What Blue Wave?
The day after Americans freed themselves from a MAGA legislature in the most powerful repudiation of a party and its agenda since Watergate, and Washington State’s residents roundly rejected the effort to repeal the millionaire tax, our Democratic Governor publicly embraced the state’s tech oligarchs and froze all regulatory action for six months.
How are we supposed to process this?
Big tech bribed and sold us out to the murderous MAGA regime, and here locally has bankrolled efforts to make sure poor people pay way higher tax rates than rich people. And, since its open embrace of MAGA, big tech’s reputation has been, appropriately, in the tank, with only 20% of Americans saying they trust it. I’m sure its popularity is much lower in Washington State.
Specifically, companies like Trump-ballroom donor Microsoft provide tech support to the frequent kidnappers and torturers, and occasional murderers, at ICE. Until last year in the face of an employee rebellion, Microsoft also provided tech support for war crimes done by the Israeli military. Amazon ponied up perhaps the biggest known Trump bribe directly to the Trump family. T-Mobile partners with the Trump family in one of its big self-enrichment schemes.
Most sensible humans understand that none of the people that signed off on these decisions should be able to show their face in public, ever again.
But the day after we the people engaged in the closest thing to an actual regime change I’ve ever lived through - our Democratic Governor put Microsoft’s Chief Lobbyist and centimillionaire in a picture with himself and made this announcement.
About that “red tape”
Now look, I’m happy to admit that there are some duplicative, unhelpful, or unnecessarily onerous regulations. I could name a bunch, in fact. There’s also a lot of good regulations. (Bro, why do you think you can drink water out of a faucet or fly around the world without dying?). I also readily embrace the fact that a lot of processes need to be simplified.
But we also need a lot more regulation, fast in key areas like AI, data centers, social media, corporate involvement in politics, lobbying, and more. This freeze won’t do a damn bit of good for anyone, other than signal to Bob’s oligarchic donors that he’s on their side, not the people’s.
The same press release brags about having cut times to receive certain permits. Awesome. But that was accomplished without this kind of sycophantic vice-signaling or freezing of government’s capacity to deal with serious problems.
In any case, the fact that he prioritized this (to repair the relationship after a thing that big businesses thought was a gaffe) on the day after a genuinely historic statement from the American people that repudiated insider dealing and oligarchic corruption, as well as the profiteering off of harming Americans and people abroad - suggests something is very, very wrong with his priorities.
I seem to remember voting for mainstream Democrat Bob Ferguson over radical corporate centrist Democrat Mark Mullet in a primary a couple years ago. (There weren’t any viable progressives on the ballot). I even encouraged my readers to do so as well.
I also seem to remember Bob Ferguson winning that primary.
Why does it feel like we got Mark Mullet instead?
A. We build aircraft.
B. Green efforts are positive.
C. Devil in details, offsetting current stampede away from regulated progress.
I would minimize undue hysteria.