City Hall
Tweeting Obama and (Better) Tweeting the Seattle Chamber Retreat
We've got PubliCola reporter Chris Kissel covering the Obama speech at the U.W. from the press box. You can follow his tweets here. (Latest tweet: "Cue the Springsteen. #seaobama").
More exciting than Obama, we think, is the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce retreat at the Suncadia Resort in Cle Elum. As we noted in Fizz, it's not just for business types this year. They've invited along labor leaders, environmentalists, and social justice types for a two-day conference focused on finding some common ground.
We can't say we're there officially (a la Kissel at the President Obama event), but we are getting some good tweet fodder from our sources:
David Freiboth, head of the King County Labor Council, speaking on a panel this morning, said the greatest threat to Seattle's success was "our sense of uniqueness," explaining that Seattle's assumption that it's soooo unique and fantastic can get in the way of ensuring that we're so unique and fantastic.
Lisa Cohen, director of the Washington Global Health Alliance (big beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation) says Washington State is too far in the weeds. "We care more about process than outcome."
Ash Awad, a VP at McKinstry (the local retrofit business that became famous in 2008 when Obama cited them as an exemplar for the new economy) started out with a joke asking if the chamber could count the jobs created to host forums on the topic of green jobs as green jobs. Big laugh. He definitely needed to warm himself up to the audience because he then made the least popular comment of the morning saying we needed to pick winners and losers in business because that's "the reality."
Dr. Skip Rowland, Executive Director of the Urban Enterprise Center (the multicultural advocate wing of the chamber) addressed race, saying that when people ask him if racism is the hardest thing he faces, he tells them no, race is easy—the hardest thing is cronyism and nepotism. He then called on the chamber to pull together a conversation with the mayor, Boeing, small businesses, and the UEC to address nepotism and cronyism through multiculturalsim.
More exciting than Obama, we think, is the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce retreat at the Suncadia Resort in Cle Elum. As we noted in Fizz, it's not just for business types this year. They've invited along labor leaders, environmentalists, and social justice types for a two-day conference focused on finding some common ground.
We can't say we're there officially (a la Kissel at the President Obama event), but we are getting some good tweet fodder from our sources:
David Freiboth, head of the King County Labor Council, speaking on a panel this morning, said the greatest threat to Seattle's success was "our sense of uniqueness," explaining that Seattle's assumption that it's soooo unique and fantastic can get in the way of ensuring that we're so unique and fantastic.
Lisa Cohen, director of the Washington Global Health Alliance (big beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation) says Washington State is too far in the weeds. "We care more about process than outcome."
Ash Awad, a VP at McKinstry (the local retrofit business that became famous in 2008 when Obama cited them as an exemplar for the new economy) started out with a joke asking if the chamber could count the jobs created to host forums on the topic of green jobs as green jobs. Big laugh. He definitely needed to warm himself up to the audience because he then made the least popular comment of the morning saying we needed to pick winners and losers in business because that's "the reality."
Dr. Skip Rowland, Executive Director of the Urban Enterprise Center (the multicultural advocate wing of the chamber) addressed race, saying that when people ask him if racism is the hardest thing he faces, he tells them no, race is easy—the hardest thing is cronyism and nepotism. He then called on the chamber to pull together a conversation with the mayor, Boeing, small businesses, and the UEC to address nepotism and cronyism through multiculturalsim.
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