech by Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. If the permit is not extended, a lengthy new feasibility study would be required, giving both native and non-native landowners the opportunity to make their voices and opposition to the tar sands projects heard. Goldtooth and Meisel stressed that tar sands extraction is a vicious process that lays waste to pristine boreal wilderness, endangers wildlife, and is also destructive to human health and society as well. The increase in violence against women near the “man camps” similar projects have already created is a serious problem that bears consideration in the approval process.

Sara Shor, 350.org Keystone XL Campaign Manager, pointed out that Mitch McConnell, who will be Senate Majority Leader in 2015, has pledged to bring up another vote to approve the Keystone XL. We can expect such a bill to be tied to must-pass legislation in the manner seen with partisan give-away riders that were attached to the so-called CRomnibus bill in early December. Any such action, in addition to events unfolding in Nebraska and South Dakota, could trigger calls for activists to participate in anti-KXL actions all across the country and at very short notice. The NoKXL Pledge of Resistance, for instance, is prepared to engage in broadly distributed acts of civil disobedience as soon as the decision lands on the President’s desk. Asked what would happen if, despite all the efforts to oppose the Keystone XL, President Obama does approve the pipeline, Shor replied, “All hell will break loose. This pipeline is not getting built.”

Emboldened by the success of efforts to defeat Mary Landrieu’s last minute legislative maneuvers, opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline such as 350.org and their allies are confident that they have the know-how to handle whatever is thrown at them in the next 2 to 3 months, and they are calling on like-minded folks to join them and build their capacity for effective grassroots action. Visit any of the following websites for more information and to offer your support.

350.org – Stop Keystone XL Team: http://350.org/kxlteam

 

Bold Nebraska: http://boldnebraska.org

 

Indigenous Environmental Network: http://nokxldakota.org

 

NoKXL Pledge of Resistance: http://nokxl.org

When is a law not a law? That seems to be the question taken up by The Herald’s editorial board, education “reform” groups like Stand for Children, the Seattle Times, state legislators and now the governor.

It is an odd question to ask, as it is directed at Initiative 1351, the class size initiative that the people passed just a month ago. That initiative was derided by the mainstream media, by liberal organizations and by public opinion-leaders as just too expensive. But the initiative prevailed statewide with majority support in counties east of the mountains, surrounding Puget Sound, as well as in southwest Washington.

As soon as the votes were counted finalized and even before, the powers-that-be were ganging up with the demand to suspend I-1351 immediately. But here is what our state constitution says about lawmaking:

“The legislative authority of the state of Washington shall be vested in the legislature…. but the people reserve to themselves the power to propose bills, laws, and to enact or reject the same at the polls, independent of the legislature, … The first power reserved by the people is the initiative.”

So Initiative 1351 is the law, indeed, with a constitutional ranking ahead of laws passed by the Legislature. That’s why the constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both houses to overturn, amend, suspend or repeal initiatives passed by the people.

So what’s the deal with Initiative 1351? How come the powers-that-be want to deep-six it immediately?

They didn’t propose to decapitate Initiative 1240, which enabled the creation of charter schools, which has floundered in its implementation, and which passed with only a 1 percent margin. When Initiative 776, which lowered car tabs for new vehicles, was passed in 2002, and then found unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, the Legislature rushed to put it back into law. This decreased state revenues by $1 billion, money that would have gone to roads and transit. And just last year, when Boeing wanted a new $8.7 billion tax exemption, the Legislature went into special session just to give it to them. That took one day.

But these same legislators can’t find it in their hearts to fund Initiative 1351, which will reduce class sizes in public schools. So they want to overturn it. Consider State Representative Ruth Kagi’s (D-Shoreline) assessment: “We had a briefing last week … that estimated the cost of compliance with 1351 to be $1.9 million [billion?] per year in the next biennium … There is no way the legislature can cut existing programs and raise enough taxes to address that level of funding.” So, the Legislature can give away tax exemptions at the behest of a single corporation, but they can’t find the money to fund a voter-approved initiative that directly benefits more than 1 million public school students.

What are they scared of? They can close tax loopholes, if they want to. State Representative Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, is leading the charge for this. This would bring in billions of dollars for public services. They could consider a capital gains tax on the wealthy, as proposed by State Rep. Laura Jinkins, D-Tacoma, and supported by State Reps. Cindy Ryu, D-Shoreline; Luis Moscoso, D-Bothell; and Mike Sells, D-Everett, as well as State Rep. Kagi, herself. This tax would bring in about $1 billion a year. That’s enough to fund Initiative 1351, and it would be paid by those wealthy individuals who have gained millions since the great recession.

Indeed, there is a multitude of ways to figure out how to fund Initiative 1351, and ensure that the funding comes from the people and corporations at the very top of the food chain. Just yesterday Boeing announced it will buy back $14 billion in stock and increase its dividends by 25 percent! Of that, $8.7 billion could be seen as a direct transfusion from citizens in Washington state. If we can move that much money to Boeing, we can certainly figure out how to fund Initiative 1351, and keep faith with the people and their constitutional right to make laws through the initiative process.

Originally published at the Everett Herald

Obama gave a priceless gift to the GOP: immunity from prosecution and accountability for war crimes, torture, and other criminality. Still, many Democrats treat him as a hero.

In 2008, it appeared that the GOP was destined for many years of repudiation. They’d proven themselves corrupt, incompetent, and imperialistic.

Obama had a chance to reorient America to a new paradigm of Democratic progressivism. Instead, he hid Bush-era criminality from the populace; surrounded himself with Bush holdovers and Wall Street cronies;  prosecuted the whistle blowers; and governed as a centrist.  As a result, in 2010 and 2014 the GOP roared back to life.   Americans were confused about who was to blame for the mess we’re in.

There are those who would say that impeachment of Bush, Cheney and others would have been too divisive and would have led to a backlash against Democrats similar to what happened in 1999 when Republicans impeached Bill Clinton. The analogy doesn’t hold. Clinton was impeached for (lying about) sex. Bush and Cheney could have been impeached for torture, deception about the grounds for invading Iraq, and other crimes. See Kucinich Introduces 35 Articles of Impeachment.

At the Seattle Westin today, Al Gore spoke to a full banquet room at a fundraiser for Jay Inslee. Gore offered praise for the Washington Governor’s much vaunted plan to combat global warming. Inslee has proposed putting a price on carbon, improving public transportation, encouraging energy efficiency, and increasing use of solar power and electric cars. It remains to be seen how much of this agenda can come to fruition with Republicans still in control of the State Senate.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that taking a strong stand on addressing the climate crisis has now become an effective campaign fundraising technique. Not so long ago, such a topic would have earned barely a mention from an elected official with such a high profile as Inslee. Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth, Earth in the Balance, and other books calling for action to address climate change as well as founder of The Climate Reality Project, called Washington’s Governor the best of all U.S. governors on this critically important issue.

While giving a nod to the importance of fully funding education as mandated by the McCleary decision, Inslee spoke at length about his plans to find “market-driven” solutions to the problem of reducing carbon emissions, telling the crowd of likely Democratic donors the importance of seeing the current crisis as not just a danger to be averted but as an opportunity for Washington State to lead the nation and the world in 21^st Century green energy technologies, drawing on our State’s history as a leader in the aerospace and software industries. Gore recited a familiar litany of dire predictions of climate chaos, but he also pivoted to a more hopeful message: the cost of clean energy technologies is dropping at rates much faster than predicted just five years ago. When the former Vice President spoke of the lower cost and higher efficiency of solar panels, a couple at my table who had recently installed solar panels on their home gave each other a quiet high-five. (They also told me that homeowners buying solar panels from a Washington State based company can look to having the cost recouped in the form of lower power bills in no more than five years.)

But while Gore and Inslee were inspirational, the star of the day was 9 year-old Abby Snodgrass, a member of Plant for the Planet, who has taken it upon herself to help in the effort to plant “a thousand billion trees”. She believes children planting one million trees in every country on earth could offset CO2 emissions all on their own, while adults are still talking about doing it. Each tree binds a CO2 intake of 10 kg per year. Abby called on all the adults to follow her example and choose not to be a bystander just because the climate problem seems too big to solve. Abby is right. The message of the day is that we will never solve the problem of global warming by doing nothing. The scope of the problem requires all of us to work together. The plan put forward by Governor Inslee won’t solve the problem by itself, but like Abby planting dozens of trees, it’s a meaningful step in the right direction.