t**g
发帖数: 784 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-s
By KIRK JOHNSON
SEATTLE — People are used to liberals running things around here. But
nobody reckoned with Kshama Sawant. Ms. Sawant, a 41-year-old economics
teacher and immigrant from India, took a left at liberal and then kept on
going — all the way to socialism.
When she takes a seat on Seattle’s nine-member City Council on Jan. 1,
representing the Socialist Alternative Party, she will become one of the few
elected socialists in the nation, a political brand most politicians run
from.
But Kshama Sawant (pronounced SHAH-mah sah-WANT) heartily embraces the label
. Ask her about almost any problem facing America today, and her answer will
probably include the “S” word as the best and most reasonable response.
Socialism is the path to real democracy, she says. Socialism protects the
environment. Socialism is the best hope for young people who have seen their
options crushed by the tide of low-wage, futureless jobs in the post-
recession economy.
“The take-home message for the left in general is that people are looking
for alternatives,” she said in an interview, discussing her victory over a
veteran Democrat by a margin of 3,100 votes of about 184,000 cast in a
citywide contest. “If you ask me as a socialist what workers deserve, they
deserve the value of what they produce.”
Progressive liberals — some of whom might look radical as well, at least to
conservatives — made inroads in other places on Election Day, notably in
New York City, where Bill de Blasio won the mayor’s race partly on his plan
to address the gulf between the “two New Yorks” of poverty and wealth.
Here in Seattle, Mayor-elect Ed Murray, a former state senator and a leader
of the state’s drive to allow same-sex marriage, promised support for an
idea that was central to Ms. Sawant’s campaign: a $15 minimum wage in the
city, matching the highest in the nation. He said in an interview that he
saw momentum in cities across the country in addressing income inequality.
“The commonality is the expression of a progressive impulse based on the
shrinking middle, as more people slip into poverty and as more wealth is
concentrated in fewer hands,” Mr. Murray said.
Seattle Republicans, mostly watching from the sidelines, also see a trend to
the left. They say a socialist on the City Council will probably fit right
in.
“I don’t think she differs that much from other Council members,” the
chairwoman of the King County Republican Party, Lori Sotelo, said of Ms.
Sawant.
Leftist critiques of capitalism have a long past in the Northwest,
historians said, from the Wobblies in lumber camps in the early 20th century
, as the Industrial Workers of the World were called, to Seattle’s general
strike of 1919 and the anarchist movement that still stirs occasionally now.
A socialist was elected mayor of Seattle as recently as 1922.
“She tapped into a growing discontent,” James N. Gregory, a professor of
history at the University of Washington, said of Ms. Sawant. “But she also
built off a framework of liberalism and economic liberalism that is pretty
widely, strongly based in Seattle.”
The spotlight on Ms. Sawant, as one of only a handful of self-avowed
socialists to be elected to a city council in a major American city in
decades, experts say, could be intense. Her party has supported Ralph Nader
for president, but its website also links to the writings of the Bolshevik
leader Leon Trotsky. It put up municipal candidates in Boston and
Minneapolis this year, though none won. The Socialist Party USA, an older
group, regularly fields candidates in state and federal races. Senator
Bernard Sanders of Vermont calls himself a socialist, though he was elected
as an independent.
“If she remains only an activist, she’ll be a one-shot wonder,” said the
Rev. Rich Lang, the pastor of University Temple United Methodist Church in
Seattle and a Sawant supporter. But if she moves too far toward the center,
“she’ll be shot down from the left as a compromiser,” he said. “There’s
tremendous pressure on her.”
So should an elected 21st-century socialist hark back to the old Marxist
passions of labor and capital, or more toward the welfare-state model of
market regulation and high taxes on the rich?
Ms. Sawant, during the interview, sometimes responded one way, sometimes
another.
Asked about Boeing, which is currently in a standoff with its biggest union
and is threatening to expand outside its historic home base in the Puget
Sound region, Ms. Sawant said the company was guilty of “economic terrorism
” by “holding not only Boeing workers but the entire state’s economy
hostage to their endless desire for profits.”
On the idea of a $15 minimum wage, though, she was more subtle.
Mr. Murray, the mayor-elect, recently announced the creation of a committee
of business executives, labor leaders and politicians, including Ms. Sawant,
that would develop recommendations for increasing the minimum wage and
report back to him early next year.
Asked if she might be co-opted by sitting on a committee alongside a
representative of the Chamber of Commerce, Ms. Sawant responded, “I think
that should always be a concern.”
“But if we’re serious about fighting for the interests of workers,” she
added, “that means engaging with people who don’t agree with me.”
The daughter of a schoolteacher and a civil engineer, Ms. Sawant said she
was seared by the disparities between the rich and the poor around Pune,
India, which is near Mumbai and where she grew up. But she was also shocked,
and radicalized, she said, by finding sharp income inequality in America
when she immigrated here in her 20s.
She drifted away from computer software engineering, her first love — she
once dreamed of being a “math geek,” she said — and began studying
economics, which she now teaches at Seattle Central Community College. She
lost her first run for public office two years ago, when she challenged a
Democrat for a state legislative seat. But she said she learned a valuable
lesson in targeting voters; this year, she aggressively, and successfully,
courted transgender people and other groups.
She holds no illusions, however, that a hidden bloc of socialist voters is
ready to mobilize for her re-election campaign in 2015. That election could
be more complicated for her, as Seattle voters this year changed the Council
’s composition from all citywide seats to geographic districts for most
members.
No one, not even Ms. Sawant, believes that a socialist-majority district
exists in Seattle. So she will try to draw support from the disgruntled
voters who helped elect her this year. And she is counting on them to feel
the same in 2015 as they did in 2013.
“They’re just fed up,” she said. | k****m
发帖数: 4670 | 2 印度裔也抓紧向政界挺进了
管他观点如何
反正人家发出声音了
相对于他们
我们腼腆了些 | t**g
发帖数: 784 | 3 这个是二十多岁来美的程序员
【在 k****m 的大作中提到】
: 印度裔也抓紧向政界挺进了
: 管他观点如何
: 反正人家发出声音了
: 相对于他们
: 我们腼腆了些
| o**********e
发帖数: 18403 | | k****m
发帖数: 4670 | 5 怪不得，在某些行业，总是压华人一头
多学人家的长处，不要老是说人家吃咖喱
这样才能好起来
就他们的抱团就很值得我们学习
【在 t**g 的大作中提到】
: 这个是二十多岁来美的程序员
|
|
