The Most Dangerous Woman in America
SEATTLE — Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bete noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.
The corporate powers, from Seattle's mayor to the Chamber of Commerce and the area's Democratic Party, are determined she be defeated, and these local corporate elites have the national elites behind them. This will be one of the most important elections in the country this year. It will pit a socialist, who refuses all corporate donations — not that she would get many — and who has fearlessly championed the rights of working-men and -women, rights that are being eviscerated by the corporate machine. The elites cannot let the Sawants of the world proliferate. Corporate power is throwing everything at its disposal — including sponsorship of a rival woman candidate of color — into this election in the city's 3rd District.
Sawant's fight is our own.
Tip of the Hat to Contributing Editor Berto Jongman.
Phi Beta Iota: Chris Hedges is a genuius but this is a misleading piece. For all the good that is represented in this individual at this time and place, she is a rounding error — a bump on the ass of the Democratic-Republican bird with two wings that keeps delivering the same crap. Electoral Reform — all in — in 2015 — is the real fight, and also the only fight we can win.
See Also:
OPEN POWER Electoral Reform Home Page