Ginning up for Violence

If you have local friends who typically vote Republican, it might be time to ask them if they know what the leaders of the SpokaneGOP publish as a Newsletter and launch as a “Clarification Campaign”. The Republican Party is not a monolith (any more than the Democratic Party is), but those who speak for the Republican Party, including the biggest Republican Party organization in eastern Washington, the SpokaneGOP, are sounding more and more like an armed camp, guns bristling outward. The rhetoric is disturbing.

The tone of the November 2021 Spokane County GOP Newsletter (Issue 6)is stunning. As an official mouthpiece of the local Republican Party one cannot dismiss what one finds there as the behind the scenes ravings of a few fringe members. What is published as the official newsletter must needs represent the position of the Party—and that’s disturbing. Here’s a sample (the Bold is mine):

Throughout human history we have witnessed eras of extreme subjugation. Where it be by means of the government or a movement; every generation has its story to tell. Currently, citizens of a certain class in this country are experiencing an ebb in freedom. Cancel culture, wokeness, selective silencing, two-tiered justice and every other gross violation by diatribe being hurled our way, rips at the fabric of our most basic rights. As our enemies claw at us with their best effort at psychological warfare, take solace in our protections under God and our Constitution. We have the right to think and speak no matter how offensive it is, period. Unfortunately, our human rights are fueling the Left’s physical intimidation on anyone in their opposition.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that it’s by a social caste system we find ourselves ensnared but rather, a political one. The other side of the political spectrum has brought the water to a slow boil leaving us conflicted on how to get out of the pot. Turn the other cheek? Full on domestic warfare? Neither of the two schools of thought seem plausible yet both have certainly been employed in times of conflict. The toll of another Civil War would devastate us and turning the other cheek doesn’t work when evil is our rival.

Juli Skinner, the author of this piece, like so many spokespeople for the modern Trumpian Republican Party, feels put upon, subjugated by people wielding words, “psychological warfare”, and “diatribe”. With no sense of irony, she claims a “right to speak no matter how offensive it is” even as she condemns “the Left” for calling out the offense and claims a nebulous, unnamed “physical” intimidation. Then, in a breathtaking and frightening leap, Ms. Skinner evokes “another Civil War” as “plausible”. 

Ms. Skinner’s reference to the American Civil War, rather than a small letter civil war, drips with irony. The Confederate South seceded in an attempt to ensure “states’ rights” for their white population to continue to enslave Black people. The modern day Republican Party’s cry of “states’ rights!” is still rooted in the wish to defy and undermine the reach of the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th). These three amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War by a northern Republican Party that bares little resemblance the Republican Party of today. The intent of these amendments was to secure freedom, equality, voting rights, and equal treatment under the law for former slaves, an intent widely resented, detested, and subverted among states of the former Confederacy. 

Whether or not Ms. Skinner is ignorant of the history of her party, her article is a disturbing nod to threatened violence in a local Republican Party apparatus that includes, nurtures, and depends on the support of paramilitary extremists like former state representative Matt Shea (“The Biblical Basis for War”). The SpokaneGOP has evolved into something my parents, people who considered themselves Republicans most of their lives, would not only not recognize but would find frightening. It is a party that has abandoned any form of substantive platform. Instead, it relies solely on the politics of grievance and distortion of the modern party’s origin to appease the sensibilities of decent people who have not yet come to realize what their party has become. 

Visit the SpokaneGOP website. Take note of their support for continuing the pandemic by protesting pandemic related public health measures. Read the party newsletter. Marvel at its grievance and its less than subtle threat of violence.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Based in Spokane Valley there is a separate but related entity with a claim to the local Republican mantle. Confusingly, it is “Republicans of Spokane County” (in contrast to the larger group, the SpokaneGOP, aka the “Spokane County Republican Party”). For years their signature event was a daytime cruise on Coeur d’Alene Lake. Curious, I attended a few of their meetings in pre-Covid times. The group seemed to consist of more traditional Republicans uncomfortable with the belligerent rhetoric of the Matt Sheas, Caleb Colliers, and Cecily Wrights of the larger group. (A meeting I attended featured speakers discussing the armed white supremacist views of and dangers of the Shea faction.) The current website of the Republicans of Spokane County reflects the same historical distortions as those of the SpokaneGOP as well as the same values statements. It is as though they are circling the wagons with the extremists of the SpokaneGOP.

Republican Politics of Intimidation

I cannot know what U.S. Representative McMorris Rodgers (R-CD5, Eastern Washington State) thinks, but I can know how she votes. On November 17th, CMR, along with all but five of her fellow Republicans in the House, cast a Nay vote on HR 789, the resolution censuring Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for promoting violence by publishing on social media an edited anime video depiction of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden. This Nay vote of CMR’s is demonstrates one of two things: 1) that she has forsaken all claims to the image of decency she tries to project as a middle-aged Christian mom or 2) that she is completely cowed by the Trump Republican Party, many gun-toting potential enforcers for which reside in her district. 

Attesting to the fear of the mafia Don’s enforcers, we have this from Miles Taylor, the former aide to Donald Trump who during the administration published as “Anonymous”:

That fear evolved, toward the end of Trump’s administration, into a much more visceral fear of potential violent retribution. And I’m talking about former Cabinet secretaries, sitting members of Congress and others who personally confessed to me, “I don’t think I can join you in rising up against this guy because I’ve got to worry about my family’s safety.” I didn’t see it going there with those people. I didn’t anticipate how much I was going to hear that as a response. They would say to me, “Look, I’ve got kids and this is too crazy right now.”

To date, McMorris Rodgers’ website is silent on her reasoning for her Nay vote and there has been no response to an inquiry. Of course, now that Goser’s video has been taken down from social media (including his re-posting of it after he was censured), it is not easy to find a copy. Absent a copy, conservative media outlets are free to play down its content, or, I suppose, even alter the content and re-present it in a less damning form. However, one of the most popular far right websites, The Gateway Pundit, claims to offer the unedited video with the leading title to the article: “HERE IS THE SILLY VIDEO Rep. Paul Gosar Posted that Tyrant Pelosi Is Using to Demand He is Removed from His Congressional Committees — What a Joke” That is an interesting preface for the video itself—which you can watch at the bottom of the linked article or here where I have uploaded it.

I encourage you to watch the one and a half minute video to see if you think it is “silly” or “a joke” or something worthy of censure. I expected a pure Japanese anime (the term implies an entirely animated work) with faces superimposed on some of the animated characters in the original video, something quite crude, but possibly excusable as sophomoric. Instead, whoever put this video together spent more time on the pounding music and the insertion of video clips of horseman and others running down migrants and displaying Gosar’s supposedly noble visage than they did on the short anime segment that has made so much news. This video is a shoutout to the violent extremists of the right wing, conveniently wrapped in a package meant to make it excusable as “silly”. In that way it parallels insignia like the Hawaiian shirts of the Boogaloo Bois.

If McMorris Rodgers voted Nay to censuring Rep. Goser without reviewing the video, then shame on her for blindly following reports of it like the writing at the Gateway Pundit. If she voted Nay after watching the video then shame on her for indicating that she believes this is acceptable conduct for a member of Congress. We deserve better representation.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Partisan Misdirection by the Media

Perhaps you saw the video, print, internet, and social media bloom of coverage over this single event of egregious shoplifting in San Francisco last June. If you did, what you saw likely fed whatever confirmation bias you brought to the encounter: from dismay and fear over the supposed collapse of law and order to wonder over the desperation that led this young man to such a foolish and blatant act of shoplifting. At some level of consciousness you probably noticed that the thief was a person of color. (I’m willing to bet that, had the perpetrator been white, this video wouldn’t have gained such currency.) Chances are that you were unaware of the breadth of coverage of this single act of shoplifting and of the exploitation of the video to feed Republican partisan bias in a large segment of the digital and print world. [Google or Duck-Duck-Go the following article title for an illustration of the breadth: “Thieves now mock the rule of law in “progressive” cities”] In the same manner as consumers of right wing media in the heartland have been led to believe that all of Portland, Oregon, has nearly burned to the ground thanks to “antifa,” this single incident has been used to feed the impression that law and order is about to collapse—but only in cities not led by Republicans. 

Whatever you brought to the encounter with this coverage, no doubt you went on with your day slightly influenced by one more drop of propaganda in the constant drip-drip-drip of propaganda that molds our opinions. Like most news blips that influence our opinions the chances are high that you never saw any follow-up, that is, you were left with a sense of foreboding, of justice foregone—and no idea how the story played out—or any comparison to other acts of theft. 

That’s where Judd Legum takes off in his November 29 email that I have copied below. Judd Legum is an independent (supported by subscriptions), investigative reporter who publishes Popular Information, a blog and email to which I subscribe. I encourage my readers to do so, too. Mr. Legum’s primary focus is on money and corporate political hypocrisy. 

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

A tale of two thefts

Judd Legum Nov 29

In the United States, only certain types of theft are newsworthy. 

For example, on June 14, 2021, a reporter for KGO-TV in San Francisco tweeted a cellphone video of a man in Walgreens filling a garbage bag with stolen items and riding his bicycle out of the store. According to San Francisco’s crime database, the value of the merchandise stolen in the incident was between $200 and $950. 

According to an analysis by FAIR, a media watchdog, this single incident generated 309 stories between June 14 and July 12. A search by Popular Information reveals that, since July 12, there have been dozens of additional stories mentioning the incident. The theft has been covered in a slew of major publications including the New York Times, USA Today and CNN.

In most coverage, the video is presented as proof that there are no consequences for shoplifting in San Francisco. But the man in the video, Jean Lugo-Romero, was arrested about a week later and faces 15 charges, including “grand theft, second-degree burglary and shoplifting.” He was recently transferred to county jail where he is being held without bond. 

Just a few months earlier, in November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5 million settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens “rounded down employees’ hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks.” 

Walgreens’ settlement includes attorney’s fees and other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total liability. According to the orderapproving the settlement, it represents “approximately 22% of the potential damages.”

So this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a single 221-word story in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that’s it. There has been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few hundred dollars of merchandise.

While Lugo-Romero has been behind bars since June on allegations that he stole several thousand dollars in a series of shoplifting incidents, no one at Walgreens has had to take personal responsibility for stealing millions from its employees. Stefano Pessina, who served as Walgreens’ CEO during the majority of the alleged wage theft saw his compensation rise from $7,133,155in 2015 to $17,483,187 in 2020. In 2021, Pessina transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman. Pessina’s 2021 compensation is not yet available, but the previous Executive Chairman made $8,797,713 last year. Needless to say, neither Pessina or any Walgreens employee has had to spend any time in jail as a result of millions in wage theft. 

Lugo-Romero’s alleged thefts are part of a larger issue of retail theft. But, after accounting for all retail theft, Walgreens still recorded $2.3 billion in profits in fiscal year 2021. Walgreens is still a highly profitable business. Meanwhile, the median Walgreens employee makes just $33,396. When the company steals hundreds or thousands of dollars in wages from its employees, it has a real impact on workers who are struggling to make ends meet. 

The only way in which Walgreens is an aberration, unfortunately, is that it had to pay some of its employees back. Numerous companies steal billions in wages from workers in the United States each year. It is a crime that is seldom prosecuted — or covered in the media. 

A $15 billion problem

Wage theft occurs whenever an employer doesn’t pay workers according to the law. And it can take many forms. Sometimes, employers fail to pay minimum wage. Sometimes, employers don’t pay overtime to employees that work more than 40 hours a week. In other cases, employers force workers to perform tasks “off the clock” and without pay. 

A 2017 study of minimum wage violations, which is just one kind of wage theft, found that in the ten most populous states “2.4 million workers lose $8 billion annually (an average of $3,300 per year for year-round workers) to minimum wage violations—nearly a quarter of their earned wages.” In these states, wage theft impacted “17 percent of low-wage workers, with workers in all demographic categories being cheated out of pay.” A typical victim of wage theft “is losing, on average, $3,300 per year and receiving only $10,500 in annual wages.”

If similar levels of wage theft are found in other states, it suggests “the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year.” That’s more than the value of stolen goods in all property crimes, according to the latest FBI statistics. 

Shoplifting is just a small fraction of total property crime because more than half of the value of all stolen property comes from stolen vehicles and currency. Nevertheless, media coverage of shoplifting vastly exceeds media coverage of wage theft. A search of United States publications in the Nexis news database reveals 11,631 stories mentioning shoplifting so far in 2021. Over the same period, the same outlets published just 2,009 stories mentioning wage theft. 

Dwindling enforcement

The disproportionately low media coverage for wage theft is partially due to lack of media interest. But it is also a product of grossly inadequate resources for enforcement.

Federal enforcement of wage theft falls under the purview of the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the U.S. Department of Labor. According to researchby Northwestern University Professor Daniel Galvin, in 1948 “the WHD employed 1,000 investigators and was responsible for protecting 22.6 million workers.” Today, according to a report in NBC News, 765 federal investigators are responsible for protecting 143 million workers. 

At the same time corporations have “increasingly embraced subcontracting, franchising, and

supply chain models.” These trends both put workers more at risk of wage theft and make it more difficult to lodge a complaint. Fewer employees are represented by a union and it is common for workers to have little or no interaction with the people responsible for paying fair wages.

Locking cheated employees out of the legal system

Walgreens workers in California were able to recover wages lost from wage theft by filing a class-action lawsuit. But, for many workers, that kind of lawsuit isn’t an option. 

California is one of a handful of states — along with Minnesota, New York, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Virginia — that offer protections against wage theft beyond federal law. But beyond that, employees are increasingly required to waive their right to sue for wage theft as a condition of employment. 

According to a report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP), “75.75 million workers in the United States earning less than $13 per hour…were subject to forced arbitration in 2019.” Millions of these workers are victims of wage theft annually. But the “employer-imposed collective and class-action waiver” prohibits them from joining forces to take on employers who cheat. Instead, disputes are pushed into private arbitration, a forum that is notoriously friendly for corporations. 

This means the only way to recover stolen wages would be for each employee to individually file a complaint. This is something most employees will never have the time or knowledge to do. With few exceptions, they cannot afford legal representation. And, even if everyone was able to figure out how to challenge their employer themselves, “public agencies, operating at their current capacity, could recover less than 4%” of wages stolen from employees locked out of class action lawsuits. 

A piece of federal legislation, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, would prohibit companies from forcing employees to forfeit access to the legal system. This would allow victims of wage theft to join forces and seek recovery in court. And, perhaps, it could incentivize more employers to follow the law in the first place.

Lincoln must be turning over in his grave

In the last few weeks three billboards have appeared in Spokane sponsored by the SpokaneGOP. On the SpokaneGOP website these billboards are deceitfully referred to as part of a “Clarification Campaign”. The campaign makes declarations about a Republican Party, but those declarations apply to a Republican Party that existed only until the mid-20th century, not the Republican Party of today (click the underlined declaration to review the proposed basis for the claim):

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS FORMED TO END SLAVERY.

THE FIRST BLACK CONGRESSMAN WAS A REPUBLICAN.¹

REPUBLICANS LED ON THE WOMAN’S RIGHT TO VOTE. (This is a dubious claim. The article cited details the efforts of one Republican woman and ignores the complicated, many-decades-long, bipartisan history of the movement.

Parties change, not always for the better. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, for the express purpose of opposing the spread of slavery into the western territories. Abraham Lincoln, previously an anti-slavery Whig, was a founding member of the Republican Party. The Republicans were the Party of the industrial north. Democrats, the Party of Andrew Jackson, were the Party of the slaveholding more agricultural south. 

Between 1864 and 1870, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, amendments collectively known as The Reconstruction Amendments, were passed. The Reconstruction Amendments formally abolished slavery and assured black people, at least on paper, of the right to vote and equal protection under the law. All three amendments were backed by Republicans, then the party of the victorious North, and bitterly contested by Democrats, then the party of the defeated South, still grounded in the ideology of white supremacy. The late 1860s was a period in which the union was being “reconstructed”—a process logically dominated by the victors. The Fourteenth Amendment was bitterly opposed by the Democrats of southern state legislatures, but were forced to ratify the 14th in order to for their delegations to be readmitted to Congress. 

Reconstruction—and, arguably, Republican support of voting rights and other civil rights for southern blacks—ended in the Compromise of 1877. According to that unwritten but widely understood compromise among members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was seated as President of the United States following the most contested election in United States history. (Hayes lost the popular vote but triumphed in an Electoral College vote dispute settled by the House.) In exchange for the Electoral College votes awarded him by the House, Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, troops that remained in the south in order to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. 

Between the Hayes’ presidency beginning in 1877 and the 1960s southern states adopted rules that effectively robbed people of color of the right to vote—as well as robbing them of equal protection under the law. Southern Democrats established the “Solid South” voting bloc in the U.S. Congress. During those roughly 80 years the Republican Party, still the party of the north and once the party of anti-slavery and Reconstruction, abdicated its founding principles by making little effort to support the rights of those over whose freedom the Civil War was fought and whom the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to bring into the body politic.

It took the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, a dissident southern Democrat, to crack this evil complacency. Although his presidency was severely marred by the Vietnam War, Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 marked a huge turning point from the conspiracy of complacency on civil rights that had existed since 1877, a complacency shared by both Democrats and Republicans, a complacency that ignored the reason the Civil War fought. 

Political tectonic plates began to move after Johnson’s policy shift. The Republican Party, sensing opportunity, adopted the “Southern Strategy”, an effort to court racist southern Democrats peeved over federal civil rights legislation that threatened to upend the white power policies southern states had built up since the end of Reconstruction. The result, played out over decades, has been a one hundred and eighty degree turn of the Republican Party from the anti-slavery Party to a Party whose avowed leader openly courts the support of white supremacists with statements like “There are good people on both sides” and “Stand down and stand by”. 

Tellingly, one of the most notorious southern racists to serve in the modern day U.S. Senate, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, switched allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party in 1970, just in time to follow the completion of the Republican about-face from its founding based on anti-slavery to it’s modern dependence on racists and white supremacists. 

On the issue of race, racism, and white supremacy the Democratic and Republican Parties have switched coats. Tellingly, Donald Trump hung a picture of his idol, Andrew Jackson, in the White House shortly after his inauguration. Andrew Jackson, a notorious slave master, is also infamous for instigating the forced relocation and ethnic cleansing of 60,000 native Americans. 

Trump, the leader of modern Republicans, nodding to Jackson should make Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the historical Republican Party, turn over in his grave. 

The modern Republican Party’s claim as the defender of civil rights while it harbors factions that proudly display confederate flags is a display of willful ignorance and purposeful distortion of history. Shame on them.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

1 The first Black U.S. Senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, was elected by the Mississippi legislature to represent Mississippi in the Senate in 1870, a feat made possible by Reconstruction, a policy abandoned by the Republican Party in 1877. (see discussion above). Over the 1870s 15 more Black men took their seats in the House and Senate. Between 1901 and 1973 not a single Black congressperson served from the eleven original Confederate states.

Boss French Flexes His Political Muscle Again

NOTE: I intend that my next post will be on Monday, November 29. Happy Thanksgiving week to one and all!

POST:

The current SRHD Board consists of twelve members: three councilpersons from City of Spokane; two Councilpersons from the City of Spokane Valley; Mayor Kevin Freeman of Millwood (representing the smaller communities in the county), and each of the three Spokane County Commissioners, each of whom appoints a “citizen” representative. The County Commissioners plus their three appointed “citizen” representatives together thus make up half of the voting members of the twelve member board. 

On Monday, November 15, in an example of partisan power politics, Commissioners Al French, Mary Kuney, and Josh Kerns began their restructuring of the SRHD Board by removing all representatives of the City of Spokane and City of Spokane Valley from the Board, all five of them, while retaining Millwood Mayor Kevin Freeman as the sole elected official on the board to represent the county’s cities and towns. (Mayor Freeman received this news not from the Commissioners, but from the Spokesman reporter who called him for comment.) In addition there will be four unelected representatives on the SRHD Board as mandated by a new state law:

The commissioners will pick three of the four unelected representatives, and there are rules outlining who they can pick. Anyone interested in applying for these positions is asked to reach out to the county commissioners.

This new SRHD Board will consist of eight, not twelve, members, six of whom are the Commissioners or people they appoint, giving the County a supermajority voting block. The only two board members not tied to the County will be Mayor Freeman and “a tribal representative selected by the American Indian health commission” (per RCW 70.05.030, see below). 

Like much of what goes on in the current three person Spokane County Commission, the reorganization was voted on and final before anyone knew it was even a topic of discussion. Those on the County email list received notification in an email on November 11 of a “Special Meeting” to be held on Monday, November 15. The notice offered a link to a two page document “Notice of Special Meeting” in which the reorganization was buried among eight items—listed only as “(7) Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD) Composition (RCW 70.05.030)”. It is impossible to believe that there was no discussion and no plan in the works—but if there was it was either not public or it was buried. As I write today, four days after the vote, I am still unable to find any written detail of the Commissioners’ decision on the Spokane County website. 

Restructuring of Washington State county-based boards of health was mandated by state law passed by the Washington State legislature this last session, RCW 70.05.030 (scroll down to see the part “Effective July 1, 2022”). The law is plainly meant to increase the voice of citizens and health professionals on the boards of health, balancing the influence of elected officials, almost none of whom have experience or expertise in public health. RCW 70.05.030 was not intended to offer an opening for a Spokane County Commissioners to strip urban elected officials from their current representation on the SRHD Board, but, seeing a window of opportunity in the law as written, French, Kuney, and Kerns jumped right on it. 

The reorganization comes at a time of flux in Spokane County politics. Next fall (2022) five commissioners will be elected, one each from five newly drawn county districts. These five positions will replace the current three countywide-elected commissioner positions. The current three commissioners will all have to stand for election if they want to keep their lucrative jobs ($110,000 annually in 2017). (Note that is more than twice the salary of city council members—even while the current commissioners operate much less transparently.) 

Current Commissioner Josh Kerns, when contacted by Colin Tiernan of the Spokane for Tiernan’s article on the reorganization, offered these lame explanations of the Commissioners’ action:

Spokane County Commissioner Josh Kerns said the county chose to have a smaller board for two main reasons: First, the county alone funds the Spokane Regional Health District, Kerns said. And second, the commissioners represent all county residents.

“We are everybody’s voice on the board,” he said.

Kerns also emphasized that the commissioners followed the letter of the law. He said if Riccelli [WA State Representative to Olympia from LD3, City of Spokane] wanted more public health professionals and more elected city officials on the board, he should have written that into the bill.

“It’s his law,” Kerns said. “I would say Rep. Riccelli’s rhetoric doesn’t match the bills that he drafts.”

Kerns’ last comment rings like the schoolyard taunt, “Nah, Nah, Ni, Nah, Nah! Gotcha!” The current three Commissioners are all allied Republicans elected on county-wide ballots. Two of them (French and Kuney) are closely tied to the building industry. The overall county typically votes around 45% Democratic. For Kerns to claim that “We are everybody’s voice on the board” and that they “represent all county residents” is a vacuous assertion. 

Although Kerns is the only Commissioner quoted in the Spokesman article, one must sense manipulations by Commissioner Al French, arguably the most powerful elected official in Spokane County. Mr. French tends to avoid the limelight, moving behind the scenes as he did the night the SRHD Board fired the health director, Dr. Bob Lutz, in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Moments later Mr. French reappeared in the Zoom meeting to offer up his choice for Lutz’ temporary replacement, Dr. Velazquez. (Dr. Velazquez, has, predictably, since been made the permanent health officer of SHRD.) 

Mr. French, like Kerns, has verbally chaffed over the voting presence on the SHRD Board of city government representatives, when, after all, it is the commissioner’s, i.e. “the county’s” money that funds the SHRD. It is curious how possessive both Kerns and French sound of “the county’s” money. “Spokane County receives the majority of their tax revenues from three sources, property tax, real estate excise tax, and sales tax.” The vast majority of those taxes are paid by residents of the City of Spokane and the City of Spokane Valley, who, together, make up 61% of the population of the entire county. 

That French, Kuney, and Kerns have just voted to toss out the city council representatives from the SHRD Board is pure power politics. They saw an opportunity to consolidate a supermajority on the Board and they took it. Remember their bogus justification when you cast your ballot for new commissioners next fall.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Here’s a chance for civic-minded people to serve their community. Check out the specifics in RCW 70.05.030 (scroll down to see the section that opens with “Effective July 1, 2022”) and put your name in the ring for the commissioners to consider. Offer them choices other than the ideologues that might otherwise be the only ones to apply. (Recall that Commissioner Josh Kerns’ defense for appointing an anti-mask, anti-vaccination, anti-science naturopath to the board was, “He was the only one who applied.”)

The widening gap

The middle class “American dream”, at least since World War II was founded on the idea of the home not only as lodging but as investment savings. My dad (a common wage-earner employed as a depot agent with the Milwaukee Road Railroad) counseled that it was a good idea to buy the largest house you could afford “because a house will appreciate in the long run.” I still remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table pencilling out what they could afford to buy, calculations that finally resulted in the momentous purchase of a two bedroom, one bath, single family dwelling priced at $15,600. That was a price that was somewhere between two and three times my dad’s union negotiated railroad annual salary. That purchase, and the mortgage that came with it, wasn’t just a dwelling, it was a major portion of my family’s net worth at the time. 

Work hard to scrape together enough money for a downpayment, put money down on the biggest home you think you can afford, find a mortgage lender, and jump on the economic treadmill. For at least a half century this path was considered the way to financial security and the middle class—an opportunity brought to you by the banks, the developers, and the homebuilding industry. Short on cash? Take out a second mortgage or a “reverse mortgage” on your home piggybank! 

It worked pretty well for decades. (That is with the major exception of 2008, when the banks, lending institutions, and regulators, in their relentless quest to make money on the backs of others, bankrupted many who had invested in the home as a vehicle to wealth.) Paying on a mortgage to own the biggest home one could stretch to afford was the prime savings plan for most Americans aspiring to the “American Dream” of upward social and economic mobility. Many folks running on this treadmill of mortgage payments have little left over each month to invest in retirement savings, stocks, and bonds. 

In that same half century, even as average family size has roughly halved, the average square footage of a new single-family home has ballooned by a factor of 3 (as has the associated carbon footprint). 

Meanwhile the income gap has vastly widened over the same time period that the cost of housing has risen. In 1950 the median (not average, but median) home price was 2.2 times the average yearly income. Today the median sales price of houses sold in the U.S. is $404,700 while median real personal income is just $35,805, so the median home price today is more than 10 times the median income.¹ Is it any wonder why cities with the hottest housing markets (and concurrently rising rental prices) are experiencing homelessness at levels not seen since the Great Depression? The relationship is clear.

If you’re one of those folks living in the Inland Northwest with a stable job and a low interest 30 year mortgage on a home you purchased ten years ago, life is good (at least until you sell at the inflated price and then try to buy something else). If, on the other hand, you’re making even $20/hour ($40,000/year) and you lack any familial wealth to fall back on, you might be holding on by the skin of your teeth to pay rent and stay housed, much less thinking about buying a home. 

For developers, builders, and realtors the greatest profit margins are in building and selling tract and high end housing. Neither offers housing a local average worker can afford. Neither contributes much to alleviating homelessness, in spite of local election claims made by realtor/developer PACs. Both types of housing are sold to folks moving here from places where they’ve been able to sell their home at an inflated price to someone even better off—and then use that money to bid up home prices in Spokane and North Idaho. Homelessness goes unaddressed, the developers profit, home prices soar, and locals, some of whom do the actual building, are priced out of a place to live. 

The part of the American Dream that specifies a large home with a bigger mortgage as the stepping stone to family savings and the middle class has become steadily more unattainable. Those who are still able to mount the mortgage treadmill in hope of a better life find the financial system rigged—as many found in the crash of 2008—or they find, like they did in Detroit, that when jobs move elsewhere, their mortgage exceeds the value of their home. Home values are neither portable nor fungible the way stock and bond investments usually are. If your home value is your only savings you’re on thin financial ice.

The home-mortgage-based stepping-stone to wealth developed in the aftermath of World War II. That was a time when many a monumental familial fortune was depleted. The home value playing field was leveled by high estate taxes and marginal income taxes running as high as 90%. In that financial milieu housing prices were driven by demand from the bottom up—not from the top down, as they are today. 

The paradigm of pursuing the American Dream by building more McMansions and pricey tract homes spread out on agricultural land is unsustainable and only serves to further enrich the already wealthy. A change in tax structure from the Republican and neoliberal trend of the last forty years (since Reagan) is required to shift this paradigm before the pitchforks come out (if they aren’t out already…) 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

If you dig into these statistics note that quoted numbers are for individualincome. In 1950 home mortgages were commonly taken on by single income families. Today, qualifying for a mortgage often requires the income of at least two adults. The numbers quoted today are often “household”, not individual income figures. That difference underlines how unaffordable housing has become over my lifetime.

The On-going Assault on the Central Valley School Board

The attempted takeover of Central Valley School District Board (CVSDB) by far right Shea Republicans did not end with the voting in the November 2 General Election. Prior to the election, CVSDB meetings were disrupted by a fired-up group of parents protesting mask mandates; recall petitions were filed against seated Board members who were not up for re-election; a write-in candidate, Brett Howell (remember that name), filed against Teresa Landa, a previously uncontested candidate for one of two open seats on the Board; and a bogus “non-profit” (Washington Citizens for Liberty) was used by Pam Orebaugh, a candidate for the other open seat, and her ally, Rob Linebarger, to gather an undisclosed amount of money to support all of this political maneuvering. (More orientation is available here.)

Reasonable people came to the defense of the CVSDB by mounting a write-in campaign to elect Stan Chalich, a retired educator, to challenge Orebaugh. 

In a general election in which only 38.64% of voters registered in the CVSD turned in ballots, Pam Orebaugh, the anti-vaccination, anti-mask far-right candidate, was elected over write-in candidate Stan Chalich by 10,129 to 8,018 votes. Garnering eight thousand votes on a local write-in campaign is an impressive achievement (Howell managed only 3939 as a write-in for the other position, losing to Teresa Landa’s 15,412).

When Pam Orebaugh takes her seat on the CVSB she will be one of the six school board“directors”, against five of whom the triumvirate of Orebaugh, Linebarger, and Howell leveled nasty, venomous attacks. Those efforts included filing petitions to recall the three directors who were not up for reelection (petitions that were rejected by Judge Harold Clarke III in late October, finding every charge “legally and factually inadequate”). 

Once Pam is seated will CVSDB meetings be further disrupted by her band of obstreperous anti-mask, anti-vaccination, anti-science, far-right followers? Will their ongoing nastiness make volunteering to serve in the unpaid position of school board director unpalatable to reasonable people? The campaign against the CVSDB shows no sign of letting up—despite the election results.

This pseudo-Christian movement railing against legal efforts to control the Covid pandemic always traces back to a few leaders, Caleb Collier, Matt Shea, and Gabe Blomgren. (See here and here.) Collier and Blomgren are joint hosts of “Church and State,” a podcast spread on Facebook, on which Brett Howell appeared on November 11th. In that podcast Howell spread lies, doubts, and innuendo against Teresa Landa (the candidate who bested Howell’s write-in campaign for CVSDB). Howell and Collier, if you click on the podcast, will waste a half hour of your time suggesting that Teresa Landa is ineligible to serve on the Board and calling for her to step down. This time there is no mention of a recall petition. Howell’s and Collier’s purpose is to rouse the anger and suspicions of their cult and anyone on the periphery they think they can attract to their cause, not to mount an actual legal challenge. Jim Allen, writing in the Spokesman on November 11th gives Howell’s and Collier’s bogus claims recognition with an article entitled “Newly elected Central Valley school board member’s residency challenged by opponent.” (No wonder that Howell and Collier speak fondly of Mr. Allen’s notice during their podcast.)

This podcast, entitled “EXPOSING FRAUD”, by yesterday morning had been shared 51 times and seen by “2K”, so this breathless bullshit has an audience of gullible Facebook followers. “Church and State”, the Facebook page says,

is about getting people plugged into politics and back into pews. The U.S. Constitution and the Holy Bible are our pillars & Only God King.

and “Dispelling the Myth of Church and State Separation”.

The address on the Facebook page is still that of Ken Peters’ non-denominational Covenant Church at 3506 W. Princeton on the near north side, but during the podcast Collier notes that funding is provided by “On Fire Ministries”, On Fire Ministries is located in a beehive of politico-religious activity in a warehouse building at 115 W. Pacific (just north of AutoRain), a building Matt Shea rented after he left Covenant following a dispute with Peters. Shea has launched a thinly documented new school, Kingdom Christian Academy, in order to support and insulate his politico-religious cult. If you take note of the names Collier, Shea, Blomgren, and Peters you will find they pop up with regularity among the ranks of the armed far right. 

We ignore these people and this assault on school boards at our peril. Reasonable people need to attend school board meetings, take note of the goings on, and support the reasonable folk who are donating their time and expertise to the education of our children. If the Matt Shea, Pam Orebaugh, and Caleb Collier set succeeds in frightening good people away from serving on the school boards we are in for big trouble. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry