the-last-trot:

Kshama Sawant: I’m a Socialist Taking On Amazon and a Corporate Onslaught in Seattle

In this op-ed, Seattle city councilmember Kshama Sawant explains how socialism and people power are fighting back against corporate control of her city.

When I was first elected in 2013, I was the first socialist to hold office in Seattle in nearly a century. At the time, Senator Bernie Sanders was the only other well-known democratic socialist elected representative in the country.

In Seattle the political establishment was “apoplectic” at the prospect of having to work with an anti-capitalist in city hall who had spearheaded the fight for a $15 minimum wage at a time when the notion was considered radical and impossible.

My first week in office, two longtime establishment politicians came by to inform me they would not allow me to pass any legislation, much less the $15 minimum wage, and that city hall would continue to run “on their terms.”

But they were unable to stop our movement. Six months later, our grassroots 15 Now campaign, working alongside labor unions and community activists, had won a groundbreaking minimum wage ordinance that made Seattle the first major city to pass $15. From here, minimum wage victories spread to more than a dozen cities and several states.

Since then, the establishment still hasn’t had much luck stopping socialist politics. We’ve won historic renters rights laws, tens of millions for affordable housing, and replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day.

None of this was done by me alone. Far from it. What we have been able to win has been based on the power of grassroots struggle.

Now, six years since I was elected (and later reelected in 2015), Amazon executives, billionaire Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee (PAC), and a who’s who of corporate interests are spending unprecedented swaths of corporate cash against my campaign.

The PAC’s donors include $1.5 million from tax-averse Amazon, $235,000 from gentrifying developer Vulcan, tens of thousands from fossil fuel giants like Puget Sound Energy, and almost half a million from the real estate lobby. Scandalously, just three weeks before Election Day, Amazon wrote a $1 million check to the Chamber of Commerce PAC in what seems to many to be the most blatant effort yet to buy city hall.

Many of Amazon’s top executives, including members of the so-called S-Team who report directly to Jeff Bezos, appear to be taking revenge over our Amazon Tax by maxing out directly to my opponent. It’s not every day that an Amazon’s senior VP of global corporate affairs and former White House press secretary (Jay Carney) steps into a city council election.

Sometimes, your enemies give you the best compliments. Being a target of an unprecedented amount of corporate PAC money says a lot about how much the ruling class fears our movement. Seattle real estate lobbyist Jamie Durkan spelled out his view to local media in 2017, in the wake of our landmark move-in-fees law. He complained that Seattle council members “say all the right things in their offices, then they get out of the podium and it all goes south.” Durkan attributed the series of tenants-rights victories loathed by real estate interests to the strength of our movement — a movement he calls “Sawant’s army.”

I wear this is a badge of honor. Because under the bankrupt system of capitalism, in which the billionaires hold the reins of power, the strength of ordinary people has always been derived from collective organizing. As anti-slaverly abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

The elite are worried about the rise of socialist ideas. They recognize the powerful appeal of Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialist presidential campaign, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s meteoric rise to U.S. Congress. They read the same polls we do, showing a majority of Americans support Medicare for All, taxing the rich, free college education and eliminating student debt, and the Green New Deal — and that there is growing anger at today’s historic levels of inequality, with eight billionaire men owning as much wealth as the poorest 3,600,000,000 people.

As a socialist and a union member, I believe the best defense is a good offense.

Around the country, working-class people are moving into struggle with a growing wave of strike action and workplace organizing. Young people are protesting in the millions against impending and in-progress climate catastrophe. Increasingly, socialist ideas are being recognized as an alternative to capitalism.

In Seattle our grassroots election campaign is fighting for bold demands like a Green New Deal, universal rent control, and a massive expansion of social housing — paid for by taxing the rich.

Seattle and Washington State have long had the most regressive tax system in the country, where ordinary people carry the overwhelming burden of taxation, while corporations don’t pay their fair share. I was a proud fighter for the Amazon Tax in Seattle, and fought alongside working people who opposed its shameful repeal when billionaires like Bezos acted like mafia dons and threatened to move jobs out of Seattle if the tax was passed.

The stakes in the coming elections are high. Rents in Seattle are the worst in the nation outside of California, and have soared 69% since 2010. Seattle’s District Three, which I represent, is at the epicenter of the crisis. Most impacted are the historical and current communities of color in the Central District and the historically LGBTQ Capitol Hill neighborhood.

This is why Seattle’s elections this year are a key test. If the billionaires are successful in buying them, I have no doubt a similar dynamic will play out nationally to further push back against socialist politics. Other alliances of right-wingers and big business will likely step up to oppose new socialist elected officials, perhaps including democratic socialists like state legislators in Pennsylvania or New York’s Julia Salazar, Chicago’s “red wave” of aldermen, and even congresswomen AOC and Rashida Tlaib when they are up for reelection in 2020. With life under capitalism increasingly unbearable for working-class people, and climate catastrophe turning from looming to emergent, the ruling class is determined to try to stem the tide of struggle.

For youth and working people, we have no time to sit idle. There is simply too much at stake. Because while it’s true that powerful forces are arrayed against us, it’s equally true that a victory in Seattle this year could send a powerful message around the country about grassroots power and socialist ideas.

Let’s show once again that when we fight back, we can win — even when the richest man in the entire world goes all out against us.

https://www.kshamasawant.org/

https://www.socialistalternative.org/

https://www.socialistalternative.org/