Monday, October 16, 2006
Frank Blethen made me switch
After reading the Seattle Times‘s vituperative and ugly Sunday endorsement of Dave Reichert in WA-08—really more a mean-spirited, falsehood-filled putdown of Darcy Burner, because there’s nothing positive to be said about Sheriff Hairspray—I called the newspaper’s circulation department this morning and switched over to the Post-Intelligencer.
It was a long time coming. The primary, perhaps only, reason I had stayed with the Times through all of Blethen’s previous stupid and self-serving editorials, through his distressingly selfish attacks on the federal and state estate taxes, comes down to a single word:
Well, that’s not enough any more. And it’s not only because one can easily read Gary Trudeau’s current strip online. The anti-Burner editorial, gratuitously insulting to the Democratic candidate in one of the nation’s closest and most closely-watched Congressional races, goes over the line, even for Frank Blethen.
When the customer service rep asked the reason for my decision to drop the Times, I told her simply that I was doing my part to help Blethen in his crusade to minimize the tax that his estate will pay when his death triggers the transfer of his assets to the next generation of his clan. I’m doing that by decreasing the amount of those assets, however slightly.
I should mention that the Blethens have made repealing the estate tax, a tax that affects very few estates other than their own, the central dogma of their collective existence. They’re part of a decades-long effort by a small number of extraordinarily rich families to convince the general populace that gifting those few multi-millionaire dynasties with, collectively, billions of dollars in transferred-but-untaxed assets is somehow the right thing for our nation. The Blethens’ role in this plutocratic cabal is especially egregious. Unlike most of the families—say, the Gallos of winery fame, Robert Johnson of BET, Dick DeVos of Amway, or the Wal-Mart Waltons—the Blethen family has enlisted its collection of daily and weekly newspapers as a house organ to market the deceptive anti-tax ad campaign they’re running.
To Frank Blethen, everything plays second-fiddle to his campaign against estate taxes. He and his corporation are helping to bankroll Initiative 920 in next month’s general election (more on that, perhaps, in a future post), and he’s put the arm on other newspaper owners in the state to get them to fork over bucks as well. The Wenatchee World, hardly a deep-pockets company, contributed $25,000(!) to Frank’s project. At the Times, every editorial opinion, every electoral endorsement, must first be held up to that mirror—which side of the issue is the candidate on? how will this policy recommendation aid in achieving the nirvana of non-taxed transfers? And Dave Reichert, or at least whoever it is in his office who can actually think a semi-coherent thought, knows how to play Blethen’s game. Killing the “death tax” is, of course, a tenet of GOP Congressional wingnuttery, but you can be damn sure that this wasn’t one of the issues where Sheriff Hairspray would “demonstrate his independence” (aka, be told to vote against the party line on a safely-won GOP bill). Nosiree, not on Frank Blethen’s one and only must-do issue.
So from here on I’m going to take the P-I instead of the Times. That won’t cut Frank Blethen’s nest egg by very much, but if a few thousand subscribers were to follow my example and become former subscribers, maybe we really could help Frank achieve his goal. Make his fortune small enough, and he won’t be susceptible to the estate tax. I’m sure he’d appreciate our help.
