Monday, March 16, 2015

Chris Hedges — The Most Dangerous Woman in America

Well, I don't know if I'd say the most dangerous woman in America. That's probably Hillary in the long run and right now, Victoria Nuland. But Kshama Sawant is making waves. She is someone to watch. Certainly the TPTB are.


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, born in India, is a leader of the Socialist Alternative Party. She holds a doctorate in economics from North Carolina State University and before her election to the City Council was a professor at a community college. She knows that there will be no genuine reforms, let alone systemic change, without the building of radical mass movements and a viable third party. She is as familiar at Seattle street demonstrations, where she has been arrested, as she is in City Council hearings. If there is any hope left for the absurdist political theater that characterizes election campaigns it is in renegades such as Sawant..... 
Sawant believes that because of the presidency of Barack Obama -- who has served corporate power, expanded imperial wars, carried out a massive assault on civil liberties and failed to address the needs of the mounting numbers who are unemployed or underemployed -- many people, especially young people, are hungry for political alternatives to "the two big business parties."... 
Sawant emphasized that the process of building a radical alternative will be long and difficult. The obstacles the Establishment will throw up to prevent such a movement will be numerous, costly and unscrupulous.... 
A new party, she said, is essential if the corporate coup is to be reversed. And it needs to be formed soon.... 
The call for a national party is, in the end, a call to educate. It is a call to put forth a program that offers an alternative to global capitalism. And it is a call to empower the citizenry to break the corporate stranglehold to make this alternative possible.....
"We must convince people that we need an alternative and we must convince them about what that alternative is," Sawant said. "We need to stand up for the hundreds of millions of lives devastated by global capitalism. The abuses we saw in 2008 will happen over and over again as long as capitalism survives. And it is our job to break the cycle of capitalist exploitation of people and the ecosystem and save ourselves. This will only come about if we organize mass movements, if we build a radical political party and if we refuse to accept a system designed to subject the immense majority to misery so that a minority can pile up untold wealth."
Oh wait a minute. That does sound pretty dangerous. Keep on trucking' — and watch your back.

1 comment:

Peter Pan said...

There are people who will read that title as an invitation to paint a bullseye on Ms. Sawant.