An Expert’s Read on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Jeff Hawn, London School of Economics – #157

  1. Jeff Hawn is a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics with an area of expertise in US/Russia relations. He previously joined us in October on episode 143 to talk about democratic erosion in Russia in the post-Soviet era. In light of events, we invited him back on the show to discuss the rapidly evolving situation in Ukraine.

Note: During the show, Jeff accidentally mixed up the cities of Kursk and Kharkiv, one of which is in Ukraine, the other is located in Russia 

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Bigger than a Rivalry: the Abuse Scandals in Portland Football – Sheba Rawson, 107IST – #156

The Portland Timbers are a men’s professional soccer team playing in Major League Soccer (MLS). The Portland Thorns are literally their sister club, a women’s team, playing in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Both teams are owned by millionaire Merritt Paulson, son of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and both teams have recently been rocked by scandals. In each incident, women were harmed by people employed by the team and in each the team was less than forthright with supporters and the public, arguably engaging in a cover-up. 

The teams’ most passionate fans are members of two supporters groups: the Timbers Army and Rose City Riveters. We brought on one of the leaders of those groups, Sheba Rawson, to talk about the scandals, the lack of transparency from team management, and how the club’s actions are souring the relationship with their most committed fans. 

Recommended Reading:

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Let’s Talk about Safe Seattle and their New Offspring Tacoma Safe  – #155

Tacoma Safe is a new group spearheaded by Angela Connoly. Connoly is a wealthy, socially conservative, activist, who previously led and funded an anti-LGBT effort called the Just Want Privacy Campaign. That campaign sought to restrict access to public bathrooms for transgender people, forcing them to use the restrooms of their sex at birth. 

She is now targeting our local homeless population, leading Tacoma Safe, an apparent copycat of Safe Seattle. Both groups think we can “cop homelessness away” and see increased law enforcement budgets and patrols as the only solutions to current public safety issues.

Safe Seattle was established in 2015, but came to prominence in 2017. Safe Seattle is an anti-homeless, rather than an anti-homelessness organization. It has been criticized by many in the Seattle community as an anti-homeless hate group and has encouraged increased sweeps and the harassment of homeless people, rather than addressing the causes of homelessness.   

Below are Tacoma Safe’s policy recommendations, they largely mirror Safe Seattle’s, and center mainly around policing, offering nothing to address the escalating housing issues in our region. In this episode, we discussed why this is all wrong-headed and ultimately dangerous.

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Why We Need Regional Housing Solutions – Rep. Jessica Bateman, Washington State Legislature, 22nd District – #154

Jessica Bateman is a former planning commissioner and former member of the Olympia City Council. She currently represents the cities of Olympia, Tumwater, and Lacey in the Washington State Legislature.

She joined us on the pod as a follow-up to our conversation last episode with Joe Tovar about “middle housing”. She talked in-depth about why we need regional solutions and why cities fighting against HB 1782 are being counter-productive.

She also makes a convincing plea to self-styled conservatives and libertarians about how the status-quo actually violates their property rights.

Housing is a deeply important issue to our community and one we’ve returned and returned to repeatedly on this show:

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The Missing Middle in Housing – Joseph Tovar, American Planning Association – #153

Joseph Tovar helped draft Washington State’s growth management act and has served as lead planner for cities across Western Washington. He has a theory: we’ve gotten good at building condos, we’ve always been good at building detached single-family housing, but to meet the coming population growth in the region we need to build what he calls “middle housing.” Middle housing includes duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. These homes put more people on a smaller footprint and will help us increase density, reduce road miles, and help create more housing in cities across Puget Sound.

Housing is a deeply important issue and one we’ve returned and returned to repeatedly on this show:

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The Congressional Agenda in 2022 — Rep. Derek Kilmer, 6th Congressional District — #152

The current Congress is our country’s 117th. They were elected in 2020 and will face voters in the midterms later this year. Today they are returning after their winter break to take up the many, many remaining unfinished items on the Biden Agenda.

If we’re being honest, a lot of people are really pissed at Congress right now. But in this conversation, Congressman Kilmer makes the case that the House has been rather busy. We talked through his impression of the 117th Congress so far, what the House has passed and is now languishing in the Senate, and the details of the massive Build Back Better Act.

We also discussed the Book of Boba Fett and listener questions from you.

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Previewing the 2022 Washington State Legislative Session — State Senator Yasmin Trudeau, 27th Legislative District — #151

A founding premise of the show is that political engagement in state and local politics is essential. It is because of this that each year we preview the upcoming state legislative session.

This week we are joined by newly appointed State Senator Yasmin Trudeau. We discussed the upcoming session, legislation she plans to introduce and support, some of the unfinished business around police accountability, some of the ways the state can nudge local governments on policy matters (like zoning), and her thoughts on the governor’s use of his emergency authority.

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The Bottom End of the Housing Market Has Been Destroyed — Will James, Special Projects Reporter, KNKX FM — #150

In arguably the most important piece of local journalism of 2021, Will James did a three part story on the displaced residents of the Merkle Hotel in Downtown Tacoma.

The Merkle was the last of its type: a residential hotel that provided no strings attached housing to very low income and disabled Tacomans. The conditions in the hotel were deplorable, a failure of municipal code enforcement, but it was a home with a door that locked. In 2018, a local developer seeking to renovate the Merkle Hotel pushed out the last remaining occupants.

Three years later, Will followed up on the people who were displaced and found nearly half were now dead. We brought him on to talk about this story, what it says about overall housing trends in our region, and his reporting on people experiencing homelessness in Washington.

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White Backlash Politics and Imagining a Post-Democratic Future — Dr. Will Horne, Editor of The Activist History Review — #149

Dr. Will Horne is a history professor at Villanova University. He is also the founder and editor of The Activist History Review, an online journal created in 2017 to contextualize US history in light of ongoing threats to our multiracial democracy.

Horn jumped on to talk about recent counter-majoritarian trends in US society and the threat to democracy in the US. I have deep respect for academics who do their thinking in public, rather than in academic journals that no one can access. Will is great and you should read his work.

From the TAHR website:

“The Review is intended to allow us and others like us the opportunity to use our knowledge of the past to help inform our decisions in the present. Our struggle is not optional. Failing to understand the forces that shape our world is a luxury of the powerful.

We launched this online journal on Inauguration Day, 2017, in the United States, a moment poised on the precipice of a forbidding uncertainty. As a nation, the United States cannot chart the way forward without reference to where it has already been. As a people, its citizens cannot make informed decisions without understanding a shared national past and the ways it has shaped the present. The events of the 2016 election remind us that forces often thought lost in the mists of a past best left forgotten are as present and as powerful as ever. The continued existence and success of those forces is the direct result of a pervasive and systemic refusal to come to terms with that past and its connections to this present.”

In other words, the authoritarian turn we are seeing in the US is a regression to the historical mean. Multiracial, pluralist democracy has really only been the norm in the US since 1965. We have to understand this history to navigate the present and build a better future.

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Understanding and Confronting Antisemitism Online and Off — Miri Cypers — Anti-Defamation League, NW Regional Director — #148

Our guest this week is Miri Cypers. She is the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Northwest. The ADL’s is a legacy civil rights organization whose mission is to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

Miri was also a prior guest at 2018’s Adult Civics Happy Hour, a conversation on local white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations operating in the Tacoma area.

This episode is timely. Over the weekend, members of Patriot Front, a fascist organization, held a demonstration in Washington DC. They marched on the National Mall, with an escort from local police. Patriot Front was created in 2017, in the aftermath of the Charlottesville Riots. They are a rebranded version of Vanguard America, a neo-Nazi organization.

Patriot Front have a local branch and are one of the plethora of local purveyors of antisemitism, online and offline.

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