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More Dispatches from the Pacific Northwest Loony Bin, a.k.a., Seattle
Sometimes it seems like the residents of Seattle are completely detached from reality. While those of us in the real world are hard at work at our jobs, Seattleites are rallying in the streets, protesting Chase Bank’s “Alleged Fossil-Fuel Investments.” Please enlighten me. Why, pray tell, would anyone give a rat’s behind whether a bank has fossil-fuel investments? The said bank isn’t even headquartered in Seattle! Maybe what they’re really protesting is the bankruptcy of the Seattle institution, Washington Mutual, in the 2008 financial crisis. Chase bought WaMu out of bankruptcy and the locals have never quite forgiven them for it. But any institution with any kind of “fossil-fuel” ties gets protested around here.
And then, there’s the story of employees at Seattle’s second-largest employer, Amazon.com, who are irked by Amazon’s “growing ties to the oil industry.” Just like with the Google employees protesting their employer’s work for the US military, Amazon employees think it’s actually their business whether Amazon works with the oil industry. These inmates seem to think they run the asylum. I sure hope that Amazon management lets them know that they do not, and it’s really none of their business who Amazon customers are. They are just acting like the spoiled brats they are.
In the Dubious Distinction category, Seattle has made the list of the most drunken-driving cities. Maybe the drivers in Seattle get really tired of all the traffic congestion, due to the city government’s efforts to get them out of their cars and into government transportation, so they just get drunk.
And, finally, in the Entitled Inmates Thinking They Own the Asylum category, residents of one of the “tiny house villages” for the homeless in Seattle locked out workers from the city government, and employees of the contractor who runs the Village. These residents think they own the place, when they are really living there at the expense of the taxpayers of the city of Seattle. Oh, I actually think the City Council forgets they are spending the taxpayers’ money and not their own!
Published in Culture
Not really. In their opinion, all money is government money. They’re just letting you keep some.
They’re not really announcing it, but Amazon is moving tons of people Austin since the WholeFoods acquisition. It’s going to be the defacto headquarters in a few years. At least it’s not quite as crazy as Seattle.
No, and the rest of Texas is distinctly business-savvy.
And somewhat fond of oil as I recall.
And UT would close shop without oil. Austin’s weird, but not crazy.
And Chase is one of the major banks in Texas (and Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Capital One also have major presences in Texas, mostly due to buyouts of in-state banks after the housing related bank collapses of almost 30 years ago). While the left might be able to push Chase and the other big banks on something like loans to gun-makers, it might hurt the folks in Seattle to discover they’re not getting Chase to burn their bridges with their oil industry clients in Houston or Dallas in order to virtue signal to progressives.
How do Seattlites perceive their city these days? Is the population mostly progressive and inclined to nod in rote agreement that a bank’s involvement in fossil-fuels is akin to loaning a German company money to build the train tracks to Auschwitz, and the protestors are doing Good Works, and it’s proof of the general moral superiority of the city?
On my last visit to Seattle a few years ago I was stunned by the number of bums. Walking down to Pike Place with my family we saw a street brawl between two homeless men over cigarettes; I think it was the first time my daughter had ever seen someone punch someone in the face and draw blood. (The first time she ever saw a drug deal was down by the Aquarium, a few years before.)
I took an early morning walk to appreciate the architecture, and while I liked the buildings, there was the ever-present stench of urine in the streets and small park areas. At the library, half the patrons were grimy mutterers from whom wafted the most baroque funks possible.
All of which, I’m sure, is the result of an insufficiency of progressive policies.
It feels to me that Amazon is expanding new stuff into Austin. Their space is tiny compared with what Apple is doing. The Seattle stuff is moving to the Seattle suburbs, right?
Yeah, for now. I feel confident here. Amazon is the hot girl sitting across the room, smiling at Austin.
It’s sad to watch a city commit slow suicide.
My wife was raised in Seattle, and she used to love it. She hates it now. She hates the homeless and drug problem that has spilled out on to the streets. She hates the loony left who have taken the place over, driving the not so loony left to move to our next of the wood (2 hours north of Seattle).
A couple of years ago there was a guest op-ed in the Seattle Times. The guy is some kind of scientist working at the University of Washington. He wrote that he was moving out of the city to “the east side” for a number of reasons. Chief among those: the crime rate even in his neighborhood, where the homeless would often acost folks or break in to cars and houses. The rising taxes which made it impossible for him to live in Seattle. And the regulatory regime which makes it impossible for middle class homeowners to improve their property.
I looked this guy up, figuring that since he wasn’t a regular “journalist” at the SeaTimes, he might answer some questions. Specifically I wanted to know if he was of the progressive persuasion, and if he understood how his voting habits and his views had brought Seattle to where it was. He was kind enough to answer my questions. Yes, he is a progressive. But no, he didn’t see how the situation in Seattle was the result of his views. Rather, he believed that it was the fault of the “really” progressive folks. I asked about perhaps getting rid of those folks, and he said that in Seattle you have two choices: mildly crazy and really crazy. Nobody who is a moderate stands a chance of getting elected. He did admit that it would be good to have some balance on the city council. When I asked him where in Eastern Washington he was going to move, he told me Bothell. Bothell is in Western Washington, but it is on the east side of Lake Washington from Seattle. Erm…?
Unfortunately, guys like this are just going to bring their problems to whatever town they move to. There is no connection between the moderate progressive politics they preach and practice (and in Seattle moderate means Barack Obama), and the results they are unhappy with.
That’s the gripe people in Texas have with people moving in from Blue states, even though a study said those recent arrivals voted more conservative than some of the longer-tenured suburban residents in the 2016 election cycle (the suburbs being the canary in the coal mine — no one expects Travis County and Austin to vote Republican, but when you see neighboring Hayes County vote for Hillary in 2016 and Beto in 2018, you know there’s a growth of people who’ve moved into the area because they like it better than other places, but have zero idea why that’s so and start turning Austin into Seattle).
Should I move from this blue state to a red state, I would likely be one of the more conservative voters there, and I’d be moving to be among people of my own kind. If only those states weren’t so…bleak. I need mountains. I need the smell of the salt air. I need Starbucks. ;-)
Texas has that …. it’s just that the mountains and the salt air are about 500 miles apart, with Starbucks in-between the two (actually, there are major mountains within about 125 miles of the Texas Golf coast at South Padre Island — you just have to drive down into Mexico near Monterrey to see them….)
As I have noted before, Seattle gets the government it elects. And they deserve what they elect. It’s we who do not deserve what they elect. The Seattle police are demoralized, and do not bother to investigate property crimes anymore, since they don’t have the resources to investigate. Result? Rising property crime. One wealthy neighborhood has hired its own security force to take the place of city police in reducing property crime. Seeing as the 1960s radicals who run the city think of police as Pigs, you can get the idea of how they respond. The Black Lives Matter crowd has also contributed to the demoralization; so has the Consent Decree imposed by DC. They are way low in recruits, and seasoned officers are leaving as soon as the have enough seniority to collect their full pension.
How much time do you have?
You can’t change voters’ minds until the voters are to the point they’re willing to change their minds. That was the case in New York in 1993, and then all the stars had to line up perfectly — i.e., the Democrats had to be in charge not just in City Hall, but also in Albany, in the White House and in the House and Senate in Congress — for just enough voters to decide that maybe, just maybe, the city’s quality of life falling into the crapper was the fault of Democratic politicians, since there was no Republican in power anywhere to blame the decay on.
When the Democrats almost bankrupted the city in the mid-1970s, they had an easy out by blaming the GOP in Washington — that’s what the Daily News’ big bold 96-point “Ford to NY: Drop Dead” headline was all about. Seattle, San Francisco and all the other Democratic-run cities are likely the same way today, in that too many residents may know their city is turning into a hellhole, but will blame Donald Trump for their problems more than they’ll ever blame the local progressive pols who caused it.
This never gets old. Might need an update though.
There is also this, which I believe RB posted a while back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
They think fossil fuel consumption will kill us all, or at least women and children, as explained by whats her face Cortez. And banks are bad because . . . something. I wish they would protest gas stations and buildings that are warm in winter and utility companies. And airports. People using fossil fuels need to be publicly shamed.
Was there last year and we saw junkies shooting up behind our hotel, and walking towards Pike Place reminded me of the Times Square area in the 1970s.
If I lived there, I’d drink too . . .
This is why my wife and I are planning to leave Western Washington as soon as possible. We’re heading to North Carolina, with the hope that our two measly votes might help save that state from becoming subverted to “blue.”
BTW, @spin, you are always welcome to come visit us on the Albemarle Sound, and enjoy the Outer Banks, then tootle inland to the Appalachian Mountains. Maybe it’s not as geographically convenient as the Pacific Northwest, but North Carolina has it all.
Welcome y’all. We moved here from Wisconsin. We could use reinforcements against the NY, NJ, MA folks who move here and immediately say ” that’s not how we did things in …X…” and vote to remake the state they just fled from.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I wish sincerely that the Blue-state progressives would just stay where they’re at and leave the Red-states alone. Sadly, that’s not how it works. They move away from their Blue enclaves because they don’t like the costs or quality-of-life consequences of their politics. But then, they bring their Blue-state voting patterns with them. We’re moving to NC to get AWAY from Seattle, not to bring it with us!
Banks are sometimes bad. But a few years ago the Left discovered that they could use the banks to prevent companies the Left didn’t like (the first target has been the firearms industry) from doing business. So, the Left thinks they can use banks can be used to prevent the oil industry from doing business. And the way the Left gets banks to do what the Left wants (shut down the oil industry) is to protest and to threaten violence.
I thought Amazon hired people who were at least moderately smart. But apparently not. These protesting employees apparently aren’t smart enough to understand that the entire Amazon business depends on airplanes and trucks running on fossil fuel to deliver those millions of packages to customers all over the world. And the faster oil companies can drill for and extract the oil, the better to ensure Amazon can continue to deliver those packages. Do these employees think the packages can be delivered using the power of magical unicorns?
I can’t help you with the mountains and salt air, but you need to learn about good coffee.
I remember when people in Washington state had bumper stickers for the Californians that said ” Welcome to Washington, now go home”….
Get a load, and I use that term advisedly, to this new “bank” pitching millennials with SJW /fossil free nonsense…
How does snowflake think the coffee beans made it to the cafe? On a mule? Where does the energy to manufacture and charge her smart phone come from? Unicorn farts?