The middle class IS steadily eroding; just ask the business world In Manhattan, the upscale clothing retailer Barneys will replace the bankrupt discounter Loehmann’s, whose Chelsea store closes in a few weeks. Across the country, Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants are struggling, while fine-dining chains like Capital Grille are thriving. And at General Electric,…
Forget the GDP; some states have found a better way to measure our progress GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, measures the market value of all goods produced within a country. It was first developed in the heart of the Great Depression, a context of dramatic declines in economic activity and scarce information about what was…
Is fracking about to arrive on your doorstep? For the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. “Fracking”—high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale—has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations…
Editor’s note This edition of Daily Clips will be the final one under the present format. The time and work involved in producing this feature is proving to be unsustainable for a strictly volunteer effort. We are as committed as we can be at KCDCC to informing Democrats of the news and issues of the…
King County Developers sue to make Seattle more developer-friendly A coalition of several developers filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court on January 15 that would make Seattle, already booming with construction cranes, more friendly for developers. Their issue? One of the city’s affordable-housing programs. Since 2006, the city has struck a deal with developers in…
(Daily Clips will not publish Wednesday, January 29, so that the editor can attend the January meeting of the King County Democratic Central Committee. See you there.) King County Sawant to take home $40,000 in pay out of her $117,000 City Council salary During her successful campaign for Seattle City Council, Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama…
King County Techies not the only ones moving to S. Lake Union Probably not since the days of the Klondike has part of Seattle felt as boomy as South Lake Union right now. The sidewalks are crammed with blue-badged programmers, working the great tech gold rush. It’s one of the hottest real-estate markets in the country, as…
King County City Light bills may grow 1.5%; Sawant: big business should pay Seattle City Light customers could face a 1.5 percent surcharge on their electricity bill by August because of the light mountain snowpack and low wholesale energy prices. For a typical homeowner paying about $60 a month for electricity, that’s an additional 90 cents…
King County Man who threatened Murray, Sawant is charged with hate crimes A Magnolia man accused of threatening Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and Councilwoman Kshama Sawant was charged with a host of offenses Wednesday, including cyberstalking and hate crimes. King County prosecutors contend Mitchell Munro Taylor threatened to kill Murray, the city’s first openly gay mayor, and…
(Server problems prevented publication of Daily Clips for Wednesday, January 22) King County Backers of $15 minimum wage turn out for MLK celebration Seattle’s burgeoning $15 minimum-wage movement turned out in droves Monday at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, peppering the crowd at Garfield High School with its red signs, T-shirts, and banners. King…