Amazon spent a fortune to block a socialist candidate's re-election to Seattle city council; she won anyway

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/10/socialist-alternative.html

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Hell yeah! I don’t live in Seattle any more - the combination of rising rents and my increasingly strong seasonal depression made me leave this year - but I was always delighted to get to cast a vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY. And I tossed Sawant a small donation when I heard how much Amazon was throwing into these races.

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Awesome.

If only the mainstream (corporate) press would cover it.

Also: someday . . . :crossed_fingers:

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We should be entering a phase soon where inordinate corporate backing becomes a liability for a candidate. We can see that dynamic already with Biden.

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The result is encouraging but rare. The existence of billionaires is not compatible with democracy. Billionaires should not exist, and currently the billionaires have an opportunity to decide how this will come about. Choose wisely, guys – if we end up building guillotines, it’s going to be bad for everyone.

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Google continues to satisfy, fuck them.

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The election has been a shit show thanks to the ignorant red majority in much of the state. It’s good to hear at least something positive happened.

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Since the person on the bill looks very little like Tulsi Gabbard and the name “Sawant” is on the bill, I strangely concluded that it was a reference to the subject of the article, not some other female politician.

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We should, but we won’t until Citizens United is repealed.

In theory, I don’t necessarily have an issue with someone being extremely wealthy - it’s the means with which they do it and the power that they are able to exert once they have it. As I noted above, one of the worst things to ever happen in our country in recent memory was the passage of Citizens United.

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Especially Amazon & Facebook. In the current atmosphere, any candidate associated with them looks bad.

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It’s only a majority if things like apple orchards and corn fields get counted as voters.

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Ummm, as already noted, that ain’t Tulsi, but also, do you always assume ignorance of the people you converse with? Or is it because she’s a woman? Or what? Why would you think @milliefink hasn’t done “cursory reading” on Tulsi Gabbard?

Also, I suggest doing a deeper dive in your own reading on Gabbard, she is most certainly not part of the problem, regardless her faults.

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All darker-skinned women look the same?

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So “head tax” dose not carry the same racist baggage outside Canada I assume?

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Why $15? Why not replace a racist on a $20?

(Or is it a reference to something more subtly Seattle that eludes me?)

Isn’t $15 the living wage?

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It’s the minimum wage here in Seattle.

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This is what I’m talking about when I say the corporate media ignores the kind of class-based fighting that Sawant succeeds at. Even the smarter than average BBS bears know little about Sawant’s part in establishing a $15/hour minimum wage in Seattle – and maybe in other places too.

A good overview from 2016 (even though I suppose The NYer is corporate media too).

Seattle’s minimum wage is now rising toward fifteen dollars per hour (for some workers, it is already at thirteen dollars), and during this election season the Fight for 15 has suddenly become not a fringe movement but a mainstream one. Bernie Sanders has made the fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage a central part of his platform. Hillary Clinton now supports a twelve-dollar-per-hour federal minimum wage, and has said she is in favor of cities and states going further. In December, Rahm Emanuel, the embattled Chicago mayor, signed a law that will push the minimum wage to thirteen dollars per hour by 2019. And yesterday, California lawmakers passed a measure that will lift the state’s minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour by 2022. Hours later, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators announced that they had reached a deal to get to fifteen dollars an hour, and by as soon as 2018 in New York City. . . . Trace an arc from Sawant’s election through the present Presidential campaign to the negotiations in California, and you have a picture of the Democratic Party, hurrying to the left.

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Egan Orion.

Sounds like a character from 3rd-rate '50s sci-fi pulp.

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But their symbol has hammer and sickle, rising sun and open book?