Category: Uncategorized

It is getting harder to believe it isn’t really happening–and to deny what’s causing it

Jerry LeClaireJul 7

The fires are starting again. Evacuation orders issued to households between Cheney and Spokane. Precipitation is nowhere in the forecast, the landscape is parched. The hay crop is a quarter of the usual. Hay prices are soaring. We take shelter in our homes trying to avoid the blazing sun and the highest temperatures ever locally recorded in an outdoor environment considered mortally dangerous. 

Something is wrong. It is wrong where we live. It is not just some faraway glaciers melting. The problem has come home to roost. Politicians who ignore this reality ought to pay attention. (More on that in a later post.)

Doug Muder, the author of The Weekly Sift (highly recommended) writes of our plight in the Northwest to suggest this is all getting very real. I have reproduced Mr. Muder’s post from Monday, July 5 below. It is well worth sharing. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Climate Change is Here

When it’s 116 in Portland and 108 in Seattle, something is wrong.

---

For a long time, you could only see global warming if you knew what you were looking for. It wasn’t something that announced itself in your everyday experience.

Wherever you might live, it continued to be warmer in the day and cooler at night, hotter in summer and colder in winter — the same as it ever was. Whether summers had been hotter or winters colder years ago was a topic for old people’s boring stories about the Blizzard of ’78 or the Drought of ’54.

You had to be a statistician — or trust statisticians whose work you couldn’t check — to get any coherent view of the trends in global temperature. Think of the millions of measurements, and thousands of adjustments to those measurements, necessary to produce a graph like the one below. Who made those measurements? Who compiled those statistics? Why should you trust them? If you had the resources and the will, you could find your own way to parse the data so that it said something different. Why shouldn’t you do that, or decide to trust somebody who did, rather than trust NASA or NOAA or some international consortium of scientists?

The situation was even worse if you tried to look to the future, because then you were dealing with computer models. What were they assuming? Who did the programming? Again, the graphs looked very impressive and scary. But if you didn’t want to believe them — and who did, really? — nobody could make you.

And without predictions decades into the future, climate change was no big deal. Maybe it was already a degree or two hotter than in your grandparents’ day, but so what? Life went on, people adjusted. The climate was always changing.

What it came down to, for a lot of Americans, was one more example of people with advanced degrees telling them what to do. And that might be fine if they were telling you to do something you want to do — like get a good night’s sleep, or spend more time in the sunlight. And it’s even OK if their advice is unpleasant, but matches your common sense — compound interest means you should start saving for retirement when you’re young, smoking isn’t good for you. But here the eggheads were telling you to stop driving and flying and running the air conditioner, or even to close down the mines your town depended on, the one that had employed your family for generations. And the evidence was all stuff you couldn’t touch: Look at this graph and don’t ask too many questions about how I made it, or else the world will be a hellscape after we’re all dead.

Americans already had religions based on things they couldn’t see that made threats and promises after death. They didn’t need another one.

And then visible things started to happen, maybe, sort of.

Right around the time Hurricane Katrina mauled New Orleans in 2005, you might think you were starting to see climate change in anomalous weather events. But what is “anomalous”, really? When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in 2012, we all had a gut feeling that hurricanes aren’t supposed to go that far north. But weird weather events have been happening forever. What about the Great New England Hurricane of 1938?

The Midwestern floods of 2019 were so intense, and so close to previous major floods, that they drove the phrase “hundred-year flood” out of our vocabulary. Nobody knows what a hundred-year flood is any more. And sure, that’s strange, but is it proof? Maybe we’re just in some kind of weird flood cycle.

We got used to these kinds of arguments, to the point that they became almost ritualized: The weather would do something incredible — a big wildfire, an intense hurricane season, or a heat wave in Siberia — and somebody would immediately say: “See? Climate change.” But then somebody else would say, “You can’t really say that about one event. It could just be bad luck.” Then either people would start yelling at each other, or the conversation would bog down in the technicalities of probability — neither of which accomplished anything. Everybody continued to believe whatever they had started out believing.

The series of weird weather events should have chipped away at climate-change-deniers’ skepticism, but in fact it did the opposite. Once you’ve explained away Katrina and Sandy, it gets easier, not harder, to shrug off Harvey and Irma and Maria all happening the same year. The weather gets weird sometimes; that doesn’t mean the world is ending.

Even so, last year’s western wildfires were a little hard to account for. Not only were they record-breaking in terms of acreage and cost, but Portland suburbs had to be evacuated, Seattle had an air-quality emergency, and the smoke gave me colorful sunsets all the way out here in Massachusetts. And only a few months before, Australia had record-breaking fires of its own.

For decades, climate-change deniers have derided activists as “scare mongers” who made “apocalyptic” predictions. But you know what? Those fires in Australia looked pretty apocalyptic.

Still, people pointed to multiple possible causes for wildfires: over-development, say, or power lines. President Trump blamed bad forest management, echoing absurd suggestions he had made about raking in 2018.

Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, pressed Mr. Trump more bluntly. “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” he told the president.

This time, Mr. Trump rejected the premise. “It’ll start getting cooler,” he insisted. “You just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,” Mr. Crowfoot replied.

“Well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” Mr. Trump retorted, maintaining a tense grin.

Well, it’s a year later now, and guess what? It’s not getting cooler.

Monday, it was 116 in Portland, Oregon, beating the previous all-time record (set in 1965 and 1981) by nine degrees. The heat wave covered the entire Northwest: 108 in Seattle, 109 in Spokane, 116 in Walla Walla, and 117 in Pendleton. Strangest of all was the small town of Lytton, British Columbia, where the heat wave peaked at 121 degrees, an all-time record for the nation of Canada.

121 in Canada. That’s not right.

Heat and drought have set the stage for another bad wildfire season, and it’s already starting in Canada and Washington and Oregon and Idaho and California. On the other side of the country, the Atlantic is already up to its fifth named storm of the season, Elsa. We’ve never gotten to E this fast before, and the previous record was set last year.

It’s happening. Global warming is here. It’s not just statistics and computer models any more. You can see it. You have to work not to see it.

That doesn’t mean things go straight to hell from here. The western heat wave finally broke. Today’s predicted high in Portland is 86. Next winter, it will get cold in lots of places, and if some oil-financed politician wants to bring a snowball to the floor of the Senate, he’ll be able to find one. “Damn,” one cold person will say to another, “we could use a little of that global warming about now.”

And while the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to go up every single year, not every year will be hotter than the previous one. 2016 and 2020 were the hottest years on record, but so far 2021 isn’t quite so bad, at least not globally. Fossil fuel spokesmen, including the politicians the oil companies pay for, will tell you that means it’s all over. Global warming ended in 2020, they’ll say, just like they said it ended in 1998.

Don’t believe them. Believe what you can see.

For a long time, believing what the scientists said about the climate required trusting in the invisible, and the future horrors they predicted seemed too far away to take seriously.

Not any more. Global warming is here. It’s visible. It was 116 in Portland Monday.

That’s not right.

The sale of our attention to advertising algorithms sows division and risks our sanity

Jerry LeClaireJul 5

A third to a half of all Americans get all or most of the “news” they absorb each day through social media. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are engaging. They help us keep up with the lives of our friends and relatives. Best of all, unlike traditional print media, social media is “free”. There is no subscription fee. All we need is a connection to the internet. But there is no free lunch. We pay with our attention—and our attention is sold algorithmically to purveyors of merchandise and propaganda, peddlers who may or may not be worthy of our trust. Judd Legum, one of the writers I follow on Substack ($50/year and worth every penny), details the pervasiveness of right wing media sources on Facebook in an article entitled, “How Facebook’s algorithm devalues local reporting” from June 22. 

The Daily Wire takes another outlet’s reporting, excerpts it, and gives it an inaccurate or incendiary spin. 

For this minimal effort, The Daily Wire is rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook while the source of the journalism, quite often a local media outlet, gets a tiny fraction of engagement.

The key is the sensationalist, incendiary, spin that attracts clicks that feed the algorithm and plants headlines of misinformation in the minds of less than careful readers. News outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and, yes, the Spokesman Review maintain reporters who do original work, e.g. this excellent video documentary dissection of the January 6th insurrection from the New York Times that came out June 30. (The Daily Wire will not be spinning that video on Facebook.) Doing original reporting and publishing a print newspaper is expensive—and print ad revenue is migrating to the internet. It is a financial squeeze of which The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller, and other right wing propaganda sites take advantage by playing the ad algorithms while subscriptions prices for mainstream print media present a barrier to accessing primary reporting. 

There is another model. Below I have copied a short essay by Chris Best, one of the founders of Substack, an online platform for writing and publishing newsletters founded in 2017 (and the current platform for this email). My former platform, Mailchimp, founded in 2001, is primarily designed for online marketing. Mailchimp charges a fee based on the number of emails sent. Substack takes 10% of any subscription fees the writer collects. If the writer does not ask for or require a subscription Substack publishes the newsletter (email) without charge.

Substack is growing. There are now a number of authors who make a living from the material they research and publish on the platform. Some have a very wide audience, like Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, who offers an optional paid subscription, was reaching 350,000 subscribers already in December of 2020 (and likely many, many more people as her work is shared. Judd Legum of Popular Information, whose article is referenced above in the first paragraph, also publishes on Substack, is widely read, and is often quoted in other media.

One sad result of the Trump administration is that many Americans fed on Trump’s call of “Fake News,” find themselves unsure of what is true. Substack offers a platform for writers to gain the trust of a loyal following by consistently providing well-referenced material and perspective often not available elsewhere. 

I recommend you read Chris Best’s article reproduced below. Don’t hesitate to check out Substack and the writers I referenced above. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

The ad-peddling model that dominates the internet and hijacks our minds is costing us too much by being “free”

Chris Best

Jul 1, 2021

For nearly two decades, social media giants have showered us with content while accepting nothing in return – other than our engagement. Now, with the normalization of online vitriol, the skyrocketing rates of mental distress linked to social media, and the surrender of intimate information to unaccountable corporations, it has become obvious that we are massively overpaying – so obvious that even Big Social is now branding its old offerings in new flavors. But a minty fresh cigarette is still a cigarette. 

For a while, it felt like we were getting a great deal. Social media giants gave us rekindled friendships, family photos, even the occasional uplifting story or useful insight. But too much of what we’ve received has been toxic gruel, tube-fed (through aptly named “feeds”) by sophisticated algorithms designed to exploit our worst impulses and keep us agitated, excited, engaged. 

The marks of this new and uglier world are everywhere. We have become conditioned to accept that viciously tearing down complete strangers online is normal and admirable, and that it is right and proper for a bad tweet from decades ago to ruin someone’s life. A new vocabulary – “doom-scrolling!” “hate-reading!” – is now necessary to capture how dysfunctional online activity has become. Even worse, these poisonous dynamics have leached into our offline lives, in the form of broken relationships, decreased attention spans, and damaged mental health. 

This doesn’t mean that social media cannot be used in productive ways, that ads and algorithms are evil in themselves, or that we users don’t bear responsibility for our own behavior. Rather, all of it shows that we are paying in the wrong currency, with devastating consequences. When platforms make their livings by harvesting and selling our attention, they achieve that by shoving unsolicited junk into our minds, while we obediently scroll down and down and down. 

One day, we will look back on this early era as a dark age, when we wrongly assumed that no one would pay for great writing on the internet, that writers could be valued only by how much attention they could command, and that readers could be played for suckers. The good news is that there is finally a clear way out.

It all starts by paying with a currency we can understand and measure: money. This is how we take back control.

With money, you know exactly what you’re paying and to whom, and you can cancel payments when you want. Transactions become transparent, and incentives become properly aligned. While platforms that depend on ad sales must harvest attention any way they can, platforms that depend on people’s willingness to pay must foster trust and satisfaction. Writers succeed only if readers are happy, and in turn platforms succeed only if writers are happy. In this world, users are finally at the table rather than on the menu. 

For writers, this means being able to control their relationships with their audience instead of being mediated by fickle corporations whose algorithms decide what gets the most attention. It means independent writers can be well paid by the people who value their work instead of having to play hunger games for a share of an advertising pie where the biggest slices always go to the platforms. And when they answer to their readers instead of to the platform, writers are free to do their best work. 

For readers, the effect is just as profound. It means having more control over what you put in your mind. When an engagement-based algorithm isn’t prompting you to scroll just a little further down the feed, you are free to make content consumption decisions thoughtfully and intentionally, based on what you find trustworthy. 

We know it can work, because it already does. Creator-focused companies such as Teachable (courses and coaching), Clubhouse (live audio), and Substack are subverting the attention economy by putting people, not platforms, in charge. These companies are all young, but they already account for millions of daily active users and hundreds of millions of dollars of economic activity, the majority of which accrues to the creators. In fact, this model is working so well that even the social media giants now are dabbling in it – a welcome development, albeit one that evokes Joe Camel offering you a Nicorette.

Still, the ad peddlers will continue to claim that their product is “free,” and that the memes, trolls, and hot takes on their platforms are minor side effects rather than the active ingredients. But we now know that the lower the price, the more we’re paying. 

We all thought we had lost our minds, but it turns out we just pawned them. Now it’s time to buy them back.

It is Past Time to pay attention to the local Primary election that closes on August 3 

Jerry LeClaireJun 25

HOUSEKEEPING: Next week I plan not to publish. A week of summer vacation! I will return to your email box on July 5th.

POST: Primary elections are fundamentally important to our democracy. These mid-summer contests in Washington State are easy to ignore, but don’t make that mistake.  Ballots will be mailed July 14 – 16, 2021. The August 3 deadline to turn them in is only six weeks away. Do your homework now. Talk over what you learn with friends and family and influence the result by encouraging others to pay attention and vote. Voter participation in primary elections is typically meager. Consequently, each vote cast in the primary counts for more, proportionately. A committed (or riled) group can limit the choices available on the general election ballot in November. 

The August primary often doesn’t draw much attention in the news. The highest profile elections in this off-off year primary are for seats in municipal government, but there are also a slew of candidates for judicial positions and local boards. There are one hundred and ninety-eight candidates who have filed for various elective offices just in Spokane County. It is a daunting, but interesting list. Here’s the link.

You can greatly simplify the choices and see who will appear on your primary ballot by accessing your list through your voter registration at VoteWA.gov(and while you’re there, check and, if necessary, update your registration). Once you access your registration click on the tab “Who Filed?” in the left hand column to see the candidates on your ballot. 

Even then some orientation is useful. On my list of elective hopefuls, I see twelve candidates for judicial positions, ten of whom are running unopposed (see the last column, “ballot order”).¹ Then come two candidates for CITY OF SPOKANE C D 2 (i.e. Council District 2, see map). Betsy Wilkerson is the incumbent Council Member in C D 2. She is challenged by Tyler LeMasters. Wilkerson, in my opinion, is doing a great job. She will get my vote. (But see below for the other two races, those in Council Districts 1 and 3. Together these three races will determine the make up of the City Council. Learn and talk about all three.)

But, whoa!, next up on the list are a total of thirteen candidates in the running for two positions on the District 81 (aka “Spokane Public Schools”) school board. Surely, among these candidates there are some folks you will want to appear on your November ballot—and just as surely there are some you’d rather not. Figuring out which is which is going to require some homework.

Washington State requires that campaign contributions be reported to the Public Disclosure Commission. The data presented there is valuable, but it is only of use if one takes a few minutes to learn how to navigate on the PDC website, pdc.wa.gov. To check out contributions to candidates for Spokane City Council or “SCHOOL DIRECTOR, SPOKANE SD 081” (aka Spokane Public Schools School Board) be sure to first set the election year at 2021. You can either click (or add) your voting address or click “Show all Campaigns”. Successive clicks will take you to a list of candidates for those each of those two sets of electoral contests, the Council or the Board. Here are the click sequences: (MUNICIPAL/CITY OF SPOKANE/CITY COUNCIL MEMBER, CITY OF SPOKANE) or (SPECIAL/SPOKANE CO/SCHOOL DIRECTOR, SPOKANE SD 081)

Unfortunately, these PDC listings are not sorted by the individual contests for particular seats, that is, the candidates for the three contested seats on the City of Spokane City Council are all lumped together. To sort that out for yourself visit https://my.spokanecity.org/citycouncil/members/ and find yourself on the map—or find your City Council District under “My Elected Officials” at voter.votewa.gov . Here they are in grouped by District:

District 1 (NE): Luc Jasmin $33,752.78, Naghmana Sherazi $19,739.12, Jonathan D. Bingle $24,249.60. 

District 2 (S Hill): Betsy L Wilkerson $43,031.00, Tyler LeMasters $9,378.19

District 3 (NW): Lacrecia “Lu”Hill $22,984.77, Zack Zappone $23,850.70, Mike Lish $18,934.00, Christopher Savage $8,681.00, Karen M Kearney $6,314.28

Click on the name to see the details of contributions and expenditures. Explore. See who is backing whom. Google the candidate websites and check out their Facebook pages. Form an opinion. Donate.

Do the same with the School Director races (SPECIAL/SPOKANE CO/SCHOOL DIRECTOR, SPOKANE SD 081). Note that seven of the twelve filers so far report no campaign funds at all. In the Position 3 race, so far only Melissa Bedford reports receiving contributions. In contrast, Position 4 has attracted six contestants, three of whom have raised money. Riley Smith is in the fundraising lead by a small margin with $5,612.54. Click on names to find out who is offering financial support. Look up the candidates on Facebook or search for a website. Formulate an opinion as to why there are so many vying for Position 4 and so few for Position 3. How is each candidate aligned? Donate. Talk with your friends and neighbors about these races.

Take note that the progressivevotersguide.com for the August Primary elections should be available right around the time ballots are mailed in mid-July. I find the Progressive Voters Guide a very useful reference. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry 1

Some of these judicial candidates, I doubt will actually appear on my ballot since they are candidates for superior court positions in other counties. Computer glitch, programmer error?

Observations of a Citizen on Spokane’s City and County Governments

Jerry LeClaireJun 23

First up for most of us when we try to put a face on government in Spokane is Mayor Nadine Woodward.¹ Her twenty-eight year career with regional TV stations makes her visage easily recognizable in eastern Washington. She is quoted and appears regularly in local media. In the City of Spokane’s “strong mayor” form of government Woodward is the head of the city’s executive branch. Her annual salary of $171,360 is among the highest salaries of elected officials in the region, exceeding the salary of all but County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich ($179,707.50), County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Haskell ($199,675.00) and county level judges. For reference, Spokane County Commissioners’ salaries are less at $117,434.22.²

What is the importance of the Spokane County Commissioners (or Washington State county commissioners in general) in the structure of local governance? It is easy to imagine (as I did until the last few years) that county commissioners only govern the parts of the county that are not incorporated as municipalities (like the City of Spokane and the City of Spokane Valley). That is a gross misconception of how it works.

The Spokane County Board of Commissioners (SCBoC) are intertwined and often overarch their municipal counterparts. There are twenty-nine governmental Boards and Commissions within Spokane County. Take the Spokane Regional Health District Board of Health (SRHDBoH) during its recent turmoil around the firing of Health Officer Bob Lutz. That Board, which, in my naïveté, I had imagined was composed of medical professionals, was no such thing. The three Spokane County commissioners and their three appointees make up half of the twelve member SRHDBoH. City of Spokane officials occupy three seats, City of Spokane Valley two, and the Mayor of Millwood (representing smaller municipalities) one. After chronic non-attendance at previous BoH meetings, Commissioner French appeared at the BoH meeting at which Dr. Lutz’ firing was belatedly approved. At that meeting French disappeared for long periods from his Zoom window, was ready with several key motions, and instantly offered up Dr. Velazquez to replace Dr. Lutz once the firing vote was taken, leaving the impression of behind-the-scenes manipulation. 

Consider that the three member Spokane County Board of Commissioners functions as the combined executive and legislative body of County government, while in the City of Spokane (roughly half the population of the County) that power is split between the Mayor and the City Council. The City Council, the legislative power, consists of a Council President (Breean Beggs) and six City Council Members elected from three districts. That’s eight elected officials representing half the county population compared to three Commissioners running the whole of county government. One could argue that makes county government more nimble, but there is no denying the concentration of power. 

There are generally unrecognized power imbalances between local county and municipal governments. For example, City of Spokane officials are limited to two terms in a given elected office whereas County officials are not term-limited. Mayor Woodward did not come to her position as mayor with a background in executive management. She came from a background in broadcast television and Republican politics. She gets to use her on-the-job training for a maximum of two terms (totaling eight years). In contrast, Al French, a developer by trade with deep ties in government and the business community, has been in office as the senior County Commissioner since 2010. In his position as one third of County Government for the last ten and a half years Al French understands and controls the levers of governance to a degree that most officials limited to two four year terms and functioning at the city level will struggle to achieve.³

County Commissioners are identified on the ballot by the shorthand of partisan affiliation, whereas city officials are nominally non-partisan. One needs to pay attention to the individual candidate in city elections rather than make assumptions (possibly unwarranted) based on party.

When you think of governmental power in the Spokane local region pay at least as much attention to your vote for your Spokane County Commissioner and to the actions of these officials as you do to faces you more commonly see in the news. County government is powerful—and widely underestimated and misunderstood.

Big changes are coming. The Spokane County Re-districting Commission is currently working to divide the county into five districts from the current three. Instead of county-wide general election of Spokane County Commissioners, starting in 2022 a single Commissioner will be elected from each of the five new districts solely by the voters in that district (as mandated by state law and defended in the courts). There is a potential shift in power. We need to pay attention.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

That is likely also true for many who live outside the city limits of the City of Spokane. Areas contiguous with and superficially indistinguishable from the City of Spokane that are not jurisdictionally part of the City include the rough rectangle of homes south of 53rd Street and east of Hatch Road, as well as a peninsula of dense housing around N. Country Homes Blvd up north. Have a look on this map.2

The Spokane City Council President’s salary (as of 2022), by comparison, is only $63,240. City Council Members’ salary (as of 2022) will be $47,624. (Elected officials in the City of Spokane Valley government make less.) For the salaries of Spokane County officials click here.3

Limiting terms in office is always tempting when looking at an entrenched politician, but term limits for one office risk weakening that office in relation to other elected offices (or even in relation to the career bureaucrats that surround these officials

The Justification of Avarice

Jerry LeClaireJun 21

On June 8 reporters at Propublica.org published an article, The Secret IRS Files, revealing that some of the wealthiest Americans often pay little or no income tax. The article produced rippling headlines and discussion across the media (Google “wealthy people who pay no taxes”). A lot of coverage paraded the names of the morbidly wealthy, Bezos, Musk, Buffet, Soros, Bloomberg, Icahn. Much of the media coverage missed the more important point: At this level of wealth, wriggling out of paying income tax is perfectly legal. The morbidly wealthy don’t play be different rules. The rules apply to everyone, but only the wealthy are in a position to take advantage of the arcane world of tax law, a world of capital gains, income offsets, and trusts, . (Almost always this advantage is achieved with the aid of an army of tax attorneys who make it their business it is to understand and take advantage of the rules as written.) Importantly, as Abigail Disney points out in The Atlantic this month (pasted below), all of these people see themselves as good folk. After all, everyone is playing within the rules as written. It would be the mark of a fool not to work within those rules to one’s best advantage. 

Who writes the rules that offer advantage to the wealthy? Well, in a fundamental sense, we do. The representatives we elect to the U.S. Congress and the fifty state legislatures have accreted the rules over decades. Since the Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1980-1988) there have been two guiding principles: 1) Government cannot be trusted and 2) the more money the wealthy (called “the job creators” in this myth) get to keep the more of it will “trickle down” to the work-a-day folk. The result is a concentration of income and wealth at the top that hasn’t been seen in this country since the late 19th and early 20th century. In spite of reality, Republican U.S. Representatives like Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA CD5, eastern Washington), no doubt with the best of intentions and purity of ideology, push through law like The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that increase the concentration at the top, even as they preach of the “money in your pocket,” the pittance the law afforded the less-than-wealthy.

Abigail Disney is one of the heirs to the Disney fortune. Her Atlantic article, reproduced below, shines light on the mindset of the dynastically wealthy—from the inside.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

The Atlantic, June 17, 2021

I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth
By Abigail Disney

When ProPublica published its report last week on the tax profiles of 25 of the richest Americans, jaws dropped across the United States. How was it possible that plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett could pay nothing in income taxes to the federal government? What sneaky sleights of pen, what subterfuge, what acts of turpitude could have led to this result?

The shock stems, in part, from a disturbing reality: Nowhere does ProPublica assert that these men cheated, lied, or did anything felonious to lower their tax burdens. The naked fact of the matter is that not a single one of the documented methods and practices that allowed these billionaires to so radically minimize their tax obligations was illegal.

What’s worse, these methods and practices—things such as offsetting income with losses in unrelated businesses; structuring assets to grow rather than generate income, then borrowing against those growing assets for cash needs; and deducting interest payments and state taxes from taxable income—are so downright mundane and commonly applied that most rich people don’t see them as unethical. The more interesting question is not how the men in ProPublica’s report were able to avoid paying much or anything in federal income taxes, but why. What motivates people with so much money to try to withhold every last bit of it from the public’s reach?

One factor is the common ideology that underlies all of these practices: The government is bad and cannot be trusted with money. Far better for the wealthy to keep as much of it as possible for themselves and use (a fraction of) it to do benevolent things through philanthropy.

Michael Mechanic: Research proves it: There’s no such thing as noblesse oblige

My grandfather Roy O. Disney, who co-founded the Walt Disney Company with his brother Walt, was a fervent believer in this idea. He was so determined to prevent the government from taking any of the money he wanted to leave to his family that he created generation-skipping trusts to end-run the IRS. What he did back then was so effective that most of it is illegal today.

I will protest to my dying breath that he was a good man—one of the best, in fact.

But I will also add, at the very end of that dying breath, that he should not have been able to do that.

Practically speaking, the way the trusts were devised meant that I came into a significant amount of money at the tender age of 21. I became an asset manager before a lot of people get their first apartment. I’m 61 now, meaning I’ve been the recipient of four decades’ worth of tax advice from the decent, good, kind men (yes, they were all men) who were put in place by my grandparents, and then my parents, to ensure that I wouldn’t do anything stupid with what I had been given.

Every single method and practice outlined in the ProPublica report has been suggested to me at one time or another by these decent men as a credible, perfectly legal, and not-at-all-questionable way to manage my assets. And, over the years, I have said yes to many of those suggestions. So it’s true: If you were to get a hold of my tax returns, you would find a record of a person who has adhered scrupulously to the law and, in doing so, has also taken advantage of the many holes our legal system has left wide open.

When you come into money as I did—young, scared, and not very savvy about the world—you are taught certain precepts as though they are gospel: Never spend the “corpus” (also known as the capital) you were left. Steward your assets to leave even more to your children, and then teach them to do the same. And finally, use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it.

If you are raised in a deeply conservative family like my own, you are taught some extra bits of doctrine: Philanthropy is good, but too much of it is unseemly and performative. Marry people “of your own class” to save yourself from the complexity and conflict that come with a broad gulf in income, assets, and, therefore, power. And, as one of my uncles said to me during the Reagan administration, it’s best to leave the important decision making to people who are “successful,” rather than in the pitiable hands of those who aren’t.

I took far too long to look with clarity upon these precepts and see them for what they are: blueprints for dynastic wealth. Why it took me so long is a fair question. All I know is that if you are a fish, it is hard to describe water, much less to ask if water is necessary, ethical, and structured the way it ought to be. As long as no one so much as raised an eyebrow about the ethics of the CRAT, the CRUT, and the credit swap, who did I think I was to query the fundamentals? I did not have the emotional courage to go down that path.

There was another reason for my inaction, and I am deeply ashamed to say what it was. But here goes: Having money—a lot of money—is very, very nice. It’s damn hard to resist the seductions of what money buys you. I’ve never been much of a materialist, but I have wallowed in the less concrete privileges that come with a trust fund, such as time, control, security, attention, power, and choice. The fact is, this is pretty standard software that comes with the hardware of a human body.

As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again.

Annie Lowrey: Cancel billionaires

Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.

I tell you all this not to defend myself; that’s between me and my conscience. I am telling you this because human nature is a mighty force, and fighting it requires understanding it.

What has caused me to question my indoctrination has been ethics. Goddamn ethics. For many people, especially those most deeply embedded in the culture of having and getting money, ethics are a wispy and ineffectual nuisance—an abstract set of principles that can’t possibly stand up to the rigors of life lived fast, business conducted efficiently, and competitors devoured and cast aside.

The older I’ve gotten and the more clearly I’ve understood these things, the more the impulse to betray my own class has taken charge of my judgment.

What’s shocking about the ProPublica report is not just that the tax bills are so low, but that these billionaires can live with themselves.

If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.

Abigail Disney is a documentary filmmaker, a co-founder of Fork Films, and the host of the podcast All Ears.

Let’s talk about more than just union negotiations

Jerry LeClaireJun 18

The Washington Policy Center’s full page ad in the Spokesman last Sunday is still gnawing at my brain. For reference, today’s post is a sort of postscript to Wednesday’s (June 16’s) post concerning WPC’s ad. The ad demanded that collective bargaining talks be open to the public. The undersigned, all of them wealthy local business people, Republican politicians, or officials of Republican “think” tanks, all of them bearing anti-union credentials, offered the following line of reasoning: 

Taxpayers deserve the right to follow the process and hold government officials accountable. Local media should be allowed to cover the process and inform the public so that citizens can be be aware if either side is acting in bad faith. 

It’s a compelling argument, an argument they bolstered by citing a recent City of Spokane initiative that resulted in an addition to the City Charter that requires that collective bargaining negotiations be performed in public. Without quite explaining it, WPC now wants to apply the City Charter’s open meeting negotiating requirement to Spokane County’s talks with the unions.

The trouble with WPC’s argument, a trouble made conspicuous by the partisan nature of the signers, is its focus on shining a light on just one thing, on collective bargaining, i.e. union negotiations. If we are going to demand public local government negotiations with unions, we should apply the same requirement to local government negotiations with other outside entities. One of my readers wrote that he had once inquired of Stacey Cowles, one of the signers of the WPC ad (and owner of the Spokesman), “if his support for transparent negotiation of contracts that drive taxpayer spending would include real estate contract negotiations like, I don’t know, Riverpark Square parking garage, and the enormous taxpayer subsidy that contract delivered to Centennial Properties, the Cowles family’s real estate arm. Crickets in response.”

On a broader scale, where are the Republicans advocating for other forms of openness and sunlight, like public disclosure of donations to blatantly partisan entities like the Washington Policy Center itself, entities that hide their donors behind “non-profit” think tank status? Crickets there also. The same business-oriented Republicans that advocate to shine the spotlight on union negotiations claim that public disclosure of donations to non-profits would dampen donations. Well, yes, it might. 

Sunlight, transparency, and openness in government serve a purpose only for those who 1) have easy access to the meeting materials and meetings and 2) have acquired enough understanding of government structure and process to make sense out of it. Otherwise, one only sees what is happening by viewing it through someone else’s filter—generally the filter of “the media.”

We should take the WPC’s and Commissioners French and Kerns’ call for public union negotiations and apply that call for transparency to a whole lot more in local government than union negotiations. Sunshine does no good if citizens can’t see what’s been illuminated, so the first task will be to explore how much effort it takes to learn what local government is doing on a week by week basis. One measure might be as simple as examining what level of effort it requires to access and understand the minutes local commissions, boards, and other government entities are legally required to keep and make available. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. In general I find the civics of local government more challenging to understand and follow than that of federal government. National government is covered by reporters of major newspapers located all over the country. Their work is widely accessible. A cogent introduction to many of the details and history of national government and elected officials is available online through Wikipedia and Ballotpedia. As often as not neither of those two excellent resources is granular enough to offer an introduction to the local scene. State, county, and municipal governments vary widely in these United States. Each level has its own set of rules in the form of state law, county resolutions, municipal ordinances, state constitutions, and county and municipal charters—and there is no guarantee of concurrence across the levels. Local politicians make it their business to learn the rules. We citizens are at a distinct disadvantage if we don’t cultivate some of the same understanding.

Spokane County Republicans have chosen the framing. See this argument for what it is.

Jerry LeClaireJun 16

“Union ads against Kerns, French latest in debate on open bargaining” was the headline of an article in the Northwest Section of the Spokesman last Sunday, June 13. On the last page of the same Northwest Section there was a full page ad apparently written and sponsored by the Washington Policy Center concerning the same topic. (I’ve copied the ad below for reference.) . Spokane County Commissioners Al French and Josh Kerns in the article and the WPC in the ad want to frame the issue as a dispute between taxpayers clamoring for transparency and employee unions that want to negotiate in the dark. The WPC starts its ad with the declaration that Spokane votersoverwhelmingly approved an initiative requiring that collective bargaining talks with city unions over taxpayer resources be open and transparent. The implication is clear: We, the undersigned, are speaking for the voter-taxpayers. What’s more, the WPC ad comes labelled as a “Letter from the Community.” The “Community” ought to be representative of Spokane voters, right?

Well, no. Scan the signatures. The first signatory is Daniel Mead Smith, the president of the Washington Policy Center, the right wing, Koch-funded, very Republican “think tank” that is presumably responsible for the ad. Every signer is from a right wing think tank (Freedom Foundation), a current or former Republican elected official or from among the wealthiest of the local business community. There is conspicuous absence of the folks whose supposed will is cited in referring to Proposition 2019-1. 

I have to hand it to the operatives who framed this argument. The Republican Party has been persistent in demonizing and undermining workers’ unions. In recent years the undermining efforts were manifest in the clever framing of the “right-to-work” laws pushed nationwide. In the current “transparency in negotiations” argument Republican strategists picked another useful wedge. Who can argue against sunlight, transparency, and openness? 

The current local debate in Spokane County began not so transparently when “Kerns and French passed a resolution that required union contract talks – which have historically been private – to be public.” On the Spokane County Board of Commissioners (SCBoC), two votes is all that is required to enact a resolution. No notable public discussion, no open argument, just a couple of Republicans following the lead of the Party’s apparatus. The vote made no news that I could dredge up in a lengthy internet search (and good luck if you want to find, much less efficiently search, the minutes of SCBoC meetings). 

The “transparent negotiations” resolution by Kerns and French was current among Republican cognoscenti of the time. In May of that year (2018) Stacey Cowles wrote an editorial in support of a statewide ballot initiative, I-1608, requiring that collective bargaining sessions be open to the public. I-1608 didn’t make it to the November ballot for lack of sufficient signatures, but, sensing a great wedge argument, Republicans pressed forward locally. 

“On behalf” of Greater Spokane, Michael Cathcart filed Proposition 2019-1with the City of Spokane in time to secure its place on the November, 2019, General Election ballot. (Mr. Cathcart was elected to the Spokane City Council in the same election in which his Props 1 and 2 passed.) Proposition 2019-1 proposed to amend the Spokane City Charter to require collective bargaining negotiations be open to the public—the local version of the state’s I-1608. 

Proposition 1 was passed by the voters of the City of Spokane (not Spokane County) with 77% in favor in the November, 2019, General Election. Here’s the whole text of the Proposition as it appeared in the voters’ guide:

Shall the Spokane City Charter be amended to require all collective bargaining negotiations be transparent and open to public observation, requiring public notification of such meetings as required by the Washington State Open Public Meetings Act and require all contracts be available for public review and observation on the City’s website?

Who would vote against sunshine and transparency, especially without any published For or Against arguments in the voters’ pamphlet? (See P.S.) 

The passage of a local City of Spokane transparency initiative in an off-off year, low turn out election is now used to justify French’s and Kerns’ Spokane County resolution and their stonewalling of union negotiations as described in the Spokesman article. 

Scan the signatures on the WPC ad (copied below). If this were truly a broad-based plea for transparency rather than another cleverly framed step in the long-running Republican campaign to weaken unions and the workers they represent, we would find the names of folks other than Republican businessmen, the Republican officials whose campaigns they finance, and representatives of right wing think tanks. 

It is highly likely that French and Kerns will win in this round of union undermining. Score one for Michael Cathcart and the Republicans of Greater Spokane. Teeing up Proposition 2019-1 was a small, but clever move in a grand strategy. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Prop 1’s companion on the 2019 ballot, Prop 2, was another Cathcart/Greater Spokane/Republican sponsored effort. Proposition 2019-2gratuitously added (amended) Section 21.6 to the City Charter to prevent the City from levying a local income tax. This needless Proposition (proposing a City income tax would be political suicide) passed with 72% of the vote. No surprise there. Props 1 and 2 were both cleverly framed Republican political operatives’ stunts, gratuitous political positioning. [Proposition 2019-1 now appears as Section 40 of the Spokane City Charter.]