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Another Dispatch from Seattle… You Add the Adjective
Two very interesting stories today about what goes on in the “Emerald City” by Elliott Bay. It seems that, while a subset of Seattle residents was occupying a portion of the Capitol Hill neighborhood (CHOP, or if you prefer CHAZ), the City of Seattle was running some training for their employees. Specifically, their White employees, on how to move forward, and respond correctly in the “new normal” of the Black Lives Matter (and White lives don’t) City. Chris Rufo, of City Journal, through an Open Records request, reported on some of the handouts at those training sessions. Here are some quotes from the training materials. Emphasis mine.
According to his screenshots, the Office of Civil Rights hosted a two-and-a-half-hour “Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.”
In the email invitation to the event, the office asked “city employees who identify as white to join this training to learn, reflect, challenge ourselves, and build skills and relationships that help us show up more fully as allies and accomplices for racial justice.”
“We’ll examine our complicity in the system of white supremacy – how we internalize and reinforce it – and begin to cultivate practices that enable us to interrupt racism in ways to be accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) folks within our community,” the email invitation said.
Diversity trainers instructed White employees in “practicing self-talk that affirms our complicity in racism.”
“Racism is not our fault but we are responsible,” one bullet point declared.
In order to be considered “accomplices,” White employees must give up “comfort,” “guaranteed physical safety,” “expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,” “control over other people and over the land,” and “relationships with some other white people.”
White employees were also urged to give up “niceties from neighbors and colleagues,” “the certainty of your job,” and “accepting jobs and promotions when we are not qualified, including racial equity jobs.”
Grovel, you will, before your BIPOC Masters.
In other news, the City Council of Seattle has passed a Payroll Tax, that hits large companies who pay their employees’ high salaries. Here are some quotes from a KOMO article about said payroll tax (the State of Washington Constitution does not allow income taxes unless they affect all citizens equally, no graduated taxes allowed):
In a written statement, [Council member Theresa] Mosqueda said the vote was the right approach for the city. “Seattle residents have made it clear – now is not the time for government austerity or divisiveness. Investing in communities of color, small businesses, and community health leads to a more robust and resilient economy. We are in the midst of a health and economic crisis that even a strong economy like Seattle may not be able to recover from quickly,” she said in the statement. “We have over a million people statewide who have filed for unemployment this year; countless businesses shuttered temporarily and some potentially forever; our immigrant and refugee families have been left out of federal aid, and our homeless neighbors continue to suffer in our streets in the midst of a global pandemic,” Mosqueda said. “JumpStart Seattle will do just that – jump start our recovery with a relief plan that centers workers, small businesses and our most vulnerable community members.”
And from the article itself:
The proposal by Mosqueda would apply only to Seattle-based companies that have payrolls of more than $7 million per year while also having employees who earn $150,000 per year or more. That tax rate would be on a sliding scale from 0.7% to 2.4% with the highest rate based on salaries of $500,000 per year or more.
The company would pay the tax, not the employee.
This is the second Tax that the City of Seattle has passed, where the actual Payer of the Tax is described as not the Citizen, but the Company. The first one was the “sweetened beverage tax” that was intended for the Distributors to pay, and not be passed along to the purchasers of the sweetened beverages. Yeah, right. Within a week, there were pictures of the signs going up at all stores selling sweetened beverages, describing the added cost of the tax to the beverage buyer.
Does anyone expect the companies that employ those high earners won’t pass that payroll tax on to the employee as a deduction, or the customer as a higher price for their services? Anyone? Anyone?
There is no limit to the ignorance of Leftists of basic economic principles. Well, none of the council critters will be subject to that payroll tax, as there’s little possibility that any of them would ever consider employment with any private-sector employer when they retire from the City government. Well, maybe Starbucks will increase the prices of their drinks, and Amazon might increase the price of a Prime membership. Or, maybe, both large, local companies will do what Amazon has already started doing. Moving their offices and employees out of Seattle.
Published in Economics
Maybe they’ll adopt some as pets. Sheesh, could the students at your old high school be any more patronizing?
I used to. Now I identify as Klingon.
Do “BIPOC folks” (folks?) even want white people being “accountable” to them? If so, what does that mean?
So, white people must wander around all day telling themselves that they’re bad?
I thought making people feel “unsafe” was the cardinal sin of the woke. And we need to dump some of our friends. Is that based on some sort of quota system? Whoops, I just went over my white friend limit, Mom. You’ve got to go.
They want to control their white employees’ interactions with their neighbors? I’m certain this employee is outta here.
If you think your life is hard, imagine the trials and travails of a Human Relations representative at FaceBook. This stuff is all addition and subtraction, they are deep into transcendental equations on this stuff.
They are ignorant, but not that ignorant. Their hope is that they can lie about the purpose of the tax and that the voters will be too stupid to see through the lie. Sadly, the leftist politicians – heck, politicians of all stripes – are often correct about the BS they can get voters to swallow.
The reason for special taxes on things like sugar and tobacco are to discourage consumption. How could it possibly discourage consumption if the taxes didn’t increase the cost for the end user? The politicians obviously know that the price of the goods will go up, but they don’t want to look like the bad guys so they claim that an increased retail price wasn’t the goal and it’s the fault of those greedy producers and merchants.
Cook County tried to do both. Sugary drinks are bad; we’re raising the taxes on those. We have all kinds of plans for the increased revenues.
Except there were no increased revenues. People simply bought their weekly supply of pop outside of the county. Sales plummeted. Tax receipts plummeted even more, because in addition to no one paying the sugar tax, the accompanying sales taxes went to other counties too, who raked it all in with giggles. The taxpayers (the citizens) knew exactly what was going on.
The tax was repealed after about six weeks.