1. State Sen. Margarita Prentice’s bill to suspend I-960—the voter-approved measured that requires a two-thirds vote for tax increases—advanced to the senate floor yesterday. (Our previous coverage of the bill is here.)
Another bill Read more…
In a letter earlier this month, City Council members Sally Clark and Nick Licata asked Mayor Mike McGinn to set up a formal selection committee to choose the replacements for the outgoing directors of the city’s Read more…
Jim Lazar, an economist and open-government advocate in Olympia, has asked the state Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) to revamp state campaign disclosure rules so that telephone campaign polls would be considered political advertising, among other changes. Read more…
Today’s pick:
1. Mayor Mike McGinn is giving a guest lecture tonight at the UW College of Built Environments, the university’s urban planning, architecture and design program (which the college’s site says aims to “integrate poetic Read more…
1. Voters have two more days to mail in their ballots in this year’s school levy election. We strongly agree with last week’s superior court ruling that the state isn’t meeting its constitutional obligation to Read more…
Washington state’s junior senator, Sen. Maria Cantwell, is both a technocrat and a populist.
Getting her footing in the Senate just as the Enron debacle was blowing up in the early 2000s, Cantwell found her niche drawing up wonked-out policy from a lefty perspective to protect energy consumers and energy markets. Cantwell spent the first several years of her Senate career doing obscure, yeoman’s corporate accountability work, like passing the Commodities Future Modernization Act to regulate energy derivatives. (And her nerdy but righteous toiling continues: During last year’s health care squabbles, she locked in an unsung corporate accountability amendment to regulate pharmaceutical profiteering by pharmaceutical benefit management companies, PBMs.)
However, as the Democrats struggle to respond to Wall Street wrongdoing and the great recession, Cantwell’s detail-oriented populism has suddenly turned her into a high profile and invaluable Senator for the Democrats—the “Most Valuable Senator” of 2009, according to the lefist mag The Nation.
Cantwell sat down for a 20-minute interview with PubliCola yesterday to talk about her emergence as the Democrats populist all-star (or black sheep?) whose yearlong challenge to Democratic President Barack Obama’s economic policies has put the national spotlight on her banking reform message—a message that may be the Democrats’ only hope of warding off a major backlash from angry voters and Tea Partiers in November.
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PubliCola: I want to talk about the populist note you’ve been hitting nonstop lately. Voting against the bailouts, dressing down [Treasury] Secretary Geithner, voting against [Fed Chair] Bernanke last week—you’ve been consistently sending a message to the Obama administration that on economic policy, they don’t get it. Does President Obama just not get it on economic issues?
Sen. Cantwell: Well, first of all, I think that this is actually a message about competitive capitalism too. I believe in good old-fashioned American capitalism where you have true competition and transparent markets. And that you have money flow to IPOs to create new technology. If you’re spending all your money in dark derivative markets—and that’s more lucrative—then how are you really getting capital flowing to small businesses?
So while it may seem it’s just “populist,” it’s really about what’s made our country great. Getting capital and competition has made our country great. And if the big banks are too big, and they push the small banks out, and more and more concentration of big banks is the norm, that’s going to hurt the competitiveness and effectiveness of getting capital to small businesses.
PubliCola: Do you think that President Obama doesn’t understand that?
Image via SDOT.
Although McGinn advisor Chris Bushnell (Haugen) resigned yesterday, the city will still scrap all of the bids it received to build the downtown Seattle seawall, thanks to a conflict of interest involving the company Bushnell’s wife works for.
Last week, McGinn’s office announced that the city would be reissuing a request for qualifications (RFQ) for companies to design the seawall, after discovering that Bushnell’s wife Megan worked for a company that was on one of the design teams seeking work on the project.
Although the conflict, obviously, no longer exists, Matassa says the city has no choice but to move forward with the rebidding process; “the original bids were formally rejected, and we can’t just go back” and un-reject them,” Matassa says.
The re-bidding process will set the project back about four weeks. Rick Sheridan, a spokesman for the Seattle Department of Transportation, says rebidding the project will cost the city the equivalent of about 40 staff hours. Read more…
I’ll be on The Conversation on KUOW (94.9FM) this afternoon shortly after 12:00 to talk about the short city career and resignation of Chris Bushnell, the controversial mayoral advisor who left the city yesterday after Read more…
1. Erica will be on KOMO news radio at 11:05 this morning to talk about Chris Bushnell, the controversial advisor to Mayor Mike McGinn who resigned yesterday. As PubliCola exclusively reported, Bushnell fudged his Read more…
Chris Bushnell, the controversial senior advisor to Mayor Mike McGinn, has resigned his $110,000-a-year city office.
Earlier this week, PubliCola broke the news that Bushnell lied about his academic credentials.
According to mayoral spokesman Mark Read more…
My post on Chris Bushnell—the advisor to Mayor Mike McGinn who misrepresented his educational background to employers and the public while working at King County and as a political consultant—has been generating a lot of Read more…
