(Staff article from The KOMO NEWS on 12 June
2020.)
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, known as "CHAZ," has been in community control since Tuesday, when Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best decreased the officers' presence in the East Precinct to allow for peaceful protests.
India-born Seattle Councilwoman Kshama Sawant called the "CHAZ" movement a major victory. She said the area should be turned over permanently into community control, instead of back in the hands of the Seattle Police Department.
Sawant said she plans to create legislation to turn the East Precinct into a community center for restorative justice. The councilwoman wants to discuss the legislation with people involved in CHAZ, black community organizations, restorative justice, faith, anti-racist, renter orgns, land trusts, groups, labor unions that have a proven record of fighting racism.
Sawant helped support CHAZ Tuesday evening when she opened the doors to City Hall to allow hundreds of protesters inside. Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant says she did nothing wrong, and the bold move was intended to uplift the diverse voices of protesters.
Sawant used her keys to open the doors and allowed protesters to enter City Hall Tuesday night. Sawant says she did it to show City Hall belongs to the people and she wanted the diverse group of demonstrators to be heard in the halls of power.
More than 1,000 protesters spent an hour talking about defunding the Seattle Police Department, banning chemical weapon use by police, and railing on Mayor Jenny Durkan, demanding she step down immediately.
Even though social distancing was non-existent, everyone wore masks and the evening remained peaceful. Assistant Police Chief Deanna Nollette also says no laws were broken, so officers did not respond. “There was none warranted. There was no illegal activity. No one called for any response, says Nollette.
More than 1,000 protesters spent an hour talking about defunding the Seattle Police Department, banning chemical weapon use by police, and railing on Mayor Jenny Durkan, demanding she step down immediately.
"Our movement needs to urgently ensure East Precinct is not handed back to police, but is turned over permanently into community control. My office is bringing legislation to convert East Precinct into a community center for restorative justice.
"The movement, led by a multi-racial community of youth, won a major victory, forcing Seattle police & the big business-backed establishment to leave East Precinct. The movement was undaunted in the face of horrific violence from Mayor Durkan's police. Congratulations, solidarity!" tweeted Kshama Sawant on 12 June.
Kshama Sawant (born October 17, 1973) is an Indian-American politician and economist who serves on the Seattle City Council. She is a member of Socialist Alternative. A former software engineer, Sawant became an economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States from her native India.
She ran unsuccessfully for the Washington House of Representatives before winning her seat on the Seattle City Council. She was the first socialist to win a citywide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the school board in 1916.
Sawant was born to Vasundhara and H. T. Ramanujam in Pune, in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, but grew up in Mumbai. Her mother is a retired principal and her father, who was a civil engineer, was killed by a drunk driver when Sawant was 13.
After moving to the United States, she was shocked by the level of poverty and decided to abandon software engineering. She pursued studies in economics because of what she described as her own "questions of economic inequality". She entered the economics program at North Carolina State University where she earned a PhD. Her dissertation was titled Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy. Sawant moved to Seattle in 2006 and became a Socialist Alternative party member.
After moving to Seattle, she taught at Seattle University and University of Washington Tacoma and was an adjunct professor at Seattle Central College. She was also a visiting assistant professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Washington State House of Representatives campaign:
Sawant successfully sued the Washington secretary of state for the right to be listed as a Socialist Alternative member on the ballot. Sawant challenged incumbent House speaker Frank Chopp in the general election on November 6, 2012. She received 29% of the vote to Chopp's 70%.
Seattle City Council 2013 election:
After her unsuccessful run for the House, Sawant entered the race for Seattle City Council with a campaign organized by the Socialist Alternative. She won 35% of the vote in the August primary election, and advanced into the general election for the at-large council position 2 against incumbent Richard Conlin, making her the first socialist to advance to a general election in Seattle since 1991.
On November 15, 2013, Conlin conceded to Sawant when returns showed him down by 1,640 votes or approximately 1% of the vote. Sawant's victory made her the first socialist to win a citywide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the School Board in 1916 and the first socialist on the City Council since A. W. Piper, elected in 1877. She was sworn into office on January 6, 2014.
Sawant on $15/hr National Day of Action in 2015:
Sawant declared a victory in May 2014 after Seattle Mayor Ed Murray announced an increase in the minimum wage to $15, which was the cornerstone of her campaign for City Council, but she is not pleased that large corporations will be allowed a few years to phase in the wage hike. During a speech at the City Council on the day of the vote she said, "We did this. Workers did this. Today’s first major victory for 15 will inspire people all over the nation."
Several Democrats endorsed her candidacy. Celebrity endorsements included Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian. Sawant received no endorsements from sitting council members, while Mike O'Brien expressed support of the idea of third party candidates but explicitly declining to extend an endorsement of Sawant. The Stranger alt-weekly endorsed both her State House and her City Council candidacy.
Councilman Nick Licata also declined to endorse her but spoke positively of her campaign saying, "she has been able to craft a message that is understandable, simple and eschews most of the rhetoric", and when her eventual election victory seemed unlikely, he expressed his hope that Sawant would not "disappear after the election if she loses. She represents the poor, the immigrants, the refugees – the folks who are not in our City Council offices lobbying us."
Tenure:
Sawant called for the expansion of bus and light rail capacity with a millionaire's tax. She has also called for "transit justice", which would include free user fares; an increase in free transit services to the poor, especially communities in south Seattle; and restriction of transit options to communities that "can afford other options" until the foregoing measures are implemented.
Opposition to U.S. support of Israel:
During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Sawant urged the Seattle City Council to condemn both Israel's attacks on Gaza and Hamas's attacks on Israel, and called on President Obama and Congress to denounce the Israeli blockade of Gaza and to cut off all military assistance to Israel. Sawant's call to condemn Israel's actions prompted a response from Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer, calling for Sawant to retract the statement.
2015 election:
On April 7, 2015, journalist Chris Hedges endorsed Sawant. The core issues of Sawant's campaign were a successful minimum wage increase to $15/hour, a successful "millionaire's tax" or income tax on wealthy Seattleites, and an unsuccessful rent control program.
Back during the 2013 campaign, Sawant had said rent control is "something everyone supports, except real estate developers and people like Richard Conlin" and compared the legal fight for its implementation to same-sex marriage, and the legalization of marijuana in the United States, both of which she supports.
Her campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage has been credited for bringing the issue into the mainstream and attracting support for the policy from both Seattle former Mayors Michael McGinn and Ed Murray. In response to criticism that a $15 an hour minimum wage could hurt the economy, she said, "If making sure that workers get out of poverty would severely impact the economy, then maybe we don't need this economy."
She is also a supporter of expanding public transit and bikeways, ending corporate welfare, ending racial profiling, reducing taxes on small businesses and homeowners, protecting public sector unions from layoffs, living wage union jobs, and social services.
Her District 3 opponent Pamela Banks said Sawant's status as a national figure, her travel and fundraising outside Seattle, speaking in support of her Socialist Alternative party, and her devotion to issues outside the jurisdiction of her City Council office were a dereliction of her primary duty to serve her constituents, "You can't represent the people without doing the work of government."
Banks' campaign said that Sawant was out of touch with her constituents, too busy to meet with them, and that Sawant's strident political positions were divisive, alienating potential allies. The Seattle Times, in their endorsement of Banks, said the City Council "isn't a job for an ideologue" and that "the District 3 seat is more than a podium", that it "needs a collaborative leader to work with other districts and balance resources and investment."
Voters returned Sawant to the City Council and made her the first District 3 representative in November 2015, with 17,170 votes counted for Sawant and 13,427 for Banks, or 55.96% to 43.76%.
With incumbent O'Brien elected to District 6, and former Licata aide Lisa Herbold elected to District 1, they, along with Sawant, became the new progressive bloc of the Council, which became majority female with the addition of two other women, Debora Juarez and Lorena González. Sawant, as one of the four people of color on the new Council, also became part of a younger and more diverse Council, the first to seat members by district in more than 100 years.
2019 election (Against Amazon-backed candidate):
In 2019, Sawant ran against Egan Orion, a small business advocate and organizer of the city's annual LGBT pride festival. The 2019 Seattle City Council election gained national attention after Amazon spent an unprecedented $1.5 million on the campaign.
The company, which is the largest private employer in the city, contributed the funds to a political action committee operated by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce which backs candidates the chamber considers to be more "business-friendly". The PAC supported Sawant's opponent in the race.
Amazon became increasingly involved in city council politics after the passage of the Seattle head tax in 2018, which would have cost the company $11 million annually in order to fund public housing and homeless services. Shortly after enacting the tax, the city council voted 7-2 to repeal it, with Sawant being one of the two dissenters. On November 5, 2019, Sawant was elected to a third term on the Seattle City Council.
Involvement with Occupy:
Before running for office, Sawant received attention as an organizer in the local Occupy movement. She praised Occupy for putting "class," "capitalism," and "socialism" into the political debate. After Occupy Seattle protesters were removed from Westlake Park by order of Seattle Mayor Micheal McGinn,
Sawant helped bring them to the Capitol Hill campus of Seattle Central Community College, where they remained for two months. She joined with Occupy activists working with local organizations to resist home evictions and foreclosures, and was arrested with several Occupy activists including Dorli Rainey on July 31, 2012 for blocking King County Sheriff's deputies from evicting a man from his home.
The Sawant state campaign criticized the raiding of Occupy Wall Street activists' homes by the Seattle Police Department's SWAT team. She also advocated on LGBT, women's, and people of color issues, and opposed cuts to education and other social programs. She gave a teach-in course at an all-night course at Seattle Central Community College.
Sawant has advocated the nationalization of large Washington State corporations such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon and expressed a desire to see privately owned housing in "Millionaire's Row" in the Capitol Hill neighborhood turned into publicly owned shared housing complex saying, "When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned."
During an election victory rally for her City Council campaign, Sawant criticized Boeing for saying it would move jobs out of state if it could not get wage concessions and tax breaks. She called this "economic terrorism" and said in several speeches that if the company moved jobs out of state, the workers should take over its facilities and bring them into public ownership.
She has said they could be converted into multiple uses, such as production for mass transit. Sawant maintains that a socialist economy cannot exist in a single country and must be a global system just as capitalism today is a global system.
Environment, education, and immigration:
Sawant unsuccessfully opposed the construction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel calling it "environmentally destructive" and "something most people were against, most environmental groups were against".
She unsuccessfully opposed the Seattle Public Schools Measures of Academic Progress test in public schools, and supported the teachers' boycott of the standardized tests. Sawant has called for a revolt against student debt saying that "the laws of the rich are unenforceable if the working class refuses to obey those laws."
She is an active member of the American Federation of Teachers union and has been critical of American labor union leadership, saying the leadership, "...in the last 30 years has completely betrayed the working class. They are hand in glove with the Democratic Party, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into their campaigns, and they tell rank and file workers that you have to be happy with these crumbs..." Sawant believes the American Labor movement should break with the Democratic Party and run grassroots left-wing candidates.
Sawant advocates for a moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants from Seattle and granting unconditional citizenship for all persons currently in the United States without citizenship. She opposes the E-Verify system.
Political affiliations and ideological views:
Sawant is a member of the Socialist Alternative party, the United States section of the British-based Trotskyist international organization the International Socialist Alternative, formerly the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI).
(The bitch doesn't really understand the evil Socialism. Amazing how Americans allow some foreigner who just become US citizen to transform USA into the hellhole they just came out from!)
Sawant said she rejects working with either the Democratic or the Republican party and advocates abandoning the two-party system. She has called for "a movement to break the undemocratic power of big business and build a society that works for working people, not corporate profits—a democratic socialist society."
In 2013, Sawant urged other left-wing groups, including Greens and trade unions, "to use her campaign as a model to inspire a much broader movement." On February 20, 2019 she published an article in Socialist Alternative backing Bernie Sanders' run for the Democratic nomination. She spoke at a campaign rally for him in Tacoma.
Arrest and statements on civil disobedience:
On November 19, 2014, Sawant was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct at a $15 minimum wage protest in Seatac, Washington. She was released on $500 bail. On May 1, 2015, a SeaTac municipal court judge dismissed charges against her. The judge determined that testimony provided by police demonstrated that it was technically the police themselves, not protesters, who had blocked traffic.
In a February 2017 article in the socialist magazine Jacobin, Sawant called for a "wave of protests and strikes" on May Day, including "workplace actions as well a mass peaceful civil disobedience that shuts down highways, airports, and other key infrastructure."
Her statement was controversial: Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said that it was "unfortunate and perhaps even tragic for an elected official to encourage people to confront and engage in confrontations with the police department" and the Washington State Patrol called the writings "irresponsible" and "reckless."
Personal life: Kshama became a United States citizen in 2010. Sawant is married to Calvin Priest, who is also a Socialist Alternative organizer.
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