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Kshama Sawant

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Kshama Sawant
Seattle City Council, Position 2 (elect)
Personal details
BornPune, India[1]
Political partySocialist Alternative
SpouseVivek Sawant
Alma materNorth Carolina State University (Ph.D.), University of Mumbai (B.S.)

Kshama Sawant is a Seattle City Council member-elect.[2] A former software engineer from India, Sawant became a socialist activist and part-time economics professor in Seattle after emigrating to the United States. She held part-time teaching positions at Seattle Central Community College and Seattle University[3] and was a visiting assistant professor at Washington and Lee University.[4] Sawant ran unsuccessfully for the Washington State House of Representatives before winning a seat on the Seattle City Council, making Sawant the first socialist to win a city-wide election in Seattle since the radical progressive Anna Louise Strong was elected to the School Board in 1916.[2][5][6]

Personal life and education

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Sawant was born to Vasundhara and H. T. Ramanujam in Pune, India in 1973.[5] [7] Sawant's family were middle class members of the Brahmin caste.[8] Sawant's observations of poverty in her native country and her unhappiness with the Indian caste system helped shape her political views before her adoption of socialism.[1][9] Sawant grew up in Mumbai where she later studied computer science and graduated with a B.S from the University of Mumbai in 1994. Sawant married her husband Vivek, an engineer at Microsoft, and moved to the United States.[10] After moving to the United States Sawant decided to abandon the computer engineering field. She began to pursue study in economics due to what she described as her own, "questions of economic inequality."[11] 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.[5][12] Sawant moved to Seattle in 2006 and, after hearing a speech by a Socialist Alternative organizer, became a socialist. She became a United States citizen in 2010.[13] Sawant and her husband Vivek are separated.[14]

Candidacies

Washington State House of Representatives

Sawant was a candidate for the Socialist Alternative party for Position 1 in the 43rd District of the Washington House of Representatives, representing Seattle. Sawant advanced past the primaries with a write-in win for Position 2, while also advancing in Position 1 where she was on the ballot challenging Jamie Pedersen. Sawant successfully sued the Washington secretary of state for the right to list her party preference, Socialist Alternative, on the November ballot.[15] Sawant challenged incumbent house speaker Frank Chopp in the general election on November 6, 2012. Sawant received 29% of the vote, losing the race to Chopp's 70%.[16]

The Sawant campaign criticized the raiding of Occupy Wall Street activists' homes by the Seattle Police Department's SWAT team.[17][18] She also advocated on LGBT issues, women's issues, people of color issues and cuts to education and other social programs.[19] She gave a teach-in course at an all-night course at Seattle Central Community College.[20]

Seattle City Council

After losing her run for the House Sawant entered the race for Seattle City Council with a campaign organized by Socialist Alternative.[11] She won 35% of the vote in the August primary election, and advanced into the general election for the at-large council position 2[21] against incumbent Richard Conlin, making her the first socialist to advance to a general election in Seattle since 1991.[22] Conlin's fundraising was double that of Sawant's,[23] and on election night Sawant was down by 6,193 votes[2] but refused to concede.[24] Late ballots consistently favored Sawant[25] and on Novemeber 15, 2013, Conlin conceded to Sawant after late returns showed him down by 1,640 votes or approximately 1% of the vote.[2][26] After her victory Sawant cautioned supporters that, going forward, her opponents would attempt to marginalize her and create both confusion and division among her supporters.[27]

The core issues of Sawant's campaign were a minimum wage increase to US$15/hour, increased taxes on the wealthy, and rent control. Sawant 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.[11][28] 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 Mike McGinn and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray.[29]

Sawant received no endorsements from sitting Council members but councilor Mike O'Brien expressed support of the idea of third party candidates while explicitly declining to extend an endorsement of Sawant.[30] The Stranger alt-weekly endorsed both her State House and her City Council candidacy.[31] 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 wouldn't, "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.”[32] All of Seattle's major Democratic Party organizations endorsed Sawant's opponent Conlin, but several individuals within the city's dominant Democratic establishment endorsed her candidacy.[33] Celebrity endorsements included Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian.[34]

She said that, if elected, she would donate the portion of her salary as a City Council person which exceeds the average salary in Seattle.[35][36]

Political positions

Kshama Sawant is a a member of the Socialist Alternative party, the United States section of the British-based Trotskyist international organization the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI). She has referred to herself as a Marxist.[28][37]

Involvement with Occupy

Before running for office, Sawant received attention by participating in the local Occupy movement.[22] She praised Occupy for putting "class", "capitalism", and "socialism" into the political debate.[28] After Occupy Seattle protestors were removed from Westlake Park by order Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, Sawant helped bring them to the Capitol Hill campus of Seattle Central Community College, where they remained for two months.[11] Sawant has joined with other Occupy activists working with local organization to resist home evictions and foreclosures. She was arrested with several other Occupy activists including Dorli Rainey on July 31, 2012 for blocking King County Sheriff's Deputies from evicting a man from his home.[38]

2013 City Council campaign platform

Sawant's core campaign issues were raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, implementing rent control, and instituting a millionaire's tax.[22] She is also a supporter of single-payer health care, 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.[39] 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.[40]

Economic policies

Sawant called for large Seattle companies such as Starbucks and Amazon to be unionized in her most recent campaign.[39] In previous campaigns she has advocated the nationalization of large Washington State corporations such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon.com[41] and expressed a desire to see privately owned housing in "Millonaire's Row" in the Capitol Hill neighborhood turned into publically owned shared housing saying, "When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned.”[42] During an election victory rally for her City Council campaign Sawant criticized Boeing for saying it would move jobs out of state if it couldn't get wage concessions and tax breaks. She called this "economic terrorism" and claimed that if Boeing moved jobs that the facilities and workers should be brought into public ownership and converted into production for mass transit.[27][43]

Environment, education, and immigration

She 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".[11] On the topic of public transit Sawant has advocated for expanding both bus and light rail capacity with a millionaire's tax and advocated for what she calls "transit justice" which calls for eliminating user fares, increasing services to the poor, especially communities in south Seattle, and not providing any more transit options to communities who "can afford other options" until that happens.[11][28][39][41]

Sawant opposes the Measures of Academic Progress test[clarification needed] in public schools and has called for their boycott.[39] 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."[28] She is an active member of the American Federation of Teachers union[37] 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.[28]

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.[39][39][41][42]

Rejection of major political parties

Sawant said she rejects working within the Democratic and Republican two-party system, and says socialists should campaign as a third party:

The job of socialists is to point the way forward, and we are not shy about it. We invite people to debate with us on ideas of socialism. But we are not shy and we have been proven, resoundingly correct, that we should not be shy, because there is no excuse for being shy or reticent when you are talking about such serious issues as fighting against the enormous misery that capitalism unleashes on us, all over the world. So let's be clear about it, let's not be shy. This is not a time for modesty; this is a time for boldness and courage.[28]

Sawant has encouraged other left-wing groups, including Greens and trade unions, to use her campaign as a model to inspire a much broader movement in 2014:

We need 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.[44]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Chidanand Rajghatta. "Indian activist poised to be first ever elected socialist in US". Times of India.
  2. ^ a b c d Joel Connelly. "Socialist Sawant wins City Council seat". Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
  3. ^ Kshama Sawant. "Candidate Personal Financial Affairs Statement" (PDF). SeattleMet.
  4. ^ Lynsi Burton (November 13, 2013). "Sawant increases lead on Conlin in Seattle council race". Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
  5. ^ a b c Kshama Sawant. "Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy: An Empirical Study. (Graduate thesis)" (PDF). North Carolina State University.
  6. ^ Seattle elects first socialist City Council member. King5.com. Retrieved 15 November 2013.
  7. ^ "Shen, Sawant look to shake up city council from opposite sides: Two challengers in races for Seattle City Council would bring differing perspectives, but face uphill battles to unseat incumbents by Brian M. Rosenthal. The Seattle Times, October 11, 2013 [1]
  8. ^ "Extended interview: Kshama Sawant". King 5 News.
  9. ^ Josh Eidelson (November 18, 2013). "Capitalism is a "dirty word": America's new socialist council member talks to Salon".
  10. ^ Erica C. Barnett. "Isn't It Weird That...A weird thing we noticed about "99 percenter" and socialist city council candidate Kshama Sawant". SeattleMet.
  11. ^ a b c d e f "KEXP interview with Kshama Sawant". KEXP FM.
  12. ^ Robert L. Clark, "Financial Education and Retirement Savings", 3/27/2003, "[2]", 9/4/2012
  13. ^ Brian M. Rosenthal. "Richard Conlin making issue of Kshama Sawant's voter registration". Seattle Times.
  14. ^ "Shen, Sawant look to shake up city council from opposite sides: Two challengers in races for Seattle City Council would bring differing perspectives, but face uphill battles to unseat incumbents by Brian M. Rosenthal. The Seattle Times, October 11, 2013 [3]
  15. ^ Associated Press (August 30, 2012), Washington socialist candidate wins suit to state party preference, OregonLive.com, retrieved November 19, 2013
  16. ^ "Legislative District 43 : Rep Position 2". King County Elections. State Legislative Races Results, November 2012 General Election. November 28, 2012. Retrieved 2013-08-07.
  17. ^ Socialistalternative.org, 9/4/2012
  18. ^ Brandi Kruse, "Mynorthwest.com", 7/10/2012, "[4]", 9/4/2012
  19. ^ OlySocialistAlt, "OlyBlog.net", 2/14/12, "[5]", 9/4/12
  20. ^ Jseattle, "Capitol Hill Seattle Blog", 10/30/2011, "[6]", 9/4/2012
  21. ^ Seattle Voters' Guide – City Council Pos. 2
  22. ^ a b c Manuel Valdes (November 16, 2013). "Socialist Kshama Sawant wins Seattle City Council seat". Associated Press.
  23. ^ Cienna Madrid (November 7, 2013). "How Kshama Sawant Won Last Night's Election". The Stranger.
  24. ^ Joel Connelly. "McGinn concedes; other losers concede nothing". Seattle Post Intelligencer.
  25. ^ David Goldstein (November 13, 2013). "Kshama Sawant Pushes Ahead of Conlin". The Stranger.
  26. ^ Martha Kang and Manuel Valdes. "Conlin Concedes to Socialist Sawant in Seattle Council Race". KPLU.org.
  27. ^ a b Chris Legeros (November 18, 2013). "Longshot winner of Seattle City Council seat warns of struggle ahead". KIRO 7 News.
  28. ^ a b c d e f g "Kshama Sawant Speech at Vote Sawant election night party 11/6/2012". Socialist Alternative.
  29. ^ Ross Reynolds and David Hyde (November 18, 2013). "Kshama Sawant Is A Socialist But What Does That Even Mean?". KUOW.
  30. ^ Matt Driscoll. "Mike O'Brien Expected to Make 'Significant Statement' In Support of Sawant". Seattle Weekly.
  31. ^ Stranger Election Control Board (July 17, 2012). "Endorsements for the August 7 Primary Election". The Stranger. Vote or We'll Kill You. Retrieved 2013-08-07.
  32. ^ Isolde Raftery. "Why Socialist Kshama Sawant's Campaign Matters, Win Or Lose". KUOW-FM.
  33. ^ Deborah Wang. "Activist Democrats Support Socialist Candidate Kshama Sawant". KUOW-FM.
  34. ^ Matt Driscoll. "Sawant Lands Tom Morello/Serj Tankian 'Axis of Justice' Endorsement". Seattle Weekly.
  35. ^ Palash Ghosh. "Kshama Sawant: A Socialist, Indian-American Woman Running For Seattle City Council… And She May Win". International Business Times.
  36. ^ Young, Bob (August 6, 2013). "For Seattle council: Conlin against Sawant, O'Brien against Shen". Seattle Times. Retrieved 2013-08-07.
  37. ^ a b Socialist Alternative. "Speech: Relevance of Socialism in Seattle today". YouTube.
  38. ^ Brian M. Rosenthal (July 31, 2012). "Council hopeful Sawant arrested during anti-eviction protest". Seattle Times.
  39. ^ a b c d e f "Sawant Campaign Issues Page". votesawant.org.
  40. ^ Josh Eidelson (18 November 2013). "Capitalism is a "dirty word": America's new socialist council member talks to Salon". Salon. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  41. ^ a b c Kshama Sawant (July 27, 2012). "What Our Campaign Stands For". Wayback Machine.
  42. ^ a b Sarah Stuteville (October 30, 2012). "You might be a socialist if… An interview with Kshama Sawant". Seattle Globalist.
  43. ^ PTI (19 November , 2013). "Indian-origin Kshama Sawant elected to Seattle City Council". Times of India. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  44. ^ United States: Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant defeats Democrat incumbent. Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Retrieved 17 November 2013.

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