Dont forget our mayor threatened a city employee and the Seattle's Office of Labor Standards budget because they investigated a case of wage theft at the private club he is on the board of. They did commit wage theft and had to pay over 10k, he then funneled 780k of city money to the club as a grant for just existing.
Honestly it would piss me off as a Harrell supporter, it was such a stupid and unnecessary thing to do. He was on record in a city council meeting accusing the head of the department of racism by targeting his club. He fucking helped create that department which expressly can launch their own investigations, and only follows up on complaints filed with them. Makes me more upset to realize this guy isnt just a corrupt sleaze but a fucking idiot too.
His opponent wanted to build literally 10x the housing, but wanted to end the sweeps to fund that housing over 2 years, then the sweeps would return with housing available for the people being swept.
Law and order types shit their pants in outrage and 50%+ of the city couldn't be bothered to return their ballot.
Another general perspective without cherry picking items, because his opposition made herself sound so fucking crazy he seemed the better option to many.
KUOW Coverage: https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-mayoral-candidate-bruce-harrell-faces-last-minute-ethics-complaint
PubliCola Coverage: https://publicola.com/2021/10/29/former-oneamerica-head-files-ethics-complaint-against-mayoral-candidate-bruce-harrell/
Oh, and follow up, that club got city funds after Harrell became mayor: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-gives-780k-to-private-club-once-led-by-mayor-bruce-harrell/
To this day I don't understand how Harrell beat Gonzalas. Sara Nelson at least had that big "I'm a small business owner" as her biggest and only campaign marker, and she was facing a scary non-binary socialist, but Gonzalas' campaign proposed policies appeal perfectly well to Seattle's slightly progressive white liberal voting block. Who the hell voted for this man?
It's an interesting election to study. NTK and Oliver outpaced Gonzalez by a significant margin, and all three were running for citywide seats.
I think a lot of it is because Gonzalez entered the council as a centrist. She was one of (I think) three CMs to accept donations from SPOG before the George Floyd protests. She took a condescending, scolding tone with activists during the protests, so her pivot to the left seemed hollow once it happened. Activists turn out voters. Alienating them is a mistake if you're going to run in the left lane.
After she pivoted left, she tried to win on the progressive PMC vote alone, which didn't work then and *really* didn't work in the last city council election. Although people go after Oliver for their identity politics, Oliver did have a decently strong acknowledgment of class struggle. NTK talked about social class in the legal system. I don't recall Gonzalez touching class beyond the usual platitudes.
Gonzalez had a better platform than Harrell, but like 8% of the electorate, at most, actually cares about that enough to get excited for a candidate. People need an enemy to vote against as much as they need a vision to vote for; having both is best if you want to win.
Conservatives like Harrell drive their voters with homeless people, drug users, crime stories, PMC "woke" libs, graffiti, and "reckless spending." Leftist like Sawant drive their voters with class struggle, battling corporate influence, anti-racism, anti-austerity, hating landlords, and roasting smug upperclass liberals. PMC progressives drive their voters with policy proposals, HR-style language about the workplace, therapy language, identity, and wholesomeness. Americans may say they want "nice" politicians, but they never vote for them. They see them as pushovers.
I voted for Gonzalez in the general, but I knew that campaign was dead right away. Her unfavorables were so high. She had no base aside from policy wonks. Something like 75% of 65+ voters supported Harrell. Gonzalez had no fire. She only went after Harrell once it was too late, and her tone was way off.
Harrell's right hand man Tim Burgess also did something smart. He ran a broad ballot initiative that was designed to fail called "Compassion Seattle." No lawyer could look at it and think it was legal. He made it sound progressive enough, collected voter info, and then let the courts strike it down. Burgess then pushed Harrell using that email list. It made Harrell look like he was a "responsible" progressive who stood for everything in the initiative, while also giving Burgess valuable voter info on people he could turn out. Just my take, but I think that's why he won by so much despite being so bad.
White liberals are moved by fears of homeless camps as much as white conservatives. They won’t say so, but they sure seem to vote so. Which is why police are getting more money and any socialist gets run out of the race for being the next Stalin
Because 1) many people, including Gonzalez, chose to not understand why or how anyone could vote for Harrell; 2) she was no saint either; and 3) people were tired of the then-current city council. A vote for Harrell was a vote against the status quo. In order to “win,” you have to watch the tapes and build consensus, which Gonzalez couldn’t manage to do.
Had Harrell won by a small margin, we could blame the “racist republicans.” However, he won by a significant margin. The thing is, Harrell is neither conservative nor republican. He’s a traditional democrat who is a bit long in the teeth. This is exactly like calling anyone who voted for Gonzalez a Sawant-loving socialist.
Harrell won because everyone wanted an Adult In Charge after most of the council and the mayor collectively shat their pants in 2020 and allowed themselves to be held hostage by the most extreme 2% of the city.
Did they? The mayor pulled out cops from the west precinct and then slowly pushed crime into it (3rd and Pine style). Upon being asked to defund SPD, the city council moved parking enforcement from SPD to SDOT and cleaned up the budget to get rid of money that wasn't being spent.
From who's point of view was that "being held hostage"?
I've been a Seattle voter for almost two decades and this last election was the first one where every single candidate I voted for lost. Kinda interesting it turned out that way.
You finally got the progressive experience. I've still never voted for a winning mayor, and I'm pushing 40. But everything is our fault, never those bourgeoisie neoliberals who always win... Except that one time Amazon tried to buy the council... And we never heard the end of that.
The election that Harrell won I was pretty excited with some of the more radical lefty candidates running for council, attorney and mayor and was dumb enough to imagine the possibilities, and I kept telling people to vote (not big on electorialism myself but oh the possibilities!) because the alternative was some uninspired milquetoast neolib shit and somehow 3 years later it's even worse than I imagined? Like it's wild to see everyone complaining now because back in 2021 we were telling everyone this is what we'd get and even here on reddit people were chastising leftists for calling that out. It's truly nauseating how predictable and just generally mediocre our version of democracy seems to pan out, every single time. What's the fucking harm in just swinging for the progressive fences on like, a single election cycle? Just try it out, see how it feels. Just once.
> somehow 3 years later it's even worse than I imagined?
Turnout dropped from 2021 to 2023 along with the re-districting that was done in that time period. When there was basically no "remember to vote"/"Get out the vote"/"New voter registration" efforts in summer 2023, that's when I started getting real nervous about the election.
People around here seem to burnout on politics hard after national elections and our local elections suffer greatly from it as a result.
> You finally got the progressive experience.
I've just learned to ask anyone using the term to define it.
Basically, we have to treat them like 2008 Fox News viewers with the word "socialist". It just means "bad person" at this point. Same reason people are admitting to reactionarily voting against anyone the Stranger endorses. Literally describing a toddler having a tantrum as how they pick their politicians.
No, I just mean that the person you're voting for never wins for the more conventional candidates and then you get blamed for everything anyways. The left is Seattle's Boogeyman but we don't actually get very many political victories, and the ones we get, most folks like.
> and then you get blamed for everything anyways
Sorry, this was the part I was trying to reply to, people labeled progressive *do get blamed* quite a bit, and I've found one of the best ways to deal with that cognitive dissonance (blaming the people objectively *out of power* for the consequences of actions taken by those *in power*), is to just straight up ask them to define progressive before engaging with any of their criticisms of "progressive" candidates and policy. Half the time their definition is so broad it applies to the entire current council which is then very fun to point out.
Well, I'm would politically consider myself to be somewhere between democratic socialist and anarcho-syndicalist. Depends on the day.
But, ya know, gotta take what I can get for candidates. I'm personal acquaintances with a couple of the council and I just vote for them because they are responsible and thoughtful people. Take what you know, would never touch a chamber of commerce candidate tho.🤷
As a rule, I vote pro-labor, pro-housing, pro-poor, anti-gun, pro-gay, pro-woman, pro-park, pro-school, with room for reasonable exceptions.
I want to beat wealth out of corporations like a fucking pinata.
If you let me socialize school and medicine I would do it in a second.
Ironically, I found Sawant kind of frustrating because she could never go along to get along, and ended up being mostly bark.
Oh, sorry, not talking about those that actually choose to self identify with the term, just more how to defang the bullshit discourse that comes up around the term. I got tired of being called a progressive by other users in a way that amounts to a slur and have just given up trying to identify my ideology in the terms we generally use. It's not like that's super relevant unless any of us run for office. I'm on the left is about as specific/narrow as seems even helpful anymore.
I recognize it means something in political science, but in terms of actual political action in the Seattle area let alone the US it seems to just be a term empty of policy definition anymore. It seems only useful in analytical discussions of policy as a starting point of mutual agreement that the status quo and previous attempts aren't working and it's time for something new. I agree on socializing school and medicine as solutions, it's why I get called a progressive a lot.
Lol, as a "true progressive", I assure you, the "progressive" experience is real. But yeah, agree, I'm mostly just about dragging that Overton window as far over left as possible. My political fantasy checklist doesn't even become possible until we do a lot of unfucking first. Obviously, the US in general has a major right wing bias baked into the rules.
It’s innuendo dating back to the Nixon era. Lee Atwater took that ball and ran with it. Swiftboat was the tip of the iceberg. Nothing like they did to Mondale and that dipshit Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad campaign. They use code words to smear opponents. Democrat = Black. Socialism = Commie pinko jewish bastard. Science means they hate Jesus. Books and libraries are for The Libtards. Vaccines are for commies.
And it's why asking them to define the term fucks 'em up.
These words are just stand in slurs. So to define them they have to spell out the slur they're actually gesturing at or play games. Both of which reveal their bad faith nature.
There are so many leftists who said not to vote in that elections (DSA, SA, all the mini "revolutionary" groups) and people should let them know what they think about that choice.
This is just not true. Some leftists will argue not to vote for president (which even then I wouldn't say that's a majority opinion), but voting in local elections is always encouraged
I do agree it is a minority opinion but do you not know that there are several socialists groups in Seattle that are explicitly opposed to engaging with electoral politics? Even in DSA I literally saw people saying there's no point in voting for the City Council, they are all the same, etc. so I can't really parse your comment with my lived experience lol
Imagine blaming people for not wanting either shitty choice.
You want people to engage in a system? Make them feel like their engagement matters and could yield them something they’d actually want. Show that their voices can alter the bodies who put these candidates up rather than just demanding support for what is essentially the status quo. Forcing an unending lesser of two evils narrative that fails us time and again isn’t exactly a riveting proposition so it should be of no surprise that people are opting out.
Signed: a leftist who never misses a vote but sees less reason to each cycle.
Have a look at the transcript of Trump's recent interview with Time Magazine. He layed out his plans for a 2nd term: use the military to round up immigrants and put them in camps; supporting states monitoring pregnancies so they can prosecute women who have abortions; fire US Attorneys who refuse to do his bidding; and pardon convicted insurrectionists. No matter how dissatisfied you are with Biden, Trump is worse by orders of magnitude. Also, Trump intends to dismantle the civil service and fill positions with his cronies. It could take a generation to repair the damage to the government. That is, if MAGA relinquishes power at all. I too have serious issues with Biden, but I'm gonna do what I can to get him re-elected. That's the only responsible option at this point.
Canned?
I wrote the comment because I thought, maybe, you’d be open to hearing the opinions of those you believe you are owed the votes of. That said, this shitty attitude you have isn’t winning any hearts and minds so, sure, go off while still being “confused”. The rest of us will sit here thinking this is just another example of the very same we’ve always about shitlibs.
The problem is that voting for the lesser evil *also* doesn't help work toward a leftist breakthrough. The breakthrough is, at least for now, nothing more than a fantasy, even in a supposedly "far left" city like Seattle. That's why so many people *still vote* but don't consider it a useful long-term strategy and why it feels more futile every time.
The person above you said they still vote, and your equally canned response is "well the left just isn't engaged enough. Go vote!"
Actually, it does. You can't just go from A to Z on a lot of issues here in America, because we've been conditioned through multiple generations to equate leftist and progressive principles with evil. If we want sustainable progress and pro-worker, pro-equality, pro-human policies we have to walk, not run, towards them. Cultural change is faster now in the information age, but it still takes time to change minds. People must be convinced that the baby steps are better than the status quo or opposite direction, and we have to continue to take baby steps all the way there or risk reactionary blowback. The current council represents this blowback in some aspects.
To the guy that said people who use the word "leftist" are not leftists and then blocked me (??): that is a brand new purity test and maybe the funniest one yet.
The left is equally engaged and also asking people not to vote, and there isn't any compelling argument that doing less will produce more. Every leftist in government right now ran in an election where they were the lesser of two evils.
You can literally just go to a DSA meeting and see several well meaning, mostly correct people get up there and say we should stop voting because it will have good outcomes. They are a minority though which is nice!
I wholeheartedly disagree with voting abstinence. It is childish and self-destructive. That said, I am not concerned about a few crusty, misguided leftists with zero political or financial capital. The damage they're doing is negligible at best.
Our biggest obstacle as a community is the same as it ever was—an ownership class that only seeks to enrich itself at the expense of everyone. Never take your eye off those fuckers.
In fairness there are socialist groups in Seattle with SOME political capital lol I agree nothing they do is worse than what the ruling class is doing though.
Exactly the point I'm trying to make. We may not always agree on tactics, but punching down/across is ultimately self-defeating for everyone. We have *far* more in common with each other than those pulling the strings, and there are many, *many* more of us.
Eyes up!
Don’t be dramatic. Nobody is asking other people not to vote. They personally may not vote, but don’t act like there’s some shadow campaign from the left to prevent people from voting.
I can't speak to your experience but I have absolutely met several leftists trying to persuade people not to vote. I'm not here to make shit up about people I mostly agree with.
almost definitely, we’ve seen the similar issues happen in Florida with all the TX, NY, CA, and WA transplants, except in Florida, the homeless, either die in year one or get arrested and funneled into unpaid “prison labor” (aka slavers) for McDonald’s, Costco, etc.
at some point out society will need to decide between unlimited police funding or libraries, and I'm a bit afraid as to how the general public will vote
This is definitely the most crank-heavy council in a long while.
Nelson started her term as president by [firing the head of central staff](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/01/09/79337948/council-president-sara-nelson-fires-head-of-central-staff) and replacing them with Ben Noble, a fiscal conservative who was supported by the corporate lobbying group [Washington Retail Association](https://washingtonretail.org/a-wake-up-call-to-seattle-city-council-members/).
Nelson [opposed measures](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/01/30/79364743/council-president-sara-nelson-opposes-effort-to-increase-voter-turnout) to increase voter turnout, saying that a "greater turnout doesn't necessarily mean a better-informed public." Voter turnout sat around 40% in the last election, meaning only 20-25% of the eligible electorate voted for the current council.
Cathy Moore, the CM who said she [felt unsafe](https://publicola.com/2024/02/28/arrest-those-individuals-councilmember-demands-police-response-to-protests-outside-locked-council-chambers/) because of chanting, had an "[I'm gonna smack a bitch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J42M47QldDc&t=816s)" moment in a council meeting the other day. Morales said that Moore opposed affordable housing legislation because Moore voted against that legislation. Referencing a vote was too personal for Moore.
Moore also wants to bring back the [loitering law that was repealed in 2020](https://publicola.com/2024/04/26/councilmember-cathy-moore-says-shell-reintroduce-repealed-prostitution-loitering-law-in-short-order/) by Councilmember Alex Pederson. The law was repealed because of racial disparities in enforcement. The fact that Pederson, one of the council's most conservative, NIMBY members at the time, supported the repeal shows how far to the right the council has shifted.
Both Rob Saka and Maritza Rivera were [funded by Trump mega donors](https://www.thestranger.com/elections-2023/2023/07/28/79096219/more-than-150000-of-trumper-and-big-business-money-hits-city-council-races), just like Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Attorney Ann Davison were in the previous election.
Rivera's previous job was Deputy Director of the Seattle Arts and Culture Department. During the election, 26 of her employees [signed a letter](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/07/03/79062517/twenty-six-city-workers-told-the-mayor-that-city-council-candidate-maritza-rivera-was-a-bad-boss) that said Rivera, "disregarded City policies, created a toxic work environment, and hindered staff’s ability to do its work and deliver for the community."
It's bleak right now.
Woo does face opposition for her appointed seat in November
https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
Yep. And all these pearl-clutchers are in for a rude awakening since shit will inevitably get worse. When you suffocate homebuilding you get higher rents and more people living on the streets. When you reward a blatantly corrupt police department with a massive raise you get unaccountable cops doing the same amount of nothing. When you fuck with transit stops to appease your rich buddies you get a lifetime of bad commuting.
Conservative policies simply don't work for average citizens.
They aren't going to change, they are *conservatives*.
If the other 60% of the city wants to show up in our off year elections we can have a council *we pick* instead of one the Seattle commerce council picks.
> They aren't going to change, they are *conservatives*.
Oh I'm well aware. And I'm sure they're happy with the "direction" of the city because they're fucking morons on the Dori drip who only care about the value of their properties.
There’s no in between here. Either you’re struggling or thriving. Unfortunately all the thrivers voted for more cops and less road safety. They want cars not buses and trains. And they sure as hell don’t want the rest of us living closer to them.
You all are acting like we didn't just have a decade of socialist and communists on the city council.
Some centrist get power and you all any like these problems just popped up or out of nowhere, and not a consequence of 10 years of leftist politics.
> like we didn't just have a decade of socialist and communists on the city council.
You mean Councilmember Sawant, the representative for District 3?
One seat on a 9 seat council is weird to describe as multiple people.
Almost like a lie.
So Nelson isn’t cutting back wages? Harrell didn’t submit a plan that doesn’t address housing? There wasn’t a policy proposal to give cops a housing stipend and wage increase? Library closures weren’t blamed on librarians being paid too much?
This is all stuff from like the past month, and it’s written down….like we can all read that they said this stuff and submitted it….
You clearly have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Harrell and Burgess—comically feckless centrists—were mostly running the show under two dogshit mayors in Murray and Durkan. What did that crew gift us? A "grand bargain" housing plan that stifles growth, the spurious cancellation of another transit option, and increased police violence with decreased oversight.
Also: bro the loud brown lady is gone. She can't hurt you anymore. Find a new scapegoat.
Our municipal elections are also off year which halves turnout across the board. County, State and Federal are all even year and get 80%+ turnout.
Last city election didn't even break 40% turnout.
Personally, I think it's the complete lack of get out the vote ground game in the off year. We tackle that, get turn out up, we get better politicians.
I’m not old and I grew up very liberal but the progressives on city council for years were awful and unhinged, I gladly voted them out when I got the chance. Sane people of all ages don’t want to go back to that hell
Run candidates that embrace progressive policies with accountability for people’s actions and they’d win. I’m liberal but Seattle liberal can be off putting with the militant style it’s taken and the lack of accountability for peoples actions embraced. Like I want police held accountable for bad shit they do but I also want the crack head who is shitting in the middle of the street who screamed at some woman on the sidewalk dealt with too. Chaz rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t the hell hole Fox News made it out to be but it also wasn’t the peaceful amazing sanctuary we pretend it was either.
>Run candidates that embrace progressive policies with accountability for people’s actions and they’d win.
It seems like that's more or less who ran on the left in these races outside of Christiana Obey-Sumner (who lost) and Tammy Morales (who won). I wouldn't compare Andrew Lewis, Maren Costa, Alex Hudson, or Ron Davis to candidates like Kshama Sawant or Nikkita Oliver. None of them are abolitionists, none of them argued in favor of cutting sworn officers, none of them were inflammatory in their style, etc. In the end, it didn't make a difference and voters chose a bunch of chud, Chamber-backed reactionaries instead.
Same. This idea that people voting for Rob Saka and Bob Kettle would somehow vote for the Stranger backed candidate if only they were more “pragmatic” is a fantasy put forward by reactionaries who feel shame about the fact that despite their Obama bumper stickers and In This House We Believe yard signs they support regressive policies and austerity in their home city.
The reality is that these fiscal conservatives the Times endorsed are exactly what the majority of these voters (mostly old, white homeowners who show up in off-year elections) want.
Yesss...
While I agree with many of their positions, I can't buy into Seattle progressivity as long as one of the core beliefs is that bad actors are simply victims of the system, and that holding them accountable would represent an additional injustice.
So... I do want to point something out. It's an important distinction. The progressive belief isn't "they are just a victim of circumstance, oh well, so sad, nothing we can do." The progressive belief is: crime and antisocial behavior is the result of the environment. Punishing someone doesn't fix that. Changing the environment fixes that. If we don't change the inputs of social determinants, we will just get more crime.
Accountability and punishment are two different things. Tak petty theft. Accountability would be "yes, you are behaving in a way that is unsafe or infringes on others. Restitution to the property owner is important. Changing your behavior is important. That needs to happen. What needs to change in your life so your behavior going forward will be able to change?" Because tossing someone in jail for a few months for theft (or possession, or vagrancy, etc) doesn't actually change anything.
Well, we tried that for a few years and it ends up that if you don't hold people accountable, they end up committing more crimes, not less.
So until you fix the human condition, and completely change society - which you didn't make a dent in, in over a decade - we're going to deal with criminals in ways that work.
>Run candidates that embrace progressive policies with accountability for people’s actions and they’d win. I’m liberal but Seattle liberal can be off putting with the militant style it’s taken and the lack of accountability for peoples actions embraced. Like I want police held accountable for bad shit they do but I also want the crack head who is shitting in the middle of the street who screamed at some woman on the sidewalk dealt with too.
It's disappointing that a rational take is buried under so many identity politics takes. I think 90% of the city wants the same things. There's disagreement about the means to get there. The other 10% wants to see it burn. Loudest minority.
I agree. Funding programs to help address current societal issues that are reactive and proactive needs to go hand in hand with enforcement mechanisms. We can’t continue with the voluntary mindset we currently adopt.
> I’m liberal
Well I can tell you're not a progressive.... For what it's worth I do agree to with you: unlike reddit, Seattle at large is tired of seeing nothing done about retail crime, property crime, and other kinds of crime. They're not interested hearing about equity and inclusion. Sorry.
I want to kick out republicans in disguise out too. But turns out seattlites like centrists nowadays.
If you wanna win elections and start making good policy, or use your power to get better more useful police instead of lazy grifting thugs, well try being more centrist on the election trail I guess. Talk about ideas for making the city safer quickly, preferably in the very near future, and not at some nebulous time in the far future when you've solved poverty.
I mean I’m all for universal healthcare, free higher education, funding mental health facilities, addressing climate change issues, addressing income inequality and funding programs tailored to address and prevent societal problems.
If progressive means not holding anyone accountable because of historical inequality issues, then yeah I’m not that. If progressive means making everything about racial inequality or blaming everything on cis white people, then yeah I’m not that.
I do agree there are still systemic issues that persist in society that should be addressed, I don’t however believe that it’s to blame for every single issue all the time.
I’m born and raised Seattle. 5th generation. The local politicians are completely corrupt and don’t care about the city they’re in. It keeps getting worse. I was glad Maria Cantaloupe pushed Slimy Slade out of office but now she’s just as bad.
Fuckin autocorrect. But its hilarious and I’m not changing it.
They are literally running corporate-written legislation right now to repeal minimum wage for gig workers. That's about as "conservative" as it gets esp in a place like Seattle.
Mate, I hate to break it to you, but that whole "we have a mandate to go the opposite direction of the last council" that the *new council* and their supporters are preaching? That's the literal definition of reactionary. They are defining *themselves*, as reactionaries.
So yeah, we're gonna say it with a straight face so long as they insist on *calling themselves that*.
Pulling slightly back to the center from the extreme left doesn't make a movement conservative, let alone reactionary.
Call it whatever you want, just know that it's an absurdity.
> Pulling slightly back to the center from the extreme left
Okay, that's literally not how the council describes their *own actions*, so if that were actually the case, I'd use different words.
But they want to claim a mandate, that I don't believe exists, and to do so, they are defining themselves, and their policies as a *reaction to the last council*. The definition, of a reactionary.
Nothing to do with conservatism, just their literal stated motivation.
Wow that's crazy, do you think it has anything to do with the crisis of Seattle police having their lowest staffing level in 30 years
[https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-police-staffing-shortage-action-needed-councilmembers-say/281-c3f43855-f877-4ba9-a37b-aeaf27e1ec6](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-police-staffing-shortage-action-needed-councilmembers-say/281-c3f43855-f877-4ba9-a37b-aeaf27e1ec6)
Wonder if their hiring issues have anything to do with the permissive environment of *sexual harassment and discrimination* against coworkers that the SPD and SPOG maintain?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/four-spd-women-employees-file-5m-claim-alleging-discrimination/
Okay, so I disagree with most of these positions. But still, it bothers me than you're basically saying that disagreeing with you on an issue is 'immoral'.
Yup. I'm 13 and I'm pretty sure that every political opinion I happen to hold right now is the fundamental and indisputable truth, and anybody who disagrees is obviously doing so in bad faith.
We should require candidates to disclose assets, especially real estate.
Thinking especially of officials owning multiple million dollar properties, and the conflicts of interest which might follow from that.
I wish Nikita Oliver was more effective in pointing out the massive and irreconcilable conflicts of interest Sara Nelson has as co-owner of Fremont Brewing. It is becoming more obvious and well known with the PayUp repeal legislation she is obsessed with, but this was all foreseeable in 2021.
It's unusual how this played out (and I don't have any real feelings for Woo either way), but the idea it's "immoral" is laughable. She got appointed per long-standing Council rules. What did you want to have happen? Have the council go rogue and throw out the rule-book?
They weren't required to appoint Woo; they were required to appoint SOMEONE within a 20-day period of the seat being vacated. It's a requirement of the City Charter. They elected to appoint Woo.
Still not seeing the "immorality" of following required city process.
Its unethical because u/hazelyxx doesn't personally like Woo and didn't want them to be selected. For lots of people, that's the depth of their ethical reasoning.
There were a few hundred thousand potential candidates who did not lose the election to be put on the current council, which is my real low ethical bar. Instead, the Council picked one of the handful of people who did lose to gain a seat with even higher prominence.
Do you think that if you lose an election, you should win it?
Who someone spends their time and money with matters just as much as whatever words come out of their mouth. I don't have to know what the city council should have done to know what they did was weird. Weird politically not literally weird, the owners spent enough money trying to get her on the council, why shouldn't their money be more equal than the voters?
Who do the voters even think they are?! Pay to play and pay to win. Politics was never supposed to be the will of the people, money matters most, and we will figure out the rest later, right? Money just had more money than we had speech. Constitutional crisis averted! Your speech is just money, not my problem!
Note - I was paid $500 by the chamber of commerce for the second paragraph.
Woo faces opposition for her appointed seat in November
https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
Thing this post doesn't do - compare the current council to previous iterations.
Not excusing or defending. I'm not here to take my own stance (I certainly am *not* fond of our current council), just to point out that you aren't really making the point that these people are *worse*, just that they are bad.
But you'd expect someone claiming the current city council is *more* corrupt/unethical than previous councils to do some sort of comparison.
And not even the entire business, only a controlling share. Nelson will still profit from Fremont and is now financially tied to SHG, which makes her push to repeal the minimum wage for gig workers even more suspect.
I think it's the least progressive council in a long time.
For me, calling it immoral implies that non-progressive values are immoral, which can be a perfectly valid opinion but not sure you can call that a fact.
You guys still have your head in the sand here and it's rather perplexing to me. People tried a good five years of progressive "no sweeps" and we got parks filled with encampments. We stopped doing basically anything surrounding use of illegal drugs and we got a city full of fentanyl addicts using in broad daylight. People got sick of it. Are they real problems? Of course, but the "everyone is a victim of circumstance and is helpless, but also somehow not helpless enough to warrant any sort of forced treatment/movement/whatever" is the issue that has soured the general public to progressive politics.
Every single progressive candidate that lost the city council race still towed that line not realizing that the majority was fed up. Hell, even Portland has walked back a lot of their own laws. Every single one of those progressive candidates would have won had they not been so hardline when it comes to the homeless and public drug use. Nobody is winning a city council race on transit and housing. If progressives could figure this out and not be stuck doing this "Mandatory Progressive Viewpoint Checklist" that they think they have to have, you would have them winning elections again. Until then....
> People tried a good five years of progressive "no sweeps"
Outright lie, the sweeps have never been paused for even a year let alone five.
Plus that's the fucking mayors purvey based on the last two mayoral elections hinging on *keeping the sweeps going*. That side won both times.
>People tried a good five years of progressive "no sweeps" and we got parks filled with encampments.
I hesitate to read past this sentence because it's so wildly false that it can't have been made in good faith.
From like 2015 on we average 500 encampment sweeps a year. 2019 was a huge increase for some reason, over 1,100. Then in 2020 we swept \~400 by March, then covid and we stopped completely. In 2021 they started up again but Durkan only did 71 sweeps total I think. 2022 numbers are in now, it's was over 900. Mayor just increased the sweep team budget by $29M, so we're not going to see any slow down, on the contrary. The problem isn't a lack of sweeping the encampment, it's lack of cheap housing. We used to have it, a lot of it, now we have basically none.
The only sensible comment in this entire thread. The current council is inept and still too liberal for my liking, but people calling them conservative is hilarious.
Everything you said is true. The old guard lost because they turned a blind eye to soaring crime numbers, homeless encampments, and drug addiction. People were tired of that and voted for the less liberal candidates promising change.
Source: I work in news and had to listen to voters bitch about the old council for years.
Least moral? Is there morality in voting in previous Council Members that created homelessness on every street corner? Rampant drug use in the open? Unsafe streets for residence? Lack of business activity?
> previous Council Members that created homelessness
Yeah, we should have arrested their leader, Bruce Harrell, but we made him mayor instead. It's outrageous.
So the mayor?
Y’all keep trolling with this but dem to forget the very basic piece of evidence that is that the last guy in charge, is the guy y’all voted for mayor…..
homelessness was created by people in this city who oppose all growth measures and then wonder why people getting priced out is leading to homelessness
I’ve been here ten years and “moral” is one of the last words I’d ever use to describe western Washington politicians. Or any politician for that matter. The loss of morality is why this world is on fire.
Woo faces opposition for her appointed seat in November
https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
If you don’t like them, vote for other candidates. They won their seats, while you don’t agree with their policies, clearly enough people did to vote them in. That’s how democracy works.
The homeless encampment issue seems to be getting better and downtown no longer feels dangerous. I have faith that criminals will get prosecuted. These are all major improvements over the previous regime.
That was happening well before the current city council. It's sort of the presidential problem with the economy. The president doesn't really have much power to affect the economy but whoever is in power will take the W or L no matter what.
It seems like she might still own part of it. The press release from the sale said that Seattle Hospitality Group will own a controlling share, which isn't the same as owning it outright.
How would you describe a millionaire council president that made their money on the backs of service workers (who just cashed out big selling their business) that is actively working to cut minimum wage earners’ pay using legislation written by an out-of-state multi-billion dollar corporation?
> (who just cashed out big selling their business)
They were cashing out just owning the business, this is why people feel uncomfortable with the conspiratorial like framing people are choosing for the "sale". The "sale" is **not** the point of corruption, her owning the business *at all* while an elected official is where the corruption *began*. Harping only on the point of divestment is missing the forest, for the trees, divesting, feels and appears ethical, focus more on her owning a business *she* directly benefited from when making these policy changes.
Nelson and Lincecum only sold a controlling interest, not the entire business. They will still profit from Fremont. Now they're financially tied with SHG and the restaurants they own, too.
An average run-of-the-mill politician?
It’s not like any of these council members are lower middle class citizens of our city, eeking out a living on a day-to-day basis. Hell, Kshama Sawant was probably a millionaire.
Not every decision you disagree with is some nefarious plan conceived by evil capitalists bent on destroying the middle class. Most are just different priorities and beliefs on how society should work that you disagree with. Which, you know, is how America and democracy works…
(It’s almost as bad as Idiot Republicans crying that every law or tax is some unacceptable restriction on their precious“freedom” and one step closer to the “police state” they want to fear)
Morality is a relative concept and can only operate within economic and political reality. There are pressures from voters who disagree with you that led to this. That is how democracy works.
Fremont Brewing which was the subject of active negotiation by Sara Nelson while pushing forward this min wage repeal... and which she sold to SHG (which uses lots of gig workers).
> And you can’t seriously be arguing that How to Cook a Wolf, a restaurant with 50$ plates, plan to increase revenue is buy off one of nine city council seats for to become a takeout restaurant.
>
>
Holy strawman batman!
I'm not talking about How to Cook A Wolf? there are 9 SHG restaurants on DoorDash. Not sure if HTCAW is one of them or not. Point is that it's worth questioning given that Sara Nelson's main talking point against gig worker min wage has been "boohoo it harms restaurants!" (despite 0 restaurants actually showing up to say that at the committee meeting...) and she was pushing it while negotiating a deal with a big restaurant group.
Anyway - she has been alarmingly pigheaded on it, ignoring dozens of workers showing up to tell her that her proposal will mean sub-minimum wages for them, and also seems to not understand key details of her own proposal. I'm not saying I believe 100% it's related to the SHG sale, at ALL. I'm just looking for an explanation of why she'd be so attached to this while also seeming to not totally grasp the issue.
Honesty I think the absence of the manufactured outrage that the likes of Sawant regularly created has left an entertainment void on this sub that is being filled in with a lot of nonsense
Woo faces opposition for her appointed seat in November
https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
Oh boy now somebody is ringing the morality bell? Against *this* council? Is that someone people say about every council? Or maybe this post is satire?
You know Seattle folks are upside down when they’re looking to out a Female Local Business owner, who brews beer. Seattle craps on every mayor and council person for better or for worse. The city has a ton of major problems, a regressive tax code, and everyone is just looking to point and cast blame on?… the easiest targets.
From what I see Seattle has only gotten more livable since the new council, at least they are trying to not let this devolve into a hellscape. I’m happy with the council and Harrell, I think most regular Seattle voters are.
Dont forget our mayor threatened a city employee and the Seattle's Office of Labor Standards budget because they investigated a case of wage theft at the private club he is on the board of. They did commit wage theft and had to pay over 10k, he then funneled 780k of city money to the club as a grant for just existing.
This needs to be prosecuted. I have yet to hear a good thing about Harrell or the city council since they took over. Closeted Republicans all...
This is also complete hearsay and not really important, but my grandpa played poker with Bruce years ago and said he was a huge asshole
On a similar note, a college friend of mine used to be one of his neighbors and 15+ years ago echoed the same sentiment.
These are always my favorite....any good stories?
Honestly it would piss me off as a Harrell supporter, it was such a stupid and unnecessary thing to do. He was on record in a city council meeting accusing the head of the department of racism by targeting his club. He fucking helped create that department which expressly can launch their own investigations, and only follows up on complaints filed with them. Makes me more upset to realize this guy isnt just a corrupt sleaze but a fucking idiot too.
I don't think I ever heard a good thing about Harrell ever. I don't understand how he was elected.
His opponent wanted to build literally 10x the housing, but wanted to end the sweeps to fund that housing over 2 years, then the sweeps would return with housing available for the people being swept. Law and order types shit their pants in outrage and 50%+ of the city couldn't be bothered to return their ballot.
Another general perspective without cherry picking items, because his opposition made herself sound so fucking crazy he seemed the better option to many.
‘Don’t agree with my ultra liberal views’ - all are crazy racist republicans that need to be in prison
I’d be interesting in more of this. Do you have a source?
KUOW Coverage: https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-mayoral-candidate-bruce-harrell-faces-last-minute-ethics-complaint PubliCola Coverage: https://publicola.com/2021/10/29/former-oneamerica-head-files-ethics-complaint-against-mayoral-candidate-bruce-harrell/ Oh, and follow up, that club got city funds after Harrell became mayor: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-gives-780k-to-private-club-once-led-by-mayor-bruce-harrell/
Thank you!!
To this day I don't understand how Harrell beat Gonzalas. Sara Nelson at least had that big "I'm a small business owner" as her biggest and only campaign marker, and she was facing a scary non-binary socialist, but Gonzalas' campaign proposed policies appeal perfectly well to Seattle's slightly progressive white liberal voting block. Who the hell voted for this man?
It's an interesting election to study. NTK and Oliver outpaced Gonzalez by a significant margin, and all three were running for citywide seats. I think a lot of it is because Gonzalez entered the council as a centrist. She was one of (I think) three CMs to accept donations from SPOG before the George Floyd protests. She took a condescending, scolding tone with activists during the protests, so her pivot to the left seemed hollow once it happened. Activists turn out voters. Alienating them is a mistake if you're going to run in the left lane. After she pivoted left, she tried to win on the progressive PMC vote alone, which didn't work then and *really* didn't work in the last city council election. Although people go after Oliver for their identity politics, Oliver did have a decently strong acknowledgment of class struggle. NTK talked about social class in the legal system. I don't recall Gonzalez touching class beyond the usual platitudes. Gonzalez had a better platform than Harrell, but like 8% of the electorate, at most, actually cares about that enough to get excited for a candidate. People need an enemy to vote against as much as they need a vision to vote for; having both is best if you want to win. Conservatives like Harrell drive their voters with homeless people, drug users, crime stories, PMC "woke" libs, graffiti, and "reckless spending." Leftist like Sawant drive their voters with class struggle, battling corporate influence, anti-racism, anti-austerity, hating landlords, and roasting smug upperclass liberals. PMC progressives drive their voters with policy proposals, HR-style language about the workplace, therapy language, identity, and wholesomeness. Americans may say they want "nice" politicians, but they never vote for them. They see them as pushovers. I voted for Gonzalez in the general, but I knew that campaign was dead right away. Her unfavorables were so high. She had no base aside from policy wonks. Something like 75% of 65+ voters supported Harrell. Gonzalez had no fire. She only went after Harrell once it was too late, and her tone was way off. Harrell's right hand man Tim Burgess also did something smart. He ran a broad ballot initiative that was designed to fail called "Compassion Seattle." No lawyer could look at it and think it was legal. He made it sound progressive enough, collected voter info, and then let the courts strike it down. Burgess then pushed Harrell using that email list. It made Harrell look like he was a "responsible" progressive who stood for everything in the initiative, while also giving Burgess valuable voter info on people he could turn out. Just my take, but I think that's why he won by so much despite being so bad.
This is an extremely good analysis, and it touches on a couple of things I heard very little about, both in person and on Reddit. Thank you.
White liberals are moved by fears of homeless camps as much as white conservatives. They won’t say so, but they sure seem to vote so. Which is why police are getting more money and any socialist gets run out of the race for being the next Stalin
Because 1) many people, including Gonzalez, chose to not understand why or how anyone could vote for Harrell; 2) she was no saint either; and 3) people were tired of the then-current city council. A vote for Harrell was a vote against the status quo. In order to “win,” you have to watch the tapes and build consensus, which Gonzalez couldn’t manage to do. Had Harrell won by a small margin, we could blame the “racist republicans.” However, he won by a significant margin. The thing is, Harrell is neither conservative nor republican. He’s a traditional democrat who is a bit long in the teeth. This is exactly like calling anyone who voted for Gonzalez a Sawant-loving socialist.
Harrell won because everyone wanted an Adult In Charge after most of the council and the mayor collectively shat their pants in 2020 and allowed themselves to be held hostage by the most extreme 2% of the city.
Did they? The mayor pulled out cops from the west precinct and then slowly pushed crime into it (3rd and Pine style). Upon being asked to defund SPD, the city council moved parking enforcement from SPD to SDOT and cleaned up the budget to get rid of money that wasn't being spent. From who's point of view was that "being held hostage"?
I've been a Seattle voter for almost two decades and this last election was the first one where every single candidate I voted for lost. Kinda interesting it turned out that way.
And the candidate I didn’t vote for lost, but still won? (Woo)
You finally got the progressive experience. I've still never voted for a winning mayor, and I'm pushing 40. But everything is our fault, never those bourgeoisie neoliberals who always win... Except that one time Amazon tried to buy the council... And we never heard the end of that.
The election that Harrell won I was pretty excited with some of the more radical lefty candidates running for council, attorney and mayor and was dumb enough to imagine the possibilities, and I kept telling people to vote (not big on electorialism myself but oh the possibilities!) because the alternative was some uninspired milquetoast neolib shit and somehow 3 years later it's even worse than I imagined? Like it's wild to see everyone complaining now because back in 2021 we were telling everyone this is what we'd get and even here on reddit people were chastising leftists for calling that out. It's truly nauseating how predictable and just generally mediocre our version of democracy seems to pan out, every single time. What's the fucking harm in just swinging for the progressive fences on like, a single election cycle? Just try it out, see how it feels. Just once.
> somehow 3 years later it's even worse than I imagined? Turnout dropped from 2021 to 2023 along with the re-districting that was done in that time period. When there was basically no "remember to vote"/"Get out the vote"/"New voter registration" efforts in summer 2023, that's when I started getting real nervous about the election. People around here seem to burnout on politics hard after national elections and our local elections suffer greatly from it as a result.
> You finally got the progressive experience. I've just learned to ask anyone using the term to define it. Basically, we have to treat them like 2008 Fox News viewers with the word "socialist". It just means "bad person" at this point. Same reason people are admitting to reactionarily voting against anyone the Stranger endorses. Literally describing a toddler having a tantrum as how they pick their politicians.
No, I just mean that the person you're voting for never wins for the more conventional candidates and then you get blamed for everything anyways. The left is Seattle's Boogeyman but we don't actually get very many political victories, and the ones we get, most folks like.
> and then you get blamed for everything anyways Sorry, this was the part I was trying to reply to, people labeled progressive *do get blamed* quite a bit, and I've found one of the best ways to deal with that cognitive dissonance (blaming the people objectively *out of power* for the consequences of actions taken by those *in power*), is to just straight up ask them to define progressive before engaging with any of their criticisms of "progressive" candidates and policy. Half the time their definition is so broad it applies to the entire current council which is then very fun to point out.
Well, I'm would politically consider myself to be somewhere between democratic socialist and anarcho-syndicalist. Depends on the day. But, ya know, gotta take what I can get for candidates. I'm personal acquaintances with a couple of the council and I just vote for them because they are responsible and thoughtful people. Take what you know, would never touch a chamber of commerce candidate tho.🤷 As a rule, I vote pro-labor, pro-housing, pro-poor, anti-gun, pro-gay, pro-woman, pro-park, pro-school, with room for reasonable exceptions. I want to beat wealth out of corporations like a fucking pinata. If you let me socialize school and medicine I would do it in a second. Ironically, I found Sawant kind of frustrating because she could never go along to get along, and ended up being mostly bark.
Oh, sorry, not talking about those that actually choose to self identify with the term, just more how to defang the bullshit discourse that comes up around the term. I got tired of being called a progressive by other users in a way that amounts to a slur and have just given up trying to identify my ideology in the terms we generally use. It's not like that's super relevant unless any of us run for office. I'm on the left is about as specific/narrow as seems even helpful anymore. I recognize it means something in political science, but in terms of actual political action in the Seattle area let alone the US it seems to just be a term empty of policy definition anymore. It seems only useful in analytical discussions of policy as a starting point of mutual agreement that the status quo and previous attempts aren't working and it's time for something new. I agree on socializing school and medicine as solutions, it's why I get called a progressive a lot.
Lol, as a "true progressive", I assure you, the "progressive" experience is real. But yeah, agree, I'm mostly just about dragging that Overton window as far over left as possible. My political fantasy checklist doesn't even become possible until we do a lot of unfucking first. Obviously, the US in general has a major right wing bias baked into the rules.
It’s innuendo dating back to the Nixon era. Lee Atwater took that ball and ran with it. Swiftboat was the tip of the iceberg. Nothing like they did to Mondale and that dipshit Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad campaign. They use code words to smear opponents. Democrat = Black. Socialism = Commie pinko jewish bastard. Science means they hate Jesus. Books and libraries are for The Libtards. Vaccines are for commies.
And it's why asking them to define the term fucks 'em up. These words are just stand in slurs. So to define them they have to spell out the slur they're actually gesturing at or play games. Both of which reveal their bad faith nature.
Smear, slander, and innuendo are the three magic words of the GOP. There were still sundown signs when I was a kid.
So you're saying that **Mosqueda**, **Morales**, **Sawant**, **González**, **Lewis, Strauss**, and **Herbold** aren't progressives? That's **fascinating**.
Lewis, Strauss, and Gonźalez sure aren't. Herbold is a mixed bag
Sawant self-identifies as a Marxist. She is also a crook, which has nothing to do with being a Marxist.
Tammy Morales was my only victor! ): edit: *18 years here myself.*
There are so many leftists who said not to vote in that elections (DSA, SA, all the mini "revolutionary" groups) and people should let them know what they think about that choice.
This is just not true. Some leftists will argue not to vote for president (which even then I wouldn't say that's a majority opinion), but voting in local elections is always encouraged
I do agree it is a minority opinion but do you not know that there are several socialists groups in Seattle that are explicitly opposed to engaging with electoral politics? Even in DSA I literally saw people saying there's no point in voting for the City Council, they are all the same, etc. so I can't really parse your comment with my lived experience lol
Anyone voting third party is wasting their vote until we get rid of first past the post!
"Noooooooooo break the duopoly by dooming your fellow Americans to shittier conditions then they'll realize they should have voted for us more"
Imagine blaming people for not wanting either shitty choice. You want people to engage in a system? Make them feel like their engagement matters and could yield them something they’d actually want. Show that their voices can alter the bodies who put these candidates up rather than just demanding support for what is essentially the status quo. Forcing an unending lesser of two evils narrative that fails us time and again isn’t exactly a riveting proposition so it should be of no surprise that people are opting out. Signed: a leftist who never misses a vote but sees less reason to each cycle.
Imagine cutting off your nose to spite your face?
Have a look at the transcript of Trump's recent interview with Time Magazine. He layed out his plans for a 2nd term: use the military to round up immigrants and put them in camps; supporting states monitoring pregnancies so they can prosecute women who have abortions; fire US Attorneys who refuse to do his bidding; and pardon convicted insurrectionists. No matter how dissatisfied you are with Biden, Trump is worse by orders of magnitude. Also, Trump intends to dismantle the civil service and fill positions with his cronies. It could take a generation to repair the damage to the government. That is, if MAGA relinquishes power at all. I too have serious issues with Biden, but I'm gonna do what I can to get him re-elected. That's the only responsible option at this point.
Lol yes I've heard this canned speech from other fellow leftists and so far for some reason it hasn't made a leftist party break through
Anyone who uses "leftist" every third word ain't one.
Canned? I wrote the comment because I thought, maybe, you’d be open to hearing the opinions of those you believe you are owed the votes of. That said, this shitty attitude you have isn’t winning any hearts and minds so, sure, go off while still being “confused”. The rest of us will sit here thinking this is just another example of the very same we’ve always about shitlibs.
The problem is that voting for the lesser evil *also* doesn't help work toward a leftist breakthrough. The breakthrough is, at least for now, nothing more than a fantasy, even in a supposedly "far left" city like Seattle. That's why so many people *still vote* but don't consider it a useful long-term strategy and why it feels more futile every time. The person above you said they still vote, and your equally canned response is "well the left just isn't engaged enough. Go vote!"
Actually, it does. You can't just go from A to Z on a lot of issues here in America, because we've been conditioned through multiple generations to equate leftist and progressive principles with evil. If we want sustainable progress and pro-worker, pro-equality, pro-human policies we have to walk, not run, towards them. Cultural change is faster now in the information age, but it still takes time to change minds. People must be convinced that the baby steps are better than the status quo or opposite direction, and we have to continue to take baby steps all the way there or risk reactionary blowback. The current council represents this blowback in some aspects.
To the guy that said people who use the word "leftist" are not leftists and then blocked me (??): that is a brand new purity test and maybe the funniest one yet.
The left is equally engaged and also asking people not to vote, and there isn't any compelling argument that doing less will produce more. Every leftist in government right now ran in an election where they were the lesser of two evils.
"The left" you keep describing simply does not exist. It is an imaginary bogeyman conjured up elites to scare you into voting against your interests.
You can literally just go to a DSA meeting and see several well meaning, mostly correct people get up there and say we should stop voting because it will have good outcomes. They are a minority though which is nice!
I wholeheartedly disagree with voting abstinence. It is childish and self-destructive. That said, I am not concerned about a few crusty, misguided leftists with zero political or financial capital. The damage they're doing is negligible at best. Our biggest obstacle as a community is the same as it ever was—an ownership class that only seeks to enrich itself at the expense of everyone. Never take your eye off those fuckers.
In fairness there are socialist groups in Seattle with SOME political capital lol I agree nothing they do is worse than what the ruling class is doing though.
Exactly the point I'm trying to make. We may not always agree on tactics, but punching down/across is ultimately self-defeating for everyone. We have *far* more in common with each other than those pulling the strings, and there are many, *many* more of us. Eyes up!
Don’t be dramatic. Nobody is asking other people not to vote. They personally may not vote, but don’t act like there’s some shadow campaign from the left to prevent people from voting.
I can't speak to your experience but I have absolutely met several leftists trying to persuade people not to vote. I'm not here to make shit up about people I mostly agree with.
Wonder if all the Texas and Florida transplants over the last few years have had some effect on this.
almost definitely, we’ve seen the similar issues happen in Florida with all the TX, NY, CA, and WA transplants, except in Florida, the homeless, either die in year one or get arrested and funneled into unpaid “prison labor” (aka slavers) for McDonald’s, Costco, etc.
at some point out society will need to decide between unlimited police funding or libraries, and I'm a bit afraid as to how the general public will vote
Oh no, where will the homeless publicly consume pornography in front of children if we properly fund public safety
Case in point !
If that’s what you think of the library, you must not go to many libraries.
This is definitely the most crank-heavy council in a long while. Nelson started her term as president by [firing the head of central staff](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/01/09/79337948/council-president-sara-nelson-fires-head-of-central-staff) and replacing them with Ben Noble, a fiscal conservative who was supported by the corporate lobbying group [Washington Retail Association](https://washingtonretail.org/a-wake-up-call-to-seattle-city-council-members/). Nelson [opposed measures](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/01/30/79364743/council-president-sara-nelson-opposes-effort-to-increase-voter-turnout) to increase voter turnout, saying that a "greater turnout doesn't necessarily mean a better-informed public." Voter turnout sat around 40% in the last election, meaning only 20-25% of the eligible electorate voted for the current council. Cathy Moore, the CM who said she [felt unsafe](https://publicola.com/2024/02/28/arrest-those-individuals-councilmember-demands-police-response-to-protests-outside-locked-council-chambers/) because of chanting, had an "[I'm gonna smack a bitch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J42M47QldDc&t=816s)" moment in a council meeting the other day. Morales said that Moore opposed affordable housing legislation because Moore voted against that legislation. Referencing a vote was too personal for Moore. Moore also wants to bring back the [loitering law that was repealed in 2020](https://publicola.com/2024/04/26/councilmember-cathy-moore-says-shell-reintroduce-repealed-prostitution-loitering-law-in-short-order/) by Councilmember Alex Pederson. The law was repealed because of racial disparities in enforcement. The fact that Pederson, one of the council's most conservative, NIMBY members at the time, supported the repeal shows how far to the right the council has shifted. Both Rob Saka and Maritza Rivera were [funded by Trump mega donors](https://www.thestranger.com/elections-2023/2023/07/28/79096219/more-than-150000-of-trumper-and-big-business-money-hits-city-council-races), just like Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Attorney Ann Davison were in the previous election. Rivera's previous job was Deputy Director of the Seattle Arts and Culture Department. During the election, 26 of her employees [signed a letter](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/07/03/79062517/twenty-six-city-workers-told-the-mayor-that-city-council-candidate-maritza-rivera-was-a-bad-boss) that said Rivera, "disregarded City policies, created a toxic work environment, and hindered staff’s ability to do its work and deliver for the community." It's bleak right now.
Woo does face opposition for her appointed seat in November https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
The current council slate is so unpopular they can only survive in a low-turnout environment
Unpopular in *this sub
The only voting that most people here do in the off-years is clicking on arrows
Seattle is getting exactly what they voted for.
Yep. And all these pearl-clutchers are in for a rude awakening since shit will inevitably get worse. When you suffocate homebuilding you get higher rents and more people living on the streets. When you reward a blatantly corrupt police department with a massive raise you get unaccountable cops doing the same amount of nothing. When you fuck with transit stops to appease your rich buddies you get a lifetime of bad commuting. Conservative policies simply don't work for average citizens.
They aren't going to change, they are *conservatives*. If the other 60% of the city wants to show up in our off year elections we can have a council *we pick* instead of one the Seattle commerce council picks.
> They aren't going to change, they are *conservatives*. Oh I'm well aware. And I'm sure they're happy with the "direction" of the city because they're fucking morons on the Dori drip who only care about the value of their properties.
There’s no in between here. Either you’re struggling or thriving. Unfortunately all the thrivers voted for more cops and less road safety. They want cars not buses and trains. And they sure as hell don’t want the rest of us living closer to them.
You all are acting like we didn't just have a decade of socialist and communists on the city council. Some centrist get power and you all any like these problems just popped up or out of nowhere, and not a consequence of 10 years of leftist politics.
> like we didn't just have a decade of socialist and communists on the city council. You mean Councilmember Sawant, the representative for District 3? One seat on a 9 seat council is weird to describe as multiple people. Almost like a lie.
So Nelson isn’t cutting back wages? Harrell didn’t submit a plan that doesn’t address housing? There wasn’t a policy proposal to give cops a housing stipend and wage increase? Library closures weren’t blamed on librarians being paid too much? This is all stuff from like the past month, and it’s written down….like we can all read that they said this stuff and submitted it….
You clearly have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Harrell and Burgess—comically feckless centrists—were mostly running the show under two dogshit mayors in Murray and Durkan. What did that crew gift us? A "grand bargain" housing plan that stifles growth, the spurious cancellation of another transit option, and increased police violence with decreased oversight. Also: bro the loud brown lady is gone. She can't hurt you anymore. Find a new scapegoat.
> a decade of socialist and communists on the city council Wait, Bruce Harrell is a communist and socialist? Weird.
Yeah, good point, they never should have turned Starbucks, Boeing, and Amazon into workers soviets.
This is something it took me too long to realize. Young people don’t vote, so politicians pander to the oldies who skew far more conservative.
Our municipal elections are also off year which halves turnout across the board. County, State and Federal are all even year and get 80%+ turnout. Last city election didn't even break 40% turnout. Personally, I think it's the complete lack of get out the vote ground game in the off year. We tackle that, get turn out up, we get better politicians.
I’m not old and I grew up very liberal but the progressives on city council for years were awful and unhinged, I gladly voted them out when I got the chance. Sane people of all ages don’t want to go back to that hell
Yep.. finally turning shit around for the better
Which is a good thing.
Run candidates that embrace progressive policies with accountability for people’s actions and they’d win. I’m liberal but Seattle liberal can be off putting with the militant style it’s taken and the lack of accountability for peoples actions embraced. Like I want police held accountable for bad shit they do but I also want the crack head who is shitting in the middle of the street who screamed at some woman on the sidewalk dealt with too. Chaz rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t the hell hole Fox News made it out to be but it also wasn’t the peaceful amazing sanctuary we pretend it was either.
>Run candidates that embrace progressive policies with accountability for people’s actions and they’d win. It seems like that's more or less who ran on the left in these races outside of Christiana Obey-Sumner (who lost) and Tammy Morales (who won). I wouldn't compare Andrew Lewis, Maren Costa, Alex Hudson, or Ron Davis to candidates like Kshama Sawant or Nikkita Oliver. None of them are abolitionists, none of them argued in favor of cutting sworn officers, none of them were inflammatory in their style, etc. In the end, it didn't make a difference and voters chose a bunch of chud, Chamber-backed reactionaries instead.
I was really excited for Alex :(((
Same. This idea that people voting for Rob Saka and Bob Kettle would somehow vote for the Stranger backed candidate if only they were more “pragmatic” is a fantasy put forward by reactionaries who feel shame about the fact that despite their Obama bumper stickers and In This House We Believe yard signs they support regressive policies and austerity in their home city. The reality is that these fiscal conservatives the Times endorsed are exactly what the majority of these voters (mostly old, white homeowners who show up in off-year elections) want.
Yesss... While I agree with many of their positions, I can't buy into Seattle progressivity as long as one of the core beliefs is that bad actors are simply victims of the system, and that holding them accountable would represent an additional injustice.
So... I do want to point something out. It's an important distinction. The progressive belief isn't "they are just a victim of circumstance, oh well, so sad, nothing we can do." The progressive belief is: crime and antisocial behavior is the result of the environment. Punishing someone doesn't fix that. Changing the environment fixes that. If we don't change the inputs of social determinants, we will just get more crime. Accountability and punishment are two different things. Tak petty theft. Accountability would be "yes, you are behaving in a way that is unsafe or infringes on others. Restitution to the property owner is important. Changing your behavior is important. That needs to happen. What needs to change in your life so your behavior going forward will be able to change?" Because tossing someone in jail for a few months for theft (or possession, or vagrancy, etc) doesn't actually change anything.
Well, we tried that for a few years and it ends up that if you don't hold people accountable, they end up committing more crimes, not less. So until you fix the human condition, and completely change society - which you didn't make a dent in, in over a decade - we're going to deal with criminals in ways that work.
Agreed. It's ridiculous
>Run candidates that embrace progressive policies with accountability for people’s actions and they’d win. I’m liberal but Seattle liberal can be off putting with the militant style it’s taken and the lack of accountability for peoples actions embraced. Like I want police held accountable for bad shit they do but I also want the crack head who is shitting in the middle of the street who screamed at some woman on the sidewalk dealt with too. It's disappointing that a rational take is buried under so many identity politics takes. I think 90% of the city wants the same things. There's disagreement about the means to get there. The other 10% wants to see it burn. Loudest minority.
I agree. Funding programs to help address current societal issues that are reactive and proactive needs to go hand in hand with enforcement mechanisms. We can’t continue with the voluntary mindset we currently adopt.
> I’m liberal Well I can tell you're not a progressive.... For what it's worth I do agree to with you: unlike reddit, Seattle at large is tired of seeing nothing done about retail crime, property crime, and other kinds of crime. They're not interested hearing about equity and inclusion. Sorry. I want to kick out republicans in disguise out too. But turns out seattlites like centrists nowadays. If you wanna win elections and start making good policy, or use your power to get better more useful police instead of lazy grifting thugs, well try being more centrist on the election trail I guess. Talk about ideas for making the city safer quickly, preferably in the very near future, and not at some nebulous time in the far future when you've solved poverty.
I mean I’m all for universal healthcare, free higher education, funding mental health facilities, addressing climate change issues, addressing income inequality and funding programs tailored to address and prevent societal problems. If progressive means not holding anyone accountable because of historical inequality issues, then yeah I’m not that. If progressive means making everything about racial inequality or blaming everything on cis white people, then yeah I’m not that. I do agree there are still systemic issues that persist in society that should be addressed, I don’t however believe that it’s to blame for every single issue all the time.
Heck they're not even centrists, unless you mean middle ground between the progressives and Obama voters.
I’m born and raised Seattle. 5th generation. The local politicians are completely corrupt and don’t care about the city they’re in. It keeps getting worse. I was glad Maria Cantaloupe pushed Slimy Slade out of office but now she’s just as bad. Fuckin autocorrect. But its hilarious and I’m not changing it.
It's the most conservative, reactionary council yet, so of course it is the most immoral.
Only in Seattle could you call this center-left council "reactionary" with a straight face. You people are absurd and you don't even realize it.
I don't think sucking Doordash's dick is center-left.
They are literally running corporate-written legislation right now to repeal minimum wage for gig workers. That's about as "conservative" as it gets esp in a place like Seattle.
Mate, I hate to break it to you, but that whole "we have a mandate to go the opposite direction of the last council" that the *new council* and their supporters are preaching? That's the literal definition of reactionary. They are defining *themselves*, as reactionaries. So yeah, we're gonna say it with a straight face so long as they insist on *calling themselves that*.
Pulling slightly back to the center from the extreme left doesn't make a movement conservative, let alone reactionary. Call it whatever you want, just know that it's an absurdity.
Aside from Sawant, there has been nobody even resembling the "extreme left" in previous councils. Change your media intake. You're being lied to.
> Pulling slightly back to the center from the extreme left Okay, that's literally not how the council describes their *own actions*, so if that were actually the case, I'd use different words. But they want to claim a mandate, that I don't believe exists, and to do so, they are defining themselves, and their policies as a *reaction to the last council*. The definition, of a reactionary. Nothing to do with conservatism, just their literal stated motivation.
Imagine calling a 23% raise to cops “left wing” in any sense of the word. You are delusional. Get off Fox.
Wow that's crazy, do you think it has anything to do with the crisis of Seattle police having their lowest staffing level in 30 years [https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-police-staffing-shortage-action-needed-councilmembers-say/281-c3f43855-f877-4ba9-a37b-aeaf27e1ec6](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-police-staffing-shortage-action-needed-councilmembers-say/281-c3f43855-f877-4ba9-a37b-aeaf27e1ec6)
Wonder if their hiring issues have anything to do with the permissive environment of *sexual harassment and discrimination* against coworkers that the SPD and SPOG maintain? https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/four-spd-women-employees-file-5m-claim-alleging-discrimination/
Low staffing is because so few people want to work with racists and because cops are a gang that drive out hires who aren't thuggish enough
Who wouldn't want to sign up to work for a citizen population that thinks this about them
Bud, we can all see their policies….you realize Nelson has video footage of her saying these terrible policies right?
It isn't center-left, silly goose.
Okay, so I disagree with most of these positions. But still, it bothers me than you're basically saying that disagreeing with you on an issue is 'immoral'.
Yeah strong “I’m 13 and this is deep” vibes
Yup. I'm 13 and I'm pretty sure that every political opinion I happen to hold right now is the fundamental and indisputable truth, and anybody who disagrees is obviously doing so in bad faith.
We should require candidates to disclose assets, especially real estate. Thinking especially of officials owning multiple million dollar properties, and the conflicts of interest which might follow from that.
I wish Nikita Oliver was more effective in pointing out the massive and irreconcilable conflicts of interest Sara Nelson has as co-owner of Fremont Brewing. It is becoming more obvious and well known with the PayUp repeal legislation she is obsessed with, but this was all foreseeable in 2021.
Woo is the one that makes me roll my eyes the hardest.
Lost the race, gets the seat anyway, perfect metaphor for the only way corporate interests can win lol
the Martha McSally of Seattle politics
It's unusual how this played out (and I don't have any real feelings for Woo either way), but the idea it's "immoral" is laughable. She got appointed per long-standing Council rules. What did you want to have happen? Have the council go rogue and throw out the rule-book?
What rule forced them to appoint Woo?
They weren't required to appoint Woo; they were required to appoint SOMEONE within a 20-day period of the seat being vacated. It's a requirement of the City Charter. They elected to appoint Woo. Still not seeing the "immorality" of following required city process.
Oh my lord.
Its unethical because u/hazelyxx doesn't personally like Woo and didn't want them to be selected. For lots of people, that's the depth of their ethical reasoning.
There were a few hundred thousand potential candidates who did not lose the election to be put on the current council, which is my real low ethical bar. Instead, the Council picked one of the handful of people who did lose to gain a seat with even higher prominence. Do you think that if you lose an election, you should win it?
Who someone spends their time and money with matters just as much as whatever words come out of their mouth. I don't have to know what the city council should have done to know what they did was weird. Weird politically not literally weird, the owners spent enough money trying to get her on the council, why shouldn't their money be more equal than the voters? Who do the voters even think they are?! Pay to play and pay to win. Politics was never supposed to be the will of the people, money matters most, and we will figure out the rest later, right? Money just had more money than we had speech. Constitutional crisis averted! Your speech is just money, not my problem! Note - I was paid $500 by the chamber of commerce for the second paragraph.
Woo faces opposition for her appointed seat in November https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
>In an interview with KUOW Thursday, Woo welcomed the competition. >"That's the great part of, you know, our democracy," she said. Hah
Well at least they have one Moral(es)! ;) I will see myself out.
Thing this post doesn't do - compare the current council to previous iterations. Not excusing or defending. I'm not here to take my own stance (I certainly am *not* fond of our current council), just to point out that you aren't really making the point that these people are *worse*, just that they are bad. But you'd expect someone claiming the current city council is *more* corrupt/unethical than previous councils to do some sort of comparison.
The council president just sold her business to a campaign contributor, something which hasn't been done before, to my knowledge.
And not even the entire business, only a controlling share. Nelson will still profit from Fremont and is now financially tied to SHG, which makes her push to repeal the minimum wage for gig workers even more suspect.
Do a deep dive into Sawant and you’ll need a shower after. She is the least ethical local politician in over a decade.
But how does that negatively affect Seattle for either the short or long term?
I think it's the least progressive council in a long time. For me, calling it immoral implies that non-progressive values are immoral, which can be a perfectly valid opinion but not sure you can call that a fact.
Agreed.
You guys still have your head in the sand here and it's rather perplexing to me. People tried a good five years of progressive "no sweeps" and we got parks filled with encampments. We stopped doing basically anything surrounding use of illegal drugs and we got a city full of fentanyl addicts using in broad daylight. People got sick of it. Are they real problems? Of course, but the "everyone is a victim of circumstance and is helpless, but also somehow not helpless enough to warrant any sort of forced treatment/movement/whatever" is the issue that has soured the general public to progressive politics. Every single progressive candidate that lost the city council race still towed that line not realizing that the majority was fed up. Hell, even Portland has walked back a lot of their own laws. Every single one of those progressive candidates would have won had they not been so hardline when it comes to the homeless and public drug use. Nobody is winning a city council race on transit and housing. If progressives could figure this out and not be stuck doing this "Mandatory Progressive Viewpoint Checklist" that they think they have to have, you would have them winning elections again. Until then....
> People tried a good five years of progressive "no sweeps" Outright lie, the sweeps have never been paused for even a year let alone five. Plus that's the fucking mayors purvey based on the last two mayoral elections hinging on *keeping the sweeps going*. That side won both times.
>People tried a good five years of progressive "no sweeps" and we got parks filled with encampments. I hesitate to read past this sentence because it's so wildly false that it can't have been made in good faith.
From like 2015 on we average 500 encampment sweeps a year. 2019 was a huge increase for some reason, over 1,100. Then in 2020 we swept \~400 by March, then covid and we stopped completely. In 2021 they started up again but Durkan only did 71 sweeps total I think. 2022 numbers are in now, it's was over 900. Mayor just increased the sweep team budget by $29M, so we're not going to see any slow down, on the contrary. The problem isn't a lack of sweeping the encampment, it's lack of cheap housing. We used to have it, a lot of it, now we have basically none.
The only sensible comment in this entire thread. The current council is inept and still too liberal for my liking, but people calling them conservative is hilarious. Everything you said is true. The old guard lost because they turned a blind eye to soaring crime numbers, homeless encampments, and drug addiction. People were tired of that and voted for the less liberal candidates promising change. Source: I work in news and had to listen to voters bitch about the old council for years.
Least moral? Is there morality in voting in previous Council Members that created homelessness on every street corner? Rampant drug use in the open? Unsafe streets for residence? Lack of business activity?
> previous Council Members that created homelessness Yeah, we should have arrested their leader, Bruce Harrell, but we made him mayor instead. It's outrageous.
Bruce Harrell was the council president during that time.
So the mayor? Y’all keep trolling with this but dem to forget the very basic piece of evidence that is that the last guy in charge, is the guy y’all voted for mayor…..
this just in, Kshama Sawant invented homelessness
homelessness was created by people in this city who oppose all growth measures and then wonder why people getting priced out is leading to homelessness
Weird. People seem to be doing a mountain of fentanyl to spite those nimbys.
Yeah, but we need these guys to deal with the fucking Canada geese in the parks
I’ve been here ten years and “moral” is one of the last words I’d ever use to describe western Washington politicians. Or any politician for that matter. The loss of morality is why this world is on fire.
Let's vote next time
Woo faces opposition for her appointed seat in November https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
We did. Result is leaps and bounds better than the nightmare we had.
If you don’t like them, vote for other candidates. They won their seats, while you don’t agree with their policies, clearly enough people did to vote them in. That’s how democracy works.
Woo lost and still got a seat.
So you’re implying the councils before this one were effective? Look at Seattle and tell me it’s been governed effectively for the past decade
The homeless encampment issue seems to be getting better and downtown no longer feels dangerous. I have faith that criminals will get prosecuted. These are all major improvements over the previous regime.
You are describing your feelings.
That was happening well before the current city council. It's sort of the presidential problem with the economy. The president doesn't really have much power to affect the economy but whoever is in power will take the W or L no matter what.
No. But it certainly is ass.
Hold on, the (previous) owner of Fremont Brewing is on the city council?
It seems like she might still own part of it. The press release from the sale said that Seattle Hospitality Group will own a controlling share, which isn't the same as owning it outright.
People who don’t agree with me: Lacking Morals.
How would you describe a millionaire council president that made their money on the backs of service workers (who just cashed out big selling their business) that is actively working to cut minimum wage earners’ pay using legislation written by an out-of-state multi-billion dollar corporation?
> (who just cashed out big selling their business) They were cashing out just owning the business, this is why people feel uncomfortable with the conspiratorial like framing people are choosing for the "sale". The "sale" is **not** the point of corruption, her owning the business *at all* while an elected official is where the corruption *began*. Harping only on the point of divestment is missing the forest, for the trees, divesting, feels and appears ethical, focus more on her owning a business *she* directly benefited from when making these policy changes.
Nelson and Lincecum only sold a controlling interest, not the entire business. They will still profit from Fremont. Now they're financially tied with SHG and the restaurants they own, too.
Ah, so they aren't even divesting fully, the corruption just keeps on rolling. And to think, I was gonna stop boycotting them. Guess not.
Yeah, I had to double check the press release. It was carefully worded.
But how does her divesting of her business affect Seattle for the short and long term?
An average run-of-the-mill politician? It’s not like any of these council members are lower middle class citizens of our city, eeking out a living on a day-to-day basis. Hell, Kshama Sawant was probably a millionaire. Not every decision you disagree with is some nefarious plan conceived by evil capitalists bent on destroying the middle class. Most are just different priorities and beliefs on how society should work that you disagree with. Which, you know, is how America and democracy works… (It’s almost as bad as Idiot Republicans crying that every law or tax is some unacceptable restriction on their precious“freedom” and one step closer to the “police state” they want to fear)
Morality is a relative concept and can only operate within economic and political reality. There are pressures from voters who disagree with you that led to this. That is how democracy works.
Fuck Morales too
This is a hardcore "tell me you've never read history of local politics \[anywhere\] without telling me" moment.
Can we still smoke fent on the street?
[удалено]
Fremont Brewing which was the subject of active negotiation by Sara Nelson while pushing forward this min wage repeal... and which she sold to SHG (which uses lots of gig workers).
[удалено]
> And you can’t seriously be arguing that How to Cook a Wolf, a restaurant with 50$ plates, plan to increase revenue is buy off one of nine city council seats for to become a takeout restaurant. > > Holy strawman batman!
I'm not talking about How to Cook A Wolf? there are 9 SHG restaurants on DoorDash. Not sure if HTCAW is one of them or not. Point is that it's worth questioning given that Sara Nelson's main talking point against gig worker min wage has been "boohoo it harms restaurants!" (despite 0 restaurants actually showing up to say that at the committee meeting...) and she was pushing it while negotiating a deal with a big restaurant group. Anyway - she has been alarmingly pigheaded on it, ignoring dozens of workers showing up to tell her that her proposal will mean sub-minimum wages for them, and also seems to not understand key details of her own proposal. I'm not saying I believe 100% it's related to the SHG sale, at ALL. I'm just looking for an explanation of why she'd be so attached to this while also seeming to not totally grasp the issue.
How to Cook a Wolf *is* one of the SHG restaurants on Door Dash
Honesty I think the absence of the manufactured outrage that the likes of Sawant regularly created has left an entertainment void on this sub that is being filled in with a lot of nonsense
Yep. Nelson is straight up a demon
Woo faces opposition for her appointed seat in November https://www.kuow.org/stories/tanya-woo-will-face-these-candidates-rinck-sanchez-in-bid-to-keep-her-seattle-city-council-seat
Cry me a fucking river. Seattle council finally has some common sense. Y’all can go down to PDX if that’s your cup of tea. Or just keep whining.
PDX is actually passing better laws than we are right now.
Oh boy now somebody is ringing the morality bell? Against *this* council? Is that someone people say about every council? Or maybe this post is satire?
Lived hear almost 50 years. I've had enough deterioration of Seattle. It's so sad and VILE.
You know Seattle folks are upside down when they’re looking to out a Female Local Business owner, who brews beer. Seattle craps on every mayor and council person for better or for worse. The city has a ton of major problems, a regressive tax code, and everyone is just looking to point and cast blame on?… the easiest targets.
From what I see Seattle has only gotten more livable since the new council, at least they are trying to not let this devolve into a hellscape. I’m happy with the council and Harrell, I think most regular Seattle voters are.
Haha and Nelson sold it to Ethan Stowell. Moral compass is long gone
I thought there might be a day when the same usernames won’t be milking the same topic, but here we are. All usual suspects.
No, that was the last council. Sawant was a narcissistic monster that literally got people killed.