Seattle

Seattle, officially known as the Commonwealth of Seattle and Bellevue, is a nation located in North America and comprised of the cities of Seattle and Bellevue. Seattle is the nation's capital (and covers over three fourth of its land space), while Bellevue is a major economic and banking center. Seattle is a member of the Purple Defense Initiative, and is an active member of Pacific trading.

Seattle is bordered by the, and across the sound the other part of western Washington. To the east, south, and north they are bordered by other small broken up city-states.

Seattle has a large population of 2,506,000 souls, most of which speak English and are Christian. Seattle is a republic, formerly titled a Commonwealth, and is broken up into four regions: Northern Seattle, Broadway District, Mercer Island and Factoria, and Bellevue Proper. Seattle is led by a Governor, and has a Committee of Senators and a House of Representatives, and also varied departments and military districts.

Etymology
"Seattle" comes from "Sealth", also known as Chief Sealth of the Duwamish Tribe. Doc Maynard insisted that the city, formerly known as Duwamp, be named Seattle after the Indian Chief.

Founding
Archaeological excavations confirm that the Seattle area has been inhabited by humans for at least 4,000 years. By the time the first European settlers arrived in the area, the people (now called the Duwamish Tribe) occupied at least seventeen villages in the areas around Elliott Bay.

In 1851, a large party led by Luther Collins made a location on land at the mouth of the Duwamish River; they formally claimed it on September 14, 1851. Thirteen days later, members of the Collins Party on the way to their claim passed three scouts of the Denny Party, the group who would eventually found Seattle. Members of the Denny Party claimed land on Alki Point on September 28, 1851. The rest of the Denny Party set sail from Portland, Oregon and landed on Alki point during a rainstorm on November 13, 1851.

After a difficult winter, most of the Denny Party relocated across Elliott Bay and founded the village of "Dewamps" or "Duwamps" on the site of present day Pioneer Square. Charles Terry and John Low remained at the original landing location and established a village they initially called "New York", but renamed "Alki" in April 1853, from a Chinook word meaning, roughly, by and by or someday. New York-Alki and Duwamps competed for dominance for the next few years, but in time Alki was abandoned and its residents moved across the bay to join the rest of the settlers.

David Swinson ("Doc") Maynard, one of Duwamps's founders, was the primary advocate to rename the village "Seattle" after Chief Sealth of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. The term, "Seattle", appears on official Washington Territory papers dated May 23, 1853, when the first plats for the village were filed. In 1855, nominal land settlements were established. On January 14, 1865, the Legislature of Territorial Washington incorporated the Town of Seattle with a board of trustees managing the city. Two years later, after a petition was filed by most of the leading citizens, the Legislature disincorporated the town. The town remained a precinct of King County until late 1869 when a new petition was filed and the city was re-incorporated with a Mayor-council government.

Timber Town
Seattle has a history of boom and bust cycles, as is common to cities near areas of extensive natural and mineral resources. Seattle has risen several times economically, then gone into precipitous decline, but it has typically used those periods to rebuild solid infrastructure. The first such boom, covering the early years of the city, was fueled by the lumber industry. (During this period the road now known as Yesler Way was nicknamed "Skid Road", after the timber skidding down the hill to Henry Yesler's sawmill. This is considered a possible origin for the term which later entered the wider American vocabulary as Skid Row.) Like much of the American West, Seattle saw numerous conflicts between labor and management, as well as ethnic tensions that culminated in the anti-Chinese riots of 1885–1886. This violence was caused by unemployed whites who determined to drive the Chinese from Seattle (anti-Chinese riots also occurred in Tacoma). Martial law was declared, and federal troops were brought in to put down the disorder. Nevertheless, the economic success in the Seattle area was so great that when the Great Seattle fire of 1889 destroyed the central business district, a far grander city center rapidly emerged in its place. Finance company Washington Mutual, for example, was founded in the immediate wake of the fire. However, the Panic of 1893 hit Seattle hard.

Gold Rush, World War I, and the Great Depression
This boom was followed by the construction of a park system, designed by the Olmsted brothers' landscape architecture firm. The second and most dramatic boom and bust resulted from the Klondike Gold Rush, which ended the depression that had begun with the Panic of 1893; in a short time, Seattle became a major transportation center. On July 14, 1897, the S.S. Portland docked with its famed "ton of gold", and Seattle became the main transport and supply point for the miners in Alaska and the Yukon. Those working men only found lasting wealth in a few cases, however; it was Seattle's business of clothing the miners and feeding them salmon that panned out in the long run. Along with Seattle, other cities like Everett, Tacoma, Port Townsend, Bremerton, and Olympia, all within Puget Sound became competitors for exchange, rather than mother-lodes for extraction, of precious metals. The boom lasted well into the early part of the 20th century and funded many new Seattle companies and products. In 1907, 19-year-old James E. Casey borrowed $100 from a friend and founded the American Messenger Company (later UPS). Other Seattle companies founded during this period include Nordstrom and Eddie Bauer. The Gold Rush era culminated in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, which is largely responsible for the layout of today's University of Washington campus.

A shipbuilding boom in the early part of the 20th century became massive during World War I, making Seattle somewhat of a company town; the subsequent retrenchment led to the Seattle General Strike of 1919, the first general strike in the country. A 1912 city development plan by Virgil Bogue went largely unused. Seattle was mildly prosperous in the 1920s but was particularly hard hit in the Great Depression, experiencing some of the country's harshest labor strife in that era. Violence during the Maritime Strike of 1934 cost Seattle much of its maritime traffic, which was rerouted to the Port of Los Angeles.

Seattle was also the home base of impresario Alexander Pantages who, starting in 1902, opened a number of theaters in the city exhibiting vaudeville acts and silent movies. His activities soon expanded, and the thrifty Greek went on and became one of America's greatest theater and movie tycoons. Between Pantages and his rival John Considine, Seattle was for a while the western United States' vaudeville mecca. The several theaters Scottish-born, Seattle-based architect B. Marcus Priteca built for Pantages in Seattle have all been either demolished or converted to other uses, but many of their theaters survive in other cities of the USA, often retaining the Pantages name.

Post War Years
Seattle and Bellevue then became home to Microsoft, a huge technology dealer. This attracted T-Mobile, Amazon.com, AT&T, and Boston Scientific, most of which still have small headquarters in the country today. The local economy dipped after World War II, which had seen the dispersion of the numerous Japanese-American businessmen. The local economy rose again with manufacturing company Boeing's growing dominance in the airliner market. Seattle celebrated its restored prosperity and made a bid for world recognition with the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World's Fair. The local economy went into another major downturn in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many left the area to look for work elsewhere, and two local real estate agents put up a billboard reading "Will the last person leaving Seattle – Turn out the lights."

Still, Seattle remained the corporate headquarters of Boeing until 2001, when the company separated its headquarters from its major production facilities. Boeing finally chose to move its corporate headquarters to Chicago. The Seattle area is still home to Boeing's Renton narrow-body plant (where the 707, 720, 727, and 757 were assembled, and the 737 is assembled today) and Everett wide-body plant (assembly plant for the 747, 767, 777 and the upcoming 787 Dreamliner); the company's credit union for employees, BECU, remains based in the Seattle area, though it is now open to all residents of Washington.

Secession
As the United States began to crumble, along with its neighbors Canada and Mexico, most parts of the country began to secede and form small nations. Then-Mayor of Seattle, Mike McGinn, when approached by the Mayor of Bellevue, was distraught when he attempted to keep his city in the United States. The Mayor of Bellevue, being advised by fellow Bellevue residents and  secede and form a commonwealth, a name which had been coined by Reichert. Mike McGinn denied the request, and that action was followed by massive downtown strikes. Violence engulfed the city, and buildings were being broken into one by one, windows being smashed in the street and home invasions were common. The ten day period of anarchy resulted in McGinns resignation, which was shortly followed by the Commonwealth of Bellevue's annexation of Seattle. They sent peace keepers to the streets from their own police force, and the city was calmed down by the 22nd of December, 2009. The resulting elections took place on January 10, 2010, giving power to Seattleite Parker Ferguson as governor and naming McKenna and Reichert into the government.

Government
The Commonwealth of Seattle and Bellevue is a federation. Seattle’s constitution labels it a republican and a representative democracy, in which the majority rule is tempered by the minority rights, which is protected by law. The commonwealth has a system of checks and balances which is defined by the Constitution of the Commonwealth, which is the commonwealth’s supreme document of legal standing. In the Seattle federalist system, citizens are subject to three levels of government—federal, citywide, and local.

The federal government of Seattle is composed of three branches:


 * Legislative: the bicameral Parliament is made up of a Committee of Senators and the House of Representatives. They can make federal law, declare war on other nations, approve treaties and trade agreements, the power of the purse, and they have the power of impeachment, by which they can remove a sitting member of any government.
 * Executive: the Governor of the Commonwealth is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, who can veto legislative bills before they become law, and can appoint department secretaries and other officers, who administer and enforce the law of the federal government.
 * Judicial: the Judicial system of the Commonwealth is headed by the Supreme Court, and followed by Local Courts and the Court of Appeals. The judicial branch of the government is one of the smallest branches of the executive.

The House of Representatives has 100 members, each being elected from a district of 25,000 people. Each Representative serves a two year term. Districts are added and subtracted from the Commonwealth every five years, when the Census Department does their annual population census. The Committee of Senators has twelve senators, three being elected from each of the Commonwealth’s districts. Each senator serves a five year term and can only be elected four times. The Governor of the Commonwealth is elected by direct vote, and may not serve in his office for more than two terms, or eight years. The Supreme Court Justices are appointed by the Governor. There are 9 supreme court justices, and the Supreme Justice is appointed out of the group. Each member serves for life or until they retire.

The two cities have a very different system of governing, they elect a mayor through at-large voting and a city council through districts. Bellevue and Seattle both have the same type of government, with a mayor and a city council system in place.

Any law that is composed by the federal government is subject to void through the Supreme Court, if the law is deemed un-constitutional.

Parties, Ideologies, and politics
Seattle is a two-party system, those parties being the majority and minority. Before the commonwealth, Seattle was a sprawling democratic stronghold, but after it became a commonwealth refugees from and , all of whom had been misplaced by war, arrived in Seattle, making it a more center-right city than center-left. Since the 2010 elections, only one third party candidate— of the Liberal Democratic Party—was seated as a Representative.

Within the former United States culture, the Republican Party commonly identifies with center-right policies, or “conservative”, even though most Seattle Republicans are moderates at best. The Democrats are considered center-left, or “liberal”. Most of Bellevue and the Seattle suburbs identify as moderate Republicans, while west and downtown Seattle identify as liberals.

The winner of the 2010 gubernatorial elections was Republican Parker Ferguson of Seattle, and he is the 1st Governor of Seattle and Bellevue. The 2010 elections also saw the election of a slim majority in the Senate and House for Republicans, the Senate has 7 Republicans and 5 Democrats, while the House has 64 Republicans and 36 Democrats. The Seattle mayoral seat went to a Democrat and the Bellevue mayor spot went to a Republican, while both city councils went into the hands of Democrats.

Structure
Here is the governmental structure of the Seattle and Bellevue government.

Departments
The Departments of the Commonwealth basically run the day-to-day activites of the government. There are currently thirteen departments on the executive, while the number of ministries on the local level varies by area. All executive level departments are responsible for the overseeing the administration of local departments, and also to oversee the nation-wide adminsistration of the department's mission and aid.

Eligibility
In order to run for office, the constitution of Seattle requires you to be:


 * a citizen and resident of Seattle for at least ten years,
 * twenty five years old,
 * mentally sane, and have no criminal record in your life,
 * and a representative of a district.

A person running to be a Representative in the House or a Senator must live in Seattle or Bellevue (if senator), and live in their district if a Representative.