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Going Postal 2016
Fifteen pounds. Thanks to Catalog Choice, Seattle’s phone book opt-out, and vigilance against Red Plum and other advertisers, I have purged and pinched my annual junk mail tally down to 15 pounds. Last time I weighed in, in 2013, it was 26 pounds; in 2012, it was 33 pounds (half of it from the hated Red Plum); and in 2009, the pile tipped the scale at 50 pounds. Just the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 11/11/16
Serena [Trigger warning] Reporter Shaun King is helping to document on Twitter a rash of hate crimes—some of them at schools, between children—in the wake of the US presidential election [/end trigger warning], and the Southern Poverty Law Center is collecting reports of hate crimes, should you witness or (goodness forbid) be victim to one. I share these to emphasize just how deeply, personally, and intimately threatened many Americans are...Read more » -
2016 Democracy Reform Ballot Initiatives Roundup
This election, voters in nine states and one province saw a total of 17 democracy reform initiatives on their ballots. The initiatives gave voters a chance to weigh in on issues ranging from voter registration to vote-counting systems, from the role of big money in funding political campaigns to the adoption of game-changing campaign finance reform programs that would make campaigns about voter outreach again. Four of these proposed reforms...Read more » -
Kalama’s Methanol Refinery, by the Numbers
By any measure, the petrochemical refinery slated for construction on the banks of the Columbia River in southwest Washington is a giant. Designed to convert large quantities of natural gas into methanol, the facility would ship tankers full of the product to China to be used for making plastics. Although the facility proposed for Kalama is only about half the size of the gargantuan scheme that recently collapsed in Tacoma,...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 10/28/16
Anna I recommend listening to two great interviews from this past week on the CBC Radio show, Q. Both feature young indigenous artists talking about making it big as part of a new generation of writers, actors, artists, and musicians gaining recognition alongside the aboriginal social justice movement, Idle No More. An encouraging cultural reawakening seems like it’s underway in Canada. Director Tracey Deer and star Brittany LeBorgne talk about...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 10/14/16
Alan In April, we recommended this superb Stranger article by Seattle teacher Sean Riley about the huge potential benefits of returning to mandatory racial integration of public schools, aka, bussing. These past few months, I have been catching up on public radio podcasts. I was spellbound by this 2015 edition of This American Life. It’s on the same theme but focused on St. Louis. The crux: “[the] various kinds of...Read more » -
This One Northwest County Could Show Us All How to Vote Better
Most Americans are all too aware of the problem of big money in politics, but they may not recognize the sibling scourge of slanted voting systems. That is, the way we vote, not just how much money moves through political campaigns, also affects how well a government represents its ordinary voters. Cities, counties, states, and provinces in both the American and the Canadian parts of Cascadia could improve their representative...Read more » -
How I-1464 Limits Corporate Cash, Lobbyist Access, and IEs
In 2012, the Spokane-based electric power utility Avista donated $92,000 via its main lobbyist, Collins Sprague, to influence state candidate races in Washington. That year, lobbied by Sprague, the Washington legislature passed an amendment to the state’s Clean Energy Initiative that loosened definitions of clean energy to include energy produced from older biomass plants, such as Avista’s 1983-vintage Kettle Falls biomass facility. The Clean Energy Initiative, approved by voters in 2006,...Read more » -
8 Things Honest Elections Seattle Has Quietly Been Up To in 2016
Things have seemed quiet on the Honest Elections Seattle (HES) front lately. After the flurry of excitement over its landslide victory last November and the attendant thrill of Seattle’s leadership on campaign finance reform, the media attention died down, and most Seattleites got back to their cynical norm about the influence of Big Money in politics, especially as the US presidential race got underway this year. But a handful of...Read more » -
No, Seattle Does Not Already Have “Plenty” of Land Zoned for New Housing
[Residents] might also ask why the city insists on ever-taller buildings and doubling or tripling density in single-family zones with accessory dwelling units, even though planners say current zoning has plenty of capacity. So declared the Seattle Times editorial board, parroting one of the most persistent and ubiquitous arguments made during zoning debates far and wide, a rallying cry in neighborhood preservation circles not only in Seattle but in cities...Read more »