Seattle's Buck Law Firm hosted a victory celebration dinner at Tent City3 on November 13 for two dozen homeless men and women from SHARE (Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) following the announcement that the Lora Lake Apartments could be sold by the Port of Seattle to the King County Housing Authority if all involved parties agree to the deal. The 162 units may be available for low income housing as early as April 2008.

On July 19, nine members of SHARE were arrested after barricading themselves inside the apartments in an effort to save the affordable housing units from the wrecking ball. The City of Burien had planned to raze all 234 apartment units, claiming they would be too close to Sea-Tac's new third runway, though only 72 units were in the runway's buffer zone. Subsequently, the Buck Law Firm obtained an injunction to prevent the destruction of the apartments until a hearing could be held in the spring. On November 5 Burien's City Council voted 4-2 on a Memo of Understanding to sell the apartments. In exchange, Burien was promised legislative advocacy on several projects from State Rep. Dave Upthegrove (D-Des Moines) and House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-Seattle), $1 million from King County for affordable and senior housing at Burien's planned Transit Oriented Development, and county purchase of two parcels of land--one from the Port of Seattle, one now owned by Seattle City Light--to be developed in accordance with the city's plans for that area. --Peggy Hotes

RADICAL SEATTLE REMEMBERS

November 24, 1885: Anna Louise Strong

An undeniable icon in Seattle's radical history, as well as that of the nation, Anna Louise Strong was born on this date in the uncannily-named Friend, Nebraska. She acquired many distinctions during her long life as a social justice activist, among them a Ph.D. in philosophy earned at the age, still precocious today, of twenty-three.

Strong first arrived in Seattle in May 1914, when she brought a national touring exhibit she'd organized to advocate for child welfare to our city. She returned to live here a year later, and in 1916 she ran for, and was easily elected to, the Seattle School Board. When the board's bureaucracy stifled her wishes to make the city's public schools into venues for social service programs for underprivileged children, as well as neighborhood community centers, she soon turned to journalism as a source of personal and political fulfillment. Her experience covering the Everett Massacre for the New York Evening Post in November 1916 served as a catalyst for her transformation from a privileged young liberal to a passionate thirty-something radical.

From that experience, she became a prominent public advocate for workers' rights, especially during the 1919 Seattle General Strike. She was also a public opponent of US entry into World War I, a stance that led to the loss of her school board seat in a recall election organized by the all-male remainder of the board. In the 1920s, disappointed by the failures of the US labor movement, she turned her activist attentions to communism abroad, leading her to spend much of her later life in Russia and China in support of their respective revolutionary movements. In 1958, at age 72, she finally settled in China, where she remained until her death in March 1970.

--Jeff Stevens. Sources: Murray Morgan, "Skid Road" (Viking Press, 1951); Anna Louise Strong, "I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American" (H. Holt and Co., 1935; Seal Press, 1979); HistoryLink.org.

THE IRAN/Q CHRONICLES

News you may or may not have seen or read regarding America's most disastrous ridiculous war.

Stop if this sounds familiar: the White House has been accused of attempting to manipulate a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in order to buttress rationale for attacking a country that poses no threat to the United States. The country, in this case, is Iran rather than Iraq, and to their credit a lot of the professional analysts in the US intelligence community are trying to make sure they don't get away with it. The upshot has been a stalemate: IPS's Gareth Porter reports that the White House has been sitting on the Iran NIE for over a year while Cheney and the hawks in his office tried without success to excise dissenting views on the threat (or lack of it) posed by Iran's nuclear program. But now they've reached a compromise: the NIE will be released to Congress, with the dissenting views included, but none of the key findings will be made public. In other words, Cheney doesn't mind if the professionals disagree with him, so long as nobody finds out about it.

Another new war is quietly developing on the northern front: Turkish military helicopter gunships attacked several abandoned villages in northern Iraq last week, searching for Kurdish separatist rebels. After several weeks of cross-border shelling, it marked the first time Turkish forces have crossed the border.

Back in the war that's already being fought, the Democrats were played for chumps in Congress again last week in their alleged efforts to end the war in Iraq. The House passed 218-203 (not even close to the votes needed to override a veto) an "emergency" war funding bill that--gasp!--included a "goal" of a December 2008 withdrawal. The Republicans then promptly killed it in the Senate by using a filibuster--the very same parliamentary maneuver Democratic leaders could have, but didn't, use to block the nomination of the execrable Michael Mukasey as US Attorney General. Reportedly the Senate Dem leadership cut a deal to let Mukasey be approved in exchange for moving the pseudo-timeline provision in the war spending bill forward. It got killed anyway, and we're left with Mukasey as Attorney General and more Iraqis dying every day.

The Democrats are idiots.

Ever so helpfully, congressional Democrats released a study last week on the costs of the war they won't stop: $1.6 trillion so far, with the so-called "worst case scenario" over the next ten years reaching a staggering $3.5 trillion. Given that everything about this war so far has been worse than the previously suggested (in DC, anyway) "worst case scenario," this probably means we'll be paying for the war in another decade like some sub-Saharan kleptocracy, by hauling around wheelbarrows of our devalued currency to purchase bootlaces. And our grandkids won't soon forgive us.

There were lots of credulous media reports this month in the US as to how well the escalation "surge" is supposedly working, with US soldier deaths down and sectarian killings supposedly decreasing (though the latter, if true, is probably because most of the country's mixed towns and neighborhoods have already been ethnically cleansed). But then there was this little telling vignette out of Karbala Province, the scene of bloody sectarian Shiite fighting in August. Amidst much ceremony and self-congratulation, the US handed off security in Karbala to Iraqi forces last month. Alas, the provincial head of intelligence was arrested last week after a large cache of roadside bombs was found at his house. Winning hearts and minds...

Fun fact, via the New York Times: the Army's desertion rate is up 80 percent (nearly double) since 2003.

The FBI announced last week that 14 of the 17 Blackwater killings of Iraqi civilians in September--but not all 17--were "without cause." It's kind of a moot point, since the State Department already gave the "guards" (aka "mercenaries") (aka "murderers") immunity for their crimes. The Iraqi government (such as it is) would like to try the Blackwater employees, but they've already been safely shepherded to--where else?--the United States.

Why "where else"? Because a Senate subcommittee hearing last week aired the somewhat inconvenient truth that the United States has become a haven for war criminals. From a report by the invaluable McClatchey newspapers: "More than 1,000 people from 85 countries accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures." Is it any surprise, given that a) we trained, funded, and armed most of them, and b) our own government is run by war criminals? Oh, and while McClatchey reported the revelation, our supposed national newspapers of record, the New York Times and Washington Post, predictably ignored it. Can't go around ruining the days of powerful people by naming their crimes; war criminals have tender feelings. --Geov Parrish. For sources and links on any of these items, email editorial@eatthestate.org.