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So-Called Locals: The Road to Corporate Taxation in Seattle


Over the past decade large capital flows --- frequently if not mostly of money laundering and speculation origin --- have poured into the Pacific Northwest, from Vancouver, Canada, to King County (Seattle), Washington, USA.

During the last mayoral election, candidate Cary Moon, along with Councilmember Lisa Herbold, raised the issue of external impacts on our local housing market. A logical critique, given reports by local realtors of a 70% unoccupied rate of recently purchased homes --- obviously not purchased to be lived in! The candidate for mayor who would later be elected, Jenny Durkan, along with other elected politicians, pushed back against any investigation into rampant real estate/housing speculation, citing that bugaboo of the political theater crowd, racism. (As Trump won the presidential election thanks to low voter turnout, an even lower voter turnout in Seattle --- at 37% of registered voters --- ensured Durkan's victory as mayor --- a sad day for the American electorate all around! Interestingly, they both won with around the same percentage of votes.)

When Gary Gensler was chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama Administration, he instigated a study of futures trades, long claimed to be done for "hedging purposes," and found that over 90% were pure speculation trades, only done for quick profit and market manipulation. (Price setting, which occurs in the futures markets)

Although so-called pundits at Fox may refer to Seattle as a "socialist hellhole" --- Seattle has long been run as the personal fiefdom of the rich through their influential Community Devleopment Roundtable (with tenant rights having been essentially missing over the past century).

http://archive.seattleweekly.c...

https://www.thestranger.com/se...

Along with that rampant money laundering/speculative capital flows into local real estate (also involving private equity/leveraged buyouts of local apartment buildings, etc.), many financial/economic forces worked together to drive up housing prices: the destruction of local affordable housing, with the replacement of high-end condos and rentals, while local jobs were displaced in the corporate rush to offshore labor, leading to an extreme tightening of the housing market, further aggravated by the recent surge and influx of new Amazon employees.

The employment picture was exacerbated by Amazon's (and Bezos') destruction, both locally and nationally, of thousands of book and record stores in its march to be the One World Retail Corporation! Add to that the cited 50% first-year turnover rate for new hires at Amazon (for whatever myriad reasons???) and consequently one observes a general rise in rental rates. (I.e., both supply and demand --- and turnover --- drive up the rates as landlords typically jack up rental rates each time an apartment becomes vacant.)

With Amazon's traditional history of tax avoidance,

https://itep.org/amazon-inc-pa...

it is no surprise of their strong push back against the recent city council measure.

As cities in Canada (and throughout the Americas and Europe) have raised taxes on foreign purchases of local real estate, it is almost logical that Seattle would follow a similar trajectory.

An excellent recent financial article in the Epoch Times further explains how the banking system drives up housing prices.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/...

Beginning in the first year of the 21st century, Seattle's local chamber of commerce, togethe

"At least half of that decline probably was due to an aging population."
Sorry, Kemosabe, but "probably" just don't cut it!!!!!!
You see, between 1997 to 2007, $23 trillion in securitized debt was sold, and between 2007 to 2009, American households lost $17 trillion in assets, while another $6 trillion was lost overseas - - which had purchased $6 trillion of that $23 trillion in securitized debt --- get it????
"Probably" not . . .
The tremendous upsurge in automating jobs out of existence began in 2012 [although admittedly it has been occurring for quite some time], while many were simply laid off as the new onslaught of jobs were offshored to India, China, Bangladesh, etc., and more and more foreign replacement workers were brought in.
"Probably" a major reason why Trump got elected is personified by a story from NPR this week, and a local Seattle Weekly story, both seeming to promote the use of foreign visa replacement workers from India.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/n...

http://www.seattleweekly.com/n... Foreign buyers market of US real estate last year: $92.2 billion.

You never really hear about him anymore...

http://archive.seattleweekly.c...

I'm sorry, but saying you "binged" it sounds slightly obscene...

Could be worse. Microsoft originally considered calling it "Bang".

...

I'm not kidding. I guess they liked "Bang" because it conveyed a sense of, uh, instant gratification. Specifically:

The company had several criteria in rebranding the search engine, he said. The company wanted a name that was one syllable and couldn't be misspelled and was as short as possible.

Webster said he initially came up with "Bang." The name had a few things going for it, he noted. "It's there, it's an exclamation point," he said. "It's the opposite of a question mark."

Short Fuse: Jorge Carrasco's Polarizing Tenure at the Top of City Light

I also see that the deal with brand.com has cost Jorge Fiasco a six figure pay raise: The Seattle Times: No pay raise for City Light CEO Jorge Carrasco

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray says he will not give City Light CEO Jorge Carrasco a pay raise, citing “judgment” issues, including a contract aimed partly at boosting Carrasco’s online image.

Murray made the comments at a City Hall news conference Wednesday.

The Seattle City Council had authorized a pay increase of up to $119,000 for Carrasco, who currently makes $245,000. Murray’s office previously had said he was considering raising Carrasco’s pay by $60,000.

According to a news report of the only similar incident I could find, the man with the knife was walking, and approached the officer with the knife in hand. Though the shooting was eventually determined to be "unjustified", under Washington law, the officer was free to kill if he believed the man to be a threat.

I'm sure in your case you'd think you were saving someone being brutally stabbed to death, but you're just as likely as the officer to have no idea what's really going on.

It is libel and defamation. That is what the judgement against her was for. http://www.scribd.com/doc/74870113/Crystal-Cox-Opinion http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/12/crystal_cox_oregon_blogger_isn.php

I had a friend that was a professional game tester, and he hated it. This article pretty much sums it up.

You think he'd be the go-to guy!

http://www.seattleweekly.com/1999-03-31/news/microsoft-s-new-brain-project/

The magic number from all my calculations is around 12%. That pretty much assumes that the market will not be good at all, and inflation will be somewhat high. If you bank 12% of income your working career (including employer matches), and you purchase a home on a 30-year mortgage before you're 35 (so your housing costs essentially disappear at retirement), you should be GOLDEN, living better than you did when you were working.

$100 or $200 a month isn't going to cut it. A person working in technology making $50K should be putting away about $500/month to hit the magic number (again, if your employer offers a 1:1 match, use it so you only need to put away $250 of your own).

If you're in the middle class and you 'could use the $250', you either need to get a side job or cut your expenses. Drop the cable TV, sell the $20K car and drive a used subcompact, or get a roommate, because you're only half a missed paycheck away from being chewed-up by this modern world.

I live in a state with high cost of living, high taxes, and I only make middle class money, but I plan on looking like this when I retire: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/monopoly%20man.jpg because I should have anywhere between $800k and $1.4M in the bank when I turn 65. It's possible to do, you just have to exhibit some very un-American fiscal discipline.

Combine this picture: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/sweaty_ballmer.jpeg

with something from a google image search for "chair throwing".

Strangely, that google image search results in several pictures of Steve Ballmer already. He really needs a PR (public relations, not Puerto Rican) minder.

Suggesting that passengers would stand up against plane hijackers is absurd. The American public at-large already crapped it's pants and bent over for the federal government when ordered to do so. Why would those same people not cower in fear when confronted directly with any other threat?

Of course American's are terrorized cowards. They will do anything to have someone tell them that it's going to be alright, that their investments are safe, that their house is worth more than it is, that social security will be around when they retire, and that the plane will land safely if they just do as they are told.

Want a direct example? Just look at these bus passengers do nothing as an old man is assaulted by some bully:

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/11/raymel_curry_sucker_punches_di.php

Using the search terms seattle+knife+native+police, Google turned up this: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/09/john_williams_native_american.php as its first result.

There's a pretty heavy recession going on, there wasn't one when Bill was at MS. I wonder if these two points are related.

This goes back to before there was a recession. Illustrated in pastel loveliness.

Mark Driver agrees.

Here's a nice analysis of Schmidt as well:

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/

Yep - and we can burn our official flag, too. Although nobody does it anymore - once it was declared legal the act lost all of its shock value.

People still do it. The news just doesn't have an orgasm about it.

http://blog.dailycal.org/photo/2009/09/14/flag-burning/
http://www.inlandnewstoday.com/story.php?s=10259
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2009/09/flag_burning_at_westlake.php

In Phoenix, you stand a good change of being the victim of a home invasion staged by Mexican Army Regulars [wordpress.com]...

Or Mexicans in Phoenix police drag [stratfor.com], fulfilling their contracts...

Or Phoenix Police whose chief and the Phoenix mayor just can't take much criticism

...

Or Minutemen posing as Border Patrol agents, in a home invasion that ended with a 9-year old girl and her father murdered in cold blood.

...but in a silently ultra-religious state like WA, it's no surprise that on of the largest local employers bows to the commands of the puppet masters.

err, really?

"Washington Is the Nation's Fourth Least-Religious State"

Did anyone notice? He linked his earlier Seattle Weekly article, in which he writes:

"And it has created more than 10,000 millionaires from stock options, including me. (I worked for Microsoft from 1991 to 1999 as a technology manager.)"

Ironic, eh? I wonder if he bothered to calculate the percentage of his own money which resulted from the shenanigans he accuses MS of, and gave it to the state?

He did (in the Seattle Weekly article) mention the more than a billion dollars the Gates Foundation has given to Pacific Northwest, and the many charitable donations MS has also made in the area. But he quickly moved on to more of the liberal 'evil M$ fatcats profit on the backs of the poor' rhetoric which Seattle Weekly readers love to read.

I wrote an article on this for the Seattle Weekly: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0504/050126_news _investing.php Gates and Microsoft are very aggressive in business and don't believe corporations should be regulated to prevent public harm except in the most eggregious cases. The problem is they don't seem to think predatory lending, stomping out the open source community or polluting third world countries is eggregious.

BlackBoxVoting is essentially "Bev Harris", and it's an organization concerned about the implications of electronic voting.

No point in getting into the goods and bads of electronic voting, because all we have here is somebody not associated with ES&S posting a copy of the ES&S software. Another slashdotter has posted at least three times in this discussion that this is all legit because he called and spoke with Bev Harris -- but Bev Harris is *not* from ES&S. Her validation does not make the software legal to obtain.

I found a very interesting little news article from two years ago: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0410/040310_news _blackbox.php

"Harris started surfing the Web. On Jan. 23, 2003, she hit the mother lode. On an unprotected Web site, she found 40,000 files of Diebold Election Systems' source code--the guts of software to run touch-screen voting machines. ... After a little soul searching, Harris downloaded the Diebold software files. It took 44 hours, and they filled seven CDs. By July 2003, after months of informal review and discussion among her friends and allies, Harris decided to allow Scoop, an "unfiltered" news Web site in New Zealand (www.scoop.co.nz/mason), to make the files available to anyone who wanted them. It wasn't a decision she made lightly."

Given her past actions (and without getting into the ethical or moral value of her crusade) I highly doubt that she has the legal right to distribute the software that she's making available today.

Last November, a full three years before her expected re-election bid, Prentice received $2,700 from David Barnett and his wife, Christine. Barnett is tribal chair of the Cowlitz tribe, an Indian nation that is slated to construct a new casino in La Center, which would easily cater to the casino-free Portland market. Prentice also got another $1,175 from the Washington Indian Gaming Commission, a lobbying group, and two lobbyists who represent Indian interests. Combined, the two sets of contributions are about 20 percent of the $22,000 she has raised so far for her 2008 race. Within four months of Prentice receiving those contributions, her online gambling ban bill raced through both houses of the Legislature with little opposition and no press attention. In 2004, Prentice got almost $9,000 from gambling interests.

Here's a very good article about the last time Bill and Melinda (the gates foundation) tried to remake a public school into a better place. Quite the learning experience with mixed results.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0529/050720_news _gateseducation.php

Costco is generally considered to be a "model company" in how it treats its employees and customers.

There's a couple of not-necessarily-unbiased articles about it (both seem to take a WALMART BAD! COSTCO GOOD! spin, which while I probably agree with it, is pretty definitely a spin):
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles_2004/costco_e mployee_benefits_walmart.html
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0450/041215_news _costco.php

Also, someone mentioned Costco sells items at their cost and only makes a profit on memberships. That does not appear to be accurate:

"Costco caps its profit margin on most products at 14% and allows itself slightly higher margins only on its Kirkland Signature store brand (a name derived from its previous headquarters in Kirkland) with a strict 15% profit limit."

(From the Costco page at Wikipedia, with a reference to a source article.)

This guy wants to quit his day to day responsibilities to give away his money to the less fortunate and all you guys want to do is bash him.

If he would pay his fair share of taxes, rather than laundering all of those copies of Windows through a Nevada shell corporation, then maybe, just maybe, there wouldn't be as many "less fortunate" people.

Don't forget, for every Bill Gates, there have to be many "less fortunate" to be exploited^W marketed to.

You are correct that they are adults (legally able to sign a contract). They are also teenagers.

I don't know if the OP meant it this way, but I took it as a comment on how US society (or at least the media) tries to excuse behavior. Legally, at 18 you're an adult. The term "teen", while technically referring to someone between the ages of 13 and 19, tends to imply "child". So, are you still a child at age 18? What about at age 25? As an example, the local news continually referred to both the shooter and victims of the recent rave killing here in Seattle as "kids". The shooter was 28. Some of his victims were 21, 22, 26, and 32. Are those "kids"?

Maybe it's a sign of our aging baby boomer population, who see anybody younger than them as kids. Maybe it's because of our economic climate that keeps "kids" in university until 25 or 26 (and then only graduating with a Bachelor's degree, not even a Master's or better). Maybe it's our "take no responsibility" society that wants to blame anything but the person (thus the person is a "kid" who didn't know any better, rather than an adult). Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

• Darrow, Barbara. "Microsoft, The New IBM." CRN 7 Jun 2004
• Goldberg, Aaron. "Microsoft Hits Downslope." eWeek 19 May 2003
• Kanellos, Michael. "The Rise and Fall of the Wintel Empire." ZDNet 5 Aug 2004
• Reifman, Jeff. "Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow." Seattle Weekly 2 Jun 2004

• Darrow, Barbara. "Microsoft, The New IBM." CRN 7 Jun 2004
• Goldberg, Aaron. "Microsoft Hits Downslope." eWeek 19 May 2003
• Kanellos, Michael. "The Rise and Fall of the Wintel Empire." ZDNet 5 Aug 2004
• Reifman, Jeff. "Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow." Seattle Weekly 2 Jun 2004

Since they started dumping money into political campaigns and hired their own lobbying group about ten years ago Microsoft has become one of the most generous contributors to politicians in the country:


LXer: How Microsoft wastes its money on anything but software
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/55497/index.h tml


Election 2004: How to Excel in DC
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0438/040922_news _microsoft.php


A Bug in Windows GOP (Seattle Weekly)
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0522/050601_news _microsoft.php


Microsoft And The G.O.P.: Antitrust Insurance?
http://www.time.com/time/reports/gatesbook/lobbyin g.html


Microsoft's lobbying efforts eclipse Enron
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-835267.html


Redmond | Feature Article: Following Microsoft's Money
http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?Editori alsID=440


News Alert 9/6/01: Microsoft
http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/alertv6_26.as p


Commentary: It's Back to Charm School for Microsoft
http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_45/b3654183.ht m


"The Think Tank As Flack" by David Callahan
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/991 1.callahan.think.html

Since they started dumping money into political campaigns and hired their own lobbying group about ten years ago Microsoft has become one of the most generous contributors to politicians in the country:


LXer: How Microsoft wastes its money on anything but software
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/55497/index.h tml


Election 2004: How to Excel in DC
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0438/040922_news _microsoft.php


A Bug in Windows GOP (Seattle Weekly)
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0522/050601_news _microsoft.php


Microsoft And The G.O.P.: Antitrust Insurance?
http://www.time.com/time/reports/gatesbook/lobbyin g.html


Microsoft's lobbying efforts eclipse Enron
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-835267.html


Redmond | Feature Article: Following Microsoft's Money
http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?Editori alsID=440


News Alert 9/6/01: Microsoft
http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/alertv6_26.as p


Commentary: It's Back to Charm School for Microsoft
http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_45/b3654183.ht m


"The Think Tank As Flack" by David Callahan
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/991 1.callahan.think.html

Okay, so I only read the headline...

While it appears to be politics as usual, this particular branch has an interesting history at The Discovery Institute". It is targeting science, and not just individual theories that conflict with docterine but all of science and the scientific process.

ever prove their theories they "discovered" during a brainstorming session?

My neighbor (one of the guys in the article who's web-savvy) wants to know ...

Don't you wish you could get away with paying taxes like Microsoft doesn't?

I'd take the 1.6 billion. I'm sure I could find a use for it, like jump starting rail mass transit in my city. Even 1.6 billion wouldn't be enough for that. That's something that irks me a little bit, the super rich Microsoft executive are always complaining about traffic in Seattle, so they want the government to pay for a better 520 bridge and other improvements. If it is so important to them, why don't they chip in a few billion between them instead of pushing it on tax payers? The bridge is fairly cheap compared to what some of them have, so it would barely be missed and then their employees and them would be happier.

Same thing for Paul Allen. He wants the city to build a street car in a neighborhood with a bunch of his property. He will be paying for about $10 million of the price, but his land value is estimated to go up over $20 million because of the improvements. His investment company is one of the main proponents of the street car, so it is only fair if he pays for the majority of the cost.

Reminds me of a story in Seattle wherein an admittedly mean old man living at a subsidized housing place for the elderly would post unpleasant things about where he lived on his (kooky) website. It went to court, and the judge ordered him to alter his site. The man eventually wound up in jail after infuriating the judge (by doing things like hosting content in the Netherlands), and was even put in solitary confinement for a bit.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0222/nc-ande rson2.shtml http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/74939_freespee ch17.shtml
His wacky tinfoil hat website: http://www.contracabal.org/#

The Mc Donalds in downtown Seattle has been doing this for years. Except they play music inside and outside at high volume.

"The sidewalk outside the McDonald's at Third Avenue and Pike Street has always been a popular spot to loiter, and six years ago, its owner, Rick Barrett, decided to do something about it. First, he took the lead of several other cities and began piping MUZAK out onto the corner. The kids stayed put, so Barrett switched tactics by blasting country music, a racially acute bit of target marketing that garnered noise complaints from the neighbors."

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0545/051109_ music_24hours.php

Funny thing was. it worked! all the teens went down to the Public Market to hang out. Barrett reported record profits that month.

unh ... isn't this Bev Harris?

I haven't enough porn films to verify whether this is a porn star, but I rather think I can tell gender.

(Yeah, I know it's a Simpson's quote, but you can still modify these things to reflect the immediate situation.)

The reason is that Miers isn't going to be bringing her personal insights to her hearing of the case, so they'd actually have to decide against Microsoft.

"Altruism was rarely the motivating factor in establishing the large independent foundations - ones like Pew, Ford, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson that every NPR listener can name. The Ford Foundation was established to help keep the company in the family without paying estate taxes. John D. MacArthur, founder of Bankers Life and Casualty Company, never made any significant charitable contributions during his lifetime, but left his estate of nearly $1 billion to a foundation rather than to his estranged children. One of the trusts founded by the Sun Oil heirs, the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, was established to "acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy... and with the values of a free market...to point out the false promises of Socialism...." In one cozy office the staff of the Pew Charitable Trusts now give out $21 million a year of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust both to right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the National Right to Work gang - and to crunchy groups like the Tides Foundation and the Pesticide Action Network, under terms of a different Pew heir's will."

Too bad Andy Stephenson wasn't around for this...

"Voter verified paper ballot" was his mantra to the end.

RIP

Mattel also owns the shade of pink associated with Barbie.

Microsoft is strictly amateur hour.

This is hardly true. Even years ago, a CCIA report (submitted to the court during the MS antitrust case -- admittedly CCIA is/was a critic of MS) called Microsoft's political influence "in many ways unprecedented in modern political history." One Seattle based study/article placed Microsoft as the number three corporate political donor. Nor can one discount the effect of policy groups, think tanks, and industry groups financed by the corporation but not accounted for in lobbying and political contributions.

There have been a number of shareholder efforts attempting to get MS to either prohibit unregulated soft money contributions or publish policies for such spending. Here for example.

Anyway, this is a tiny bit of the info that's out there. Just possibly, Microsoft is more than an amateur in political influence.

Hopefully it will prevent corporations from opening bogus operations in states that don't tax. For example, the state of Washington is loving millions of dollars in taxes from Microsoft because Microsoft has opened entities in Nevada which doesn't tax them. If you want to read how Microsoft is screwing the state of Washington, look here: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0439/040929_ news_microsoft.php

During the budget debate, it was, "Don't raise taxes during a recession."

During the gubernatorial campaign, it was, "Twenty years of Democratic control of Olympia has ruined the state's economy--it's time for

a change."

I tend to agree, the last Dem Governor really screwed things up, but I'm willing to see how Gregoire works out.

/truly non-partisan

The Seattle Weekly appears to agree.

It's good that MS gives a lot of money to Washington, because they've screwed the state out of millions, maybe even billions, more. Please read this article for more details.

I am not suggesting that we have "The Seattle Software Party". I don't think that polluting the Port of Seattle would accomplish anything in this case. I am simply suggesting that you should each give your law makers a history lesson to remind them of the consequences of government caving to big business and not protecting the people.