Cascadia today: Taxing the wealthy in WA + Spokane Flock data exposed + inside Seattle's professional women's hockey

Good morning, and happy December! This is going to be a critical month for Cascadia Journal. I'm working towards exclusive, reported articles here as well as the daily news round-up and opinionated essays on Cascadia's resistance to the Trump regime. My goal is 100 paid subscribers before the end of the year. I can't do this newsletter without your financial support, so if you can, please sign up for a monthly subscription, which starts at $5 per month. Or, if you can't do that, please tell five friends about this newsletter. They can sign up for free here. Thanks!
--Andrew

Progressive WA legislators push wealth tax in 2026

It's clear to me that Cascadia needs to become economically independent from the feds, which have slashed funds for everything to health care to clean energy that benefit residents of Oregon and Washington. Last week, according to Washington State Standard, a group of progressive Democrats in the Washington state legislature, led by socialist Shaun Scott of Seattle, announced their plan to tax the wealthy in Washington state and generate $2 billion in revenue to help the state become resilient in the faces of the Trump administration cuts. This is welcome news – it would function similar to Seattle's Jump Start tax and place a 5 percent business tax companies with $7 million or more in payroll and on employees making more than $176,100 per year. Companies that Seattle's Jump Start would be exempt.

The bill, sponsored last year by senator Rebecca Saldana, is SB 5796, and will be reintroduced this year. If you live in Washington, please take a moment to find your legislators and call or email them in support of this bill, and tell them that this is not the time for austerity.

Cops accessed Spokane Flock data seeking to prosecute woman for abortion

RANGE Media has some fantastic and terrifying reporting on how a sheriff's deputy in Texas gained access to Flock license plate reader data from the Spokane County sheriff's office in the attempt to charge a woman for an alleged self-induced abortion. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office now claims that "national search" of that data by other law enforcement agencies has been turned off, but it's clear Flock readers are a deeply troubling threat to Cascadia residents' privacy. Washington legislators will consider a bill this session limiting the cameras' data collection – Washington currently does not regulate the readers.

National guard shooter lived in Bellingham

The tragic fatal shooting of National Guard troops in Washington DC had a local connection to Cascadia, as the alleged gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, lived in Bellingham. Cascadia Daily News has a report from his neighbors about the FBI raid on his home. Lakanwal allegedly worked with a CIA-backed unit during the US war in Afghanistan. In related news, Trump apparently still plans to deploy the Oregon National Guard in Portland, despite messages from the feds to governor Tina Kotek that some of the troops were being demobilized. Courts have found the deployment illegal and we all know it's simply an effort to bully Cascadia into complying with Trump's mass deportation efforts.

BC bitcoin data mines converted to AI

CBC reports that huge data centers in Prince George, British Columbia are being transitioned from the energy-intensive work of mining for bitcoin cryptocurrency to providing AI services to various companies who think we all need it. Now that 93 percent of the digital coins are already mined, Cascadia might take advantage of bitcoin as an alternative to the US dollar. But as to AI, here's a helpful chart:

Inside Seattle's professional women's hockey team

The Stranger has a great, detailed look inside Seattle's first professional women's hockey team, the Seattle Torrent. It's a great, gritty account of a scrappy, rough-around -the-edges league that is most different from the NHL in pay. The article notes that ONE Seattle Kraken player's annual salary could fund all the players in Professional Women’s Hockey League for TWO YEARS.

That $1.3 million season salary cap means that the $29,400,000 contract Seattle Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn signed in 2023 could fund the entire PWHL’s eight-team roster for two years and still have several million left over to add a few expansion teams.

Support women's sports, folks. Buy Seattle Torrent tickets here.

--Andrew