For two years Nadine Woodward has led the mayor’s office of the City of Spokane. Ms. Woodward came to the 2019 election from a long career as the familiar face and voice of local television news, projecting what is arguably an illusion of knowledge and management competence. Even as a public personality in the November 2019 general election Ms. Woodward beat former City Council President Ben Stuckart by a margin of just 848 votes, out of nearly 70,000 votes cast, 50.32 to 49.08%.
Ms. Woodward’s and Mr. Stuckart’s campaigns each raised and spent close to $300,000 on the electoral contests, but local developer and realtor Political Action Committees (PACs) contributed another $330,000 in “independent expenditures” in support of Ms. Woodward.
Early on Ms. Woodward set the theme by posting a link to an inflammatory video entitled “Seattle is Dying”, a polemic “KOMO News Documentary” that presents Seattle as a city strewn with homeless camps with a mentally disturbed addict acting up on every corner. The video blames “liberal” Seattle government for this video-presented tragedy. The implication of the posting was that candidate Woodward would keep Spokane from descending into the same fate.
Beyond the registered PACs funded by realtors and developers wanting control of the mayor’s office, wealthy local developer Larry B. Stone spent tens of thousands of dollars putting together a documentary video one might describe as the lite version of “Seattle is Dying”. “Curing Spokane” carefully avoids any mention of either candidate or the upcoming mayoral general election in 2019. Posted two and a half months ahead of the November general election, it spends 17 minutes discussing crime while depicting homeless camps and mentally disturbed people acting out on city streets. “Curing Spokane” details how Spokane and Boise, Idaho, are extremely similar, but portrays Boise as much clearer and safer. Boise is noted to have a higher jail capacity and half the homeless population of Spokane, implying the two are related. Mr. Stone’s video than presents “solutions”: a new, bigger jail, more cops on the streets, and, somewhat bizarrely, the development of more downtown parking and, lastly, putting the bus station underground. In a separate news video Mr. Stone is seen declaring that he is “neutral” regarding the mayoral candidates and that both candidates “really care”. The interviewer adds that Mr. Stone is not endorsing either candidate.
Even so, it is impossible to miss that Ms. Woodward’s campaign leaned hard on promoting an increase in police presence downtown, proposed moving the location of the downtown police station, and supported building a new, bigger jail, all implying Ms. Woodward would offer Spokane the suggested “Cure”. A few weeks after Ms. Woodward won election as mayor by her slim majoritythe Spokesman quietly reported that Larry Stone’s L. B. Stone Properties was “seeking $1.2 million in tax exemptions [from the City of Spokane] for a major high-rise project on the north bank of the Spokane River”. The article further notes that the same L.B. Stone high-rise project “has already been approved for $300,000 in city money through the “Projects of Citywide Significance” program. Some might consider that tax break and grant a good return on investment for a few tens of thousands of dollars spent on making and spreading “Curing Spokane” while carefully couching the video as a non-political position statement.
Is Spokane “Cured”? Hardly. Mayor Woodward’s administration has for two years now seemed to wake up in late October to the idea that winter is coming, that increasing numbers of people have been made homeless by loss of jobs and rising rents. Ms. Woodward and her administration hurriedly opened, at great expense, a warming shelter at the Convention Center during a recent cold snap expecting 150 people. Then the administration seemed surprised when more than 300 people showed up, giving the lie to the city’s contention that a few scattered empty shelter beds counted elsewhere in the city were proof that everyone who needed a bed had one available to them. Then, in direct violation of the City of Spokane’s own ordinances, on a 19 degree Sunday morning, the City closed that Convention Center shelter and turned people out into the cold. A friend of mine who saw the spectacle said “I am ashamed of my city” as people shuffled out the Convention Center and out to the streets. The next day there were reports of police, presumably ordered to do so by the mayor’s office, clearing tents and belonging of these same people from under downtown overpasses.
Admittedly, there has been a lot going on the past two years to keep the mayor occupied, but the problems of crime and homelessness are worse, not better. We can thank big money and propaganda from the realtor and developer community for a mayor’s office run by a television newscaster. The alternative was a man with administrative experience who understands the intertwining problems of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. We need a mayor’s office that understands that winter comes every year, that a few open shelter beds around the city doesn’t mean that no one is homeless, and that doesn’t think that directing the police to clear the encampments of people with no place to go is a humane solution.
Does the citizenry need to sue the mayor’s office to encourage it to comply with city ordinances?
I was taught in school that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, that the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of slavery came as something of an afterthought to a dispute over “States’ Rights,” the tension between the authority of the individual states and the authority of the federal government, a tension that had existed even before the time of the ratification of the Constitution, a tension expressed, in part, by the political movement of Anti-Federalism.
The South lost the Civil War and, with it, you would think, not only the institution of enslavement based on race, but You would also think they lost much of the argument over “States’ Rights”. In the years following Richard Nixon’s adoption of the “Southern Strategy”, the modern Republican Party has taken up the cause of “States’ Rights” in a modified form: through a concerted campaign to stoke distrust in the workings of the federal government. It crops up in many forms. Locally elected “Constitutional Sheriffs” in some jurisdictions (think Richard Mack and Joe Arpaio in Arizona, but also Daryl Wheeler in Bonner County, North Idaho), all far right Republicans, claim their authority supersedes the federal government’s (and, in some cases, even the state government).
Such antagonism and distrust of the federal government cropped up recently in a surreal article appearing in the Bonner County Daily Bee describing a meeting of the County Commissioners (all far right Republicans). At the meeting there was contention over whether federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 were being accepted clandestinely by the Commissioners for use in Bonner County. It sounded as though both the Commissioners and those testifying from the audience agreed:
…that spending the federal money would cause smaller government entities to adhere to potential future executive orders about pandemic response actions.
The argument was over whether the Commissioners were by some sort of financial sleight of hand were actually using some of the federal money while claiming they were not. The surreal part of this that the money in question comes from federal income taxes paid, in part, by the citizens of Bonner County, the same people who will be asked to fill the gap in the county budget left by non-acceptance of ARPA funds—an inane expression of the doctrine of “States’ Rights”: “We can’t accept a federal grant of our own money because it might, arguably, come with some strings attached.”
There is a much more than a tinge of “States’ Rights” in some Spokane County Republicans (see former state Rep. Matt Shea, for example) promotion of Liberty State and in the concept of The American Redoubt. What point is there, after all, in establishing a new government if that government can’t enact laws independent of federal oversight?
From where does this need to assert “States’ Rights” to operate independent of federal oversight come from? I’ve copied and pasted below Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s post from January 7 for those of you who are not yet subscribed to her daily email Letters from an American. HCR’s post lifted the blinders I received in high school, blinders provided by decades of “Lost Cause” ideology. (I recommend an excellent documentary, The Neutral Ground, for rent on Youtube for $3.99 for further explanation of the “Lost Cause”.) I do not believe that all modern-day Republicans understand the origins of these concepts, but the far right upon which Republicans increasingly depend certainly do—I cannot get the image of a full size flag, the Confederate Stars and Bars, carried proudly through the U.S. Capitol on January 6. It isn’t just that the “South will rise again” with all it stood for. The South has, in fact, risen, but in veiled form and over decades of effort.
Today, Judge Timothy Walmsley sentenced the three men convicted of murdering 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, as he jogged through a primarily white neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan chased Arbery in their trucks, cornering him on a suburban street. Travis McMichael shot and killed the unarmed Arbery, while Bryan filmed the encounter from inside his truck.
While the men were convicted of several different crimes, all three were convicted of felony murder or of committing felonies that led to Arbery’s death. Under Georgia law, they each faced life in prison, but the judge could determine whether they could be paroled. Judge Walmsley denied the possibility of parole for the McMichael father and son, but allowed it for Bryan. Under Georgia law, that means he will be eligible for parole after 30 years.
The state of Georgia came perilously close to ignoring the crimes that now have the McMichaels and Bryan serving life sentences.
Gregory McMichael was connected to the first two district attorneys in charge of the case, both of whom ultimately recused themselves, but not until they told law enforcement that Georgia’s citizens arrest law, dating from an 1863 law designed to permit white men to hunt down Black people escaping enslavement, enabled the men to chase Arbery and that they had shot him in self-defense. In late April, the state’s attorney general appointed a third district attorney to the investigation. “We don’t know anything about the case,” the new district attorney told reporters. “We don’t have any preconceived idea about it.”
On April 26, pressure from Arbery’s family and the community had kicked up enough dust that the New York Times reported on the case, noting that there had been no arrests. Eager to clear his name, and apparently thinking that anyone who saw the video of the shooting would believe, as the local district attorneys had, that it justified the shooting, on May 6 Gregory McMichael arranged for his lawyer to take the video to a local radio station, which uploaded it for public viewing.
The station took the video down two hours later, but not before a public outcry brought outside oversight. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case, and two days later, on May 7, GBI officers arrested the McMichaels. On May 11, the case was transferred to Atlanta, about 270 miles away from Brunswick. On May 21, 2020, officers arrested Bryan.
On Wednesday, November 24, a jury found the three men guilty of a range of crimes on the same day that the first district attorney turned herself in to officials after a grand jury indicted her for violating her oath of office and obstructing police, saying she used her position to discourage law enforcement officers from arresting the McMichaels.
The Arbery case echoes long historical themes. Arbery was a Black man, executed by white men who saw an unarmed jogger as a potential criminal and believed they had a right to arrest him. But it is also a story of local government and outsiders, and which are best suited to protect democracy.
From the nation’s early years, lawmakers who wanted to protect their own interests have insisted that true American democracy is local, where voters can make their wishes clearly known. They said that the federal government must not intervene in the choices state voters made about the way their government operated despite the fact that the federal government represents the will of the vast majority of Americans. Federal intervention in state laws, they said, was tyranny.
But those lawmakers shaped the state laws to their own interests by limiting the vote. They actually developed and deployed their argument primarily to protect the institution of human enslavement (although it was used later to promote big business). If state voters—almost all white men who owned at least some property—wanted to enslave their Black neighbors, the reasoning went, the federal government had no say in the matter despite representing the vast majority of the American people.
After the Civil War, the federal government stepped in to enable Black men to protect their equality before the law by guaranteeing their right to vote in the states. But it soon abandoned the effort and let the South revert to a one-party system in which who you knew and what you looked like mattered far more than the law.
After World War II, returning veterans, civil rights lawyers, and grassroots organizers set out to register Black and Brown people to vote in their home states and got beaten and murdered for their efforts. So in 1965, Congress stepped in, passing the Voting Rights Act.
It took only about 20 years for states once again to begin cutting back on voting rights. Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and states promptly began to make it harder to vote. Since the 2020 election, 19 Republican-dominated states have made it even harder. Many of those states are now functionally one-party states, in which equality before the law matters less than belonging to the dominant group.
Now, once again, right-wing leaders are trying to center our government on the states. Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Biden administration’s vaccine or testing requirement for businesses that have more than 100 employees. (Ironically, two of the lawyers arguing against the mandate had to appear virtually because they had tested positive for Covid and the Supreme Court protocols prohibited them from the court.)
A majority of the justices indicated they thought such a mandate was government overreach. Knowing that Republicans in the Senate would never permit similar legislation, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the pandemic “sounds like the sort of thing that states will be responding to or should be, and that Congress should be responding to or should be, rather than agency by agency the federal government and the executive branch acting alone.”
But states that are restricting the vote almost certainly will not respond to the pandemic in a way that represents the will of the majority, and Republicans are trying to guarantee that the federal government cannot protect voting. Just last Tuesday, January 4, 2022, Republican senators reiterated their opposition to the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters that there was no need for federal election protections because states would never overturn the counting of votes after an election (although a number of state legislators tried to do just that in 2020). “The notion that some state legislature would be crazy enough to say to their own voters, ‘We’re not going to honor the results of the election’ is ridiculous on its face,” he said. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “is using the false narrative that our states cannot protect voters’ access to voting.”
They can, of course. The problem is that historically, many of them do the opposite. And the minority rule that results not only results in poor governance, it leads to the sort of society in which three men can hunt down and shoot an unarmed jogger and, unless outsiders happen to step in, run a good chance of getting away with it.
—
Notes:
I outlined the events of the Arbery killing on November 26, 2001.
If you read the Spokesman or The Inlander or if you watched the video featured in my last post, you are aware that the number of beds available in homeless shelters is a contested issue. The City of Spokane mayor’s office might insist that if there are, for example, unoccupied beds at a given homeless shelter that it (the City) is within its rights to send its police and workers to clear a homeless encampment and throw the scant belonging of these people into an awaiting garbage truck. (Mind you, of course, the words used by the mayor’s office spokespeople to describe this action would not be so explicit.) You might also have heard arguments over what constitutes a “low barrier” bed.
You would hardly know it based on news coverage, but this is a U.S. Constitutional issue, specifically, an issue grounded in the Bill of Rights. In 2018 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (covering eight western states) ruled in Martin v. Boise that:
…cities cannot prosecute people for sleeping on the streets if there is nowhere else for them to go, saying that violates the 8th Amendment and amounts to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
Moreover,
The city [Boise] later asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its appeal, but the court declined to hear it.
In view of the Martin v. Boise decision, cities, particularly those in the western United States, are adjusting their camping ordinances (and their enforcement of older ordinances) to comply with the ruling.
Absorb that. The Ninth Circuit ruled that, as a matter of personal right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution, that a government cannot prosecute a person for camping on government property if there is no other appropriate shelter available—and the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear and weigh in appeal from the City of Boise. If I understand how the courts work, the only way the Ninth Circuit could come to be overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court is if one of the other federal circuit courts were to be presented a similar case and that court were to issue a ruling contrary to Martin v. Boise. Then the U.S. Supreme Court would be called upon to break the tie.
When the City of Spokane mayor’s office (that is, the executive branch of city government, the branch of government that oversees law enforcement) claims that enough low barrier shelter beds are available to homeless people, the mayor is setting the stage to work around the U.S. Constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment of people simply trying to shelter themselves from the elements.
When, as happened during our recent cold snap, four hundred people show up seeking relief from the cold at the hastily offered space at the convention center while the mayor’s office claims there are 80-100 unoccupied, available beds at local shelters there is an important reality disconnect. Once again Shawn Vestal hits the nail on the head with “A jumble of numbers obscures the need on the street”. Please take the time to watch “The Night of the Unsheltered Homeless” on YouTube and share the link with others for more on the numbers and the City’s inhumanity.
Martin v. Boise’s application of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment of the unsheltered homeless should, in a just world, carry at least the same weight as those civil rights guaranteed by other amendments, like the 2nd, that are more often paraded around and defiantly waved. We would all do well to remember Martin v. Boise each time Mayor Woodward directs law enforcement to threaten homeless people who have no place to go with confiscation of their belongings.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Of course, nothing is inarguable, as this article title in the highly biased and right wing “Epoch Times” (owned and and run by the Falun Gong) demonstrates:
What’s interesting when I talk to everybody is that we all agree what the answer is. We all agree that the answer is not people living in destitution, in poverty, and in filth on our streets in the cold, leaving needles and human waste. We all don’t want that. We think what we want is people living in safe, clean, managed shelters and decent homes getting their life back together and becoming a contributing member of society and not staying an addict. I don’t care whether you’re left or right. I don’t care if you’re businessman or you’re a social worker. We all agree that that’s the goal. What we can’t seem to do is sit down with each other and talk about how to achieve that goal. Because we climb the mountain from different sides.
“We climb the mountain from different sides.”
A great deal of controversy over the problem laid out by Pastor Bryceson stems from the polarized views of the homeless that the media feeds us. Famously, Nadine Woodward narrowly won election as Mayor of the City of Spokane in 2019 in part by stoking fear and loathing of the homeless by posting “Seattle is Dying,” the hourlong polemic by KOMO TV in Seattle that, based on anecdotes and endless video of homeless encampments, characterizes all homeless people as drug addicted or mentally ill. For Woodward, apparently, the problem of homelessness was to be addressed solely by law enforcement and incarceration. That was her side of the mountain.
But homelessness is not one problem. It is several problems that intertwine. Most of us see the issue like a blind man “sees” an elephant. It depends upon which part of the elephant we encounter. For some, like our Mayor, the picture of homelessness is the scantily clad, skinny, tattooed, scary guy walking on the downtown streets gesticulating and talking to people only he can see. For others, it is people urinating, defecating, and shooting up in downtown alleys or on the sidewalk, making a mess that frightens away potential customers. For others the image is one of clustered tents under bridges, outside City Hall or in the parks. The least seen and least iconic face of the Spokane homeless are the men, women, and children who have lost their means of support, cannot pay the rent, cannot figure out how to get help, and wind up desperate and on the streets. Each homeless individual, each homeless family, has a unique story.
Homeless people have one thing in common: once you’re homeless the barriers to getting back on your feet are suddenly very high. Each of the things that make it possible to function in our modern world, things that most of us take almost for granted, are suddenly out of reach. Without secure shelter with an address, a cell phone, and means of transportation, your day is taken up with the very most basic needs—staying warm, guarding the few belongings you still possess, finding food (and how do you prepare it?), and just physically getting to whatever shelter or agency might offer help—or might not. Imagine all that occupying your mind and THEN facing the daunting task of making yourself presentable enough in both appearance and odor to apply for a job. What do you use as an address, phone number, or email address on the application? How do you get to the job on time while holding the rest of your life together? While you’re at work, where do you safely park the shopping cart that might contain enough bedding to stay warm that night? That some might take solace in street drugs—just to forget for a while—should not come as a surprise.
That level of life uncertainly and precariousness is frightening to contemplate. None of us wants to imagine ourselves walking a block in those tattered shoes. It is human nature to mentally distance ourselves from such fears: homeless people must have “made bad choices” or they are drug addicted, or they’re mentally ill, and, after all, I am not any of those things. Like the blind man, we tend to characterize the whole elephant by the part of the animal we happen to encounter—or the part that is easiest to “see”.
It costs money and requires careful administration and oversight for it to work, but the first step in dealing with homelessness is to provide secure shelter and basic support, not just warming centers. That needs follow-up with affordable housing, not the high margin upper middle class and upper class housing we are so fond of building based on market forces. At the same time we have to start dealing with addiction as the disease that it is instead of relying solely on the penal system in the hope of sweeping the problem out of sight.
As housing costs rise into the stratosphere every large city faces the multi-faceted problem of people who have no means to find shelter, a problem reminiscent of the cities of Dickensian England.
There are individuals and groups in Spokane who are working very hard, pulling together, climbing the mountain from different sides, trying to work together to address the problem of homelessness. It behooves us to learn of these efforts, take part, donate, get involved—and support those who are working hard to make things better. A good start can be had by watching the local documentary video below (also referenced above) and checking out others of the documentaries at MyRoadLeadsHome.org.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Another quote from Pastor Rob Bryceson of The Gathering House from this documentary (1:07):
Wow you know it’s interesting to me is because I’m a pastor I sit with groups of other church leaders. I’m in a group right now sponsored by Whitworth that sits with other pastors discussing how could we unite together and use our resources of people, time, and money to help a major social problem in the city. They wonder what to do. In the meantime I’m in another meeting where the mayor is speaking—actually in our church—on a women’s panel event and she is saying, ‘Do you know who’s not showing up to deal with these problems? It’s the faith community. Where is the faith community? I would love to talk to the faith community,’ she said. And meanwhile the business community is having a hard time talking to the front line workers.
Pastor Bryceson, it seems to me, represents the outward-looking, socially responsible Christianity in which I was brought up. I may differ on some points of theology, but I understand these people. For me they stand in stark contrast to the predominantly inward-looking, insular, Second Amendment, anti-abortion, and End Times obsessed congregations like those of Matt Shea and Ken Peters, who, instead of working for the common good, spend their time demonstrating outside Planned Parenthood and demonstrating against vaccinations and masks.
“Inflation” is an economic term whose meaning—and explanation of its cause(s)—has evolved over nearly two centuries. For at least the last half century “inflation” has been synonymous with a rise in prices, that is, a rise in the “cost of living,” but the commonly cited reason for price inflation has carried over from the original meaning of the term. When the term “inflation” was coined it referred specifically to the printing of paper money (“currency”) in excess of the value held by the government as “hard” currency, traditionally gold, available to back it. Things you might want or need to buy were considered to have intrinsic value vis-à-vis the value of gold. If the “price” of one of those things rose it was on account of the government using its power to print more paper money, that is, to “inflate” the amount of currency, thereby devaluing a given unit of that currency (e.g. a dollar) with respect to gold reserves.
The meaning of inflation as explained to me as a youth was tied up in terms like the “gold standard”, Fort Knox (actually the United States Bullion Depository established at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1936), and cautionary worry about the Great Depression and “hyperinflation”. Today we hear, and mostly dismiss as crackpots, people talking about a “return to the gold standard”. All of this references a time when the average citizen was aware of and debated issues around the value of money, a time when things you might want to buy were considered to have an intrinsic value beyond the paper dollar price attached to them at a given moment, a price that rises only on account of the government printing, i.e. “inflating”, the money supply.
With that background it should be no surprise that Republicans today immediately place the blame for “inflation” (“price inflation” in the modern meaning of the word) on any social spending—as if there were no other cause for the price of anything to rise. It is as if Republicans considered the law of supply and demand were abruptly suspended. Instead, it is suddenly about “too much spending”. Our eastern Washington Republican Congresswoman, devoted spreader of Republican talking points, adopted this blame game with gusto.
A December 8 email from Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) comes with a simple subject line: “Biden’s inflation … it’s getting worse.” (Here is the whole email.) The missive opens with a dark, brooding photo of President Biden with the line “Americans Are Paying More Because of Joe Biden”. Perhaps McMorris Rodgers’ “Executive MBA” (the abridged version of a Masters of Business Administration) never covered economics—a convenient omission since her primary purpose is to focus blame and derision rather than present and discuss complex issues. It is far easier to blame Joe Biden for the purpose of eventual electoral advantage than it is to address corporate profits growing at the expense of consumers.
If you have another eight minutes watch the following video. The economic basics presented by the British commentator make a mockery of CMR’s simplistic blame game.
P.S. Whether she understands this or not, McMorris Rodgers is preaching the credo of the “monetarists”, a school of economic thought most associated with the leading“Chicago School” economist, Milton Friedman, and with the neoliberal ideas that have driven the Republican (and to a lesser extent the Democratic) Party for the last forty years. Friedman (1912-2006) coined and often repeated “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”, a convenient and appealing (for some) simplification of how the economies work, a simplification that always puts the blame for price inflation on the government “printing” too much money. Friedman, like the Republicans who continue to follow his ideas, reduced complex economic problems to a simple formulation and then hammered the idea into listeners’ minds by repetition, effectively precluding the consideration of alternate points of view, such was his influence. For example, see this presentation on inflation:
