What the heck is a “special purpose municipal corporation,” and how did one ever go from being a corporation to becoming a fiefdom? This is a question that I ask myself whenever I run out of paper to doodle on. Nevertheless, it’s an important question that can’t be ignored, given that wages and job protections depend on it.
A corporation is a corporation, right? Say I work for a corporation. That means I work for an organization that has an executive director, some sort of board of directors and a charter and a mission, and BS like that.
In fact I do!
Real Change is just such a corporation, and I work for Real Change for a few bucks and some real change just about 10 hours a week.
The director can take half of everything I own, by law the best half. Including but not limited to my best pig, best goat and best cow.
So, therefore, when I marry, he gets to have sex with my wife before I do.
If by accident Timothy “M’lord” Harris kills my first-born by running him or her over with his gold-plated luxury Honda Civic or Ford Fiesta or whatever he took from the serfs this week, he may deign to pay me a farthing, or not, in compensation — depending on his royal mood.
If I went to a state judge and demanded more restitution, the judge would of course dismiss my claim as absurd because Mr. Harris is the king of Real Change, and Real Change is a corporation and a law unto itself, right?
That’s stupid. Nobody says corporations are able to get away with creating medieval feudal states.
So how has the Port of Seattle been able to get away with defying the municipal law of SeaTac?
What has been going on here?
You should know the State Supreme Court said last week that the businesses operating at Sea-Tac Airport have to obey the city of SeaTac’s minimum wage law. They even have to give workers back pay to January 2014.
So the question I’m asking is not, does the Port of Seattle get to ignore the law of the municipalities within which it functions, which we now agree, 5-4, it doesn’t. Rather, I’m asking, how did the Port of Seattle ever come to ignore such laws in the first place? I’m saying this was, and always ever was, a fantastical idea.
The Port of Seattle is not Vatican City. It is not its own country. We know that. How, I’m asking, did we ever not know that?
Is there something wrong with the human brain that it can’t make elementary computations of political power and claims to power and justifications of power?
Compare this to the act of attempting to throw a ball at a basket from halfway to the back of the court. If I did so, odds are very high that before the ball was a quarter of its way along its arc, 95 percent of all human observers could utter the words “no way — that won’t even hit the rim” and they’d be certain of being right.
But for some reason, human beings can’t seem to make the same kind of instant, accurate assessments of power relationships. Why not?
An agency claims that a law meant to raise the wages of all who work within a municipality doesn’t touch them.
They claim immunity from it. Isn’t it utterly obvious that if they really had such immunity they would also have to compensate for it by allowing other means for its workers to effect such changes? They can’t be immune to the extent of being free from all pressures whatsoever to raise wages. If they were, they would be beyond politics and beyond laws.
They would have license, in that case, to pretty much disregard all state laws and behave as if they were an occupying army within city limits.
Some ideas scream at you, “Please tell me how wrong I am.”