Admit It, You're Already a Socialist
Before Democrats Start Ridiculing Socialist Candidate Kshama Sawant, They Might Want to Look at Their Own Platform
PJ McQuade
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A specter is haunting Seattle—the specter of socialism. And no, we're not just talking about Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant, who is challenging Democratic house Speaker Frank Chopp in Seattle's ultraliberal 43rd Legislative District. Sure, some have ridiculed Sawant for running as a Socialist this November. But most people don't even know what socialism really is (particularly those Tea Partyers who toss the word at the president). A Stranger investigation has revealed that socialism is already everywhere in Seattle!
It is in our schools. It is in our churches. It is in our very homes. Even as you read these words, socialism is silently running every tiny detail of your modern technological life.
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Of course I'm talking about Seattle City Light, the 110-year-old publicly owned utility that has proven to be a triumph of the socialist ideal.
Socialist City Light?
As Merriam-Webster defines it, socialism is the "collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production." As such, City Light is socialism in spades.
Yes, through our ownership of City Light, the people of Seattle don't just own the means of production, we own the means to the means of production. Founded in 1902 by a seven-to-one citywide vote in order to break the monopoly of Seattle's overpriced private power supplier, City Light proved so popular, efficient, and successful that it eventually became a monopoly itself.
And our cheap power is not just an accident of geography. It took the central planning and collective resources of government—both City Light and the Bonneville Power Administration—to build the hydro infrastructure that generates the carbon-free electricity that powers our homes and industry. Unbeholden to shareholders and their demand for short-term profits, City Light's leaders and the elected officials built the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project in the 1920s and the Boundary Hydroelectric Project on the Pend Oreille River in the 1960s. "It was visionary," says City Light communications director Suzanne Hartman.
It was also socialism.
And this form of socialism is helping business.
"Electrical power represents the main energy cost for most businesses," writes the pro-business Washington Roundtable in its May report "Benchmarks for a Better Washington," a study that proudly notes that Washington boasts the lowest electricity rates in the nation.
So when Sawant's critics ridicule The Stranger for our straight-faced embrace of a candidate who outrageously advocates for the collective ownership of industry, they do so while pounding away on keyboards powered by Marxist ideology.
And while City Light may be the most extreme example of the mainstream application of socialist principles to everyday civic life, it is far from the only one. Indeed, outside of police, military, and foreign affairs, much of what our government does can be fairly described as socialist to some extent or another.
Medicare? Socialism.
Medicaid? Socialism.
Social Security? Hell, it's got the word "social" right in its goddamn name.
Obamacare? Not nearly as socialistic as it would've been (had the Democrats had the balls to implement a single-payer system or a public option). But when Republicans decry Obamacare as "socialized medicine," well, if by socialized medicine they mean dramatically expanding access to affordable health care through government subsidies, planning, and regulations, the GOPers kinda have a point.
And the list goes on. Unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, family and medical leave, food stamps, TANF, WIC, EITC, CHIP, and the rest of the acronyms that weave together our wide if fraying social safety net? Socialism all. And it's not just the poor, the elderly, and the disabled who benefit; commerce also enjoys the warm, nurturing embrace of the social welfare state. From farm subsidies to deposit insurance, from the Small Business Administration to the Export-Import Bank to the Federal fucking Reserve—these pro-business subsidies, programs, and agencies are all classic examples of the sort of centralized economic planning that is supposedly antithetical to free-market capitalism.
And then of course there was the Wall Street bailout. "Privatize the profits, socialize the risk." Well, no ideology is perfect.
Even public parks are socialist. Public libraries. Public schools! My god, what could be more contrary to the free-market pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps spirit that allegedly defines America than the government-imposed indoctrination of our children? And yet no less a champion of individual liberty than Thomas Jefferson was one of the earliest and most passionate advocates of a state-sponsored "system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest."
Even the Tea Party's favorite founding father had a socialist streak. Who knew?
For all the knee-jerk ridicule hurled at any candidate who dares to define herself as a "Socialist," there really isn't all that much of a difference between Sawant's socialist platform and the so-called progressive platform of the King County Democrats.
At a recent Stranger Election Control Board interview, we asked Sawant's opponent Chopp for his position on a number of the core issues listed on Sawant's campaign website, and there was hardly a policy disagreement between the two. Federal and state jobs programs to provide living-wage jobs? Check. No cuts to social services? Check. Raise the minimum wage? Check. Impose a moratorium on home foreclosures? That's one of Chopp's pet causes.
On issue after issue, from civil rights to immigration reform to public transit, the Democrat Chopp and the Socialist Sawant are in total agreement, at least in principle. It was only when we got to the final plank in Sawant's 14-point platform that Chopp definitively balked. It turns out that despite City Light's outstanding track record under collective ownership, Chopp doesn't support Sawant's advocacy for taking local economic mainstays like Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon "into public ownership under democratic workers' control to be run for public good, not private profit."
Go figure.
The unprecedented 12 percent of the vote Sawant garnered in the August primary as an undeclared write-in candidate doesn't augur a coming proletarian era or anything, and she's no more likely to seize the means of production from Jeff Bezos than the Republicans are to achieve their implied goal of executing abortion doctors and imprisoning their patients. The truth is, like all modern industrialized nations, we have a "mixed economy," a blend of free-market capitalism and the socialist policies needed to rein in and mitigate its abuses.
No, what Sawant brings to the political debate isn't the hope of victory, but a desperately needed dose of ideological balance in a city that laughs at the "socialist" label while powering its iPads and espresso machines off the purest incarnation of its philosophy. 
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I never got why americans had such a weird fear of that word...
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This is one of the most vacuous articles in Stranger history. I had this exact same revelation in ninth grade.
Let me know when she's got a party. All of those reforms you mention were established by parties. Individuals don't matter (except insofar as they work together in parties). Sawant is a nonentity; if she went to Olympia no one would ever even talk to her. Why would they?
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I figger we might get there in about 2400 AD.
Unless we live in Judge Dredd's America by then.
Of course there is the fact that "Last Train to Clarksville," is a romantic pean to the workers collective that formed railroad unions and built the socialistic AmTrak service. Which incidentally goes to that famous southern workers enclave in Tennessee where the off-to-war hero of the ballad implores his love, the leader of feminist Marxist anti-war group, to meet him for one last chance at love and pamphleting the local non-union mill.
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You wouldn't know fiscally responsible socialism if it hit you upside the head with an Apple iPhone 5 ...
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BOOM.
And yeah, I mean, DUH, I am already a socialist.
@9, telling other people what they believe is absolutely the single most infantile form of argumentation. Grow up. Moderate socialists - myself included - have absolutely no interest in government control of the vast majority of "everything," as you so helpfully and specifically describe your areas of concern. I mean, shit, did you even read the article? At all? I mean, you realize, just for example, the essential concept of a "minimum wage" entails there being wages in the first place, right?
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And yes, many other government programs might be deemed to be at least arguably socialistic.
But calling for public ownership of manufacturers like Boeing is a bad idea. I get that Goldy is playing a game here--"we're already quite socialistic, so why be scared of the word?"--but the reality is that big chunks of Sawant's platform are wrong-headed for not only practical purposes, but also in principle.
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Kindle this:
"extremely wealthy individual may purchase a very nice car, or perhaps even several cars. But he or she is not going to purchase 100 or 1000 automobiles. When income is too concentrated, it undermines the mass market."
https://kindle.amazon.com/work/the-light…
The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future
by Martin Ford
"Small, incremental steps" would have been progressively lowering the age of Medicare eligibility, expanding what it covers, and lowering the out-of-pockets, while broadening and increasing the taxes that support it. Doing that, we would soon cover everyone while spending no more at first, and less in the medium and long term. Under the Affordable Care Act, we're going to be spending >20% of GDP on health care (up from just shy of 18% now) and leaving 30 million completely uninsured* -- the same number that were uninsured when the Clintons proposed their plan two decades ago. Given the Act's complete lack of cost controls, I predict increases in premiums and out-of-pockets and cutbacks in subsidies that will have us right back at the 48.6 million uninsured we have now** in less than two decades.
America's for-profit health-care racket is skimming around $1 trillion a year in excess costs, compared to per-capita costs in the most expensive of our peer countries. Obamacare's goal was to protect and expand the skim. You don't seriously believe that Max Baucus took in over $3 million in declared contributions from the for-profit health sector to look after your interests, do you?
*Per the CBO's latest projections.
**Per the latest Census Report.
Hey I could dig this socialism thing.
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Snohomish actually took the plunge before we did. They separated from PSE in the late 40's.
If I'm not mistaken, Thurston County will vote in November to form their own PUD and cast aside the shackles of their Capitalistic foreign-owned energy provider. I doubt they'll have the courage or foresight to do that, especially as PSE has dusted off their old "the Socialists are coming to get you" argument, and it seems to be working.
Coincidentally, the person in the illustration looks strikingly similar to a former close friend of mine (we are enemies now).
Oh no, don't worry, I don't have anything against Michael Nesmith. I didn't even catch the resemblance. I just used to have a friend who looked like him I guess.
AAANNNnnnhhhhh!!
You erred, Goldstein, it's "privatize the profits, socialize the debt ! ! ! ***
("Risk" is far too nebulous, my son!)
You're equating corporate super-welfare with socialism; socialism is considerably higher on the evolutionary, ethical and intelligence scale.
Your mention of the Ex-Im Bank and the Small Business Administration are historically highly relevant, since they have both been severely compromised to benefit the super-rich and their multinationals.
When Eisenhower appointed Nelson Rockefeller to several positions in his administration, Rockefeller enacted radical changes to specific government agencies, quasi-government organizations and foreign aid programs to benefit the multinationals.
The Ex-Im Bank was originally managed by four senior executives and Nelson Rockefeller altered that to ONLY one CEO, destroying the checks-and-balances and allowing for easier control by the multinationals and Wall Street, which used the Ex-Im Bank and foreign aid programs to build all those foreign factories and production facilities they then offshored all those American jobs to, and created new ones at!
Fast forward to the present: missing $8.7 billion in Iraq, and over $17 billion in Afghanisan, and observe the involvement of the Ex-Im Bank!
The Small Business Administration (SBA): witness the congressional legislation passed several years ago, giving loan preference to those businesses which have already received investment from private equity firms and hedge funds --- small business indeed!!!!
Overall, though, it was a well-written article and Ms. Sawant should receive our full support and votes!
***During 2007 to 2009, US households lost an estimated $17 trillion in savings, assets and value. During that same period $17 trillion was pumped out to corporations, banks and private banks throughout the planet by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury ($16.1 trillion from the Fed/$.9 trillion from the TARP bailout funds and the affiliated management fees to BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon, et al., from the US Treasury).
When the Federal Reserve does that QEI, II plus (Quantitative Easing), they are socializing the debt by buying up the banks' toxic assets -- junk paper -- and allowing them to create newer junk paper; future toxic assets.
This, in turn, allows the banksters to do proprietary trading, that is, ultra-leveraging of the stock market, with Goldman Sachs leading the way with its ultra-high-frequency-trading --- it's all a mirage, charade or hologram, folks!
http://seattletimes.com/text/2016927802.…
But the workers are doing great. Well, not if they pay for electricity and City Light's constant rate increases. But otherwise, yes.
Onward Socialism, where it's not the results that count, it's how you feel about them.
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Why hasn't there been a public outcry about ending MetroTransit's downtown Free Zone?
It's unbelievably stupid!
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/end-o…
Maybve we should start an Unterrified Democrats Caucus to do it?
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which one is more flawed, system that has China for example, or the US with a trillion dollar deficit?
while you can't or don't want to let go of your ideology-which is a turbo capitalism,
and a panic of anything "socialistic" that you could incorporate into your system to make it better, your economy is....what? desintegrating?
the time of colonies is gone, there are no new continents to discover, or exploit, ...you are all on your own, and the time is ticking-
what I meant is the debt is getting bigger
https://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com…
Michael Nesmith executive-produced Repo Man (1984) and will always have a special place in my heart on that account.
Because of Chopp, thousands of people have housing, health care, opportunity grants, human rights, a union, and thousands of other large and small improvements - each won by cooperating with others, which governing requires that you do.
What will you leave behind but a constant trail of cynicism and undeserved self congratulations?
It's such a laughable hypocrisy, yet it's been allowed to propagate rampantly. We have such ridiculously high discrepancies between the suits and the actual workers of a company that it's no wonder the middle class is becoming a relic of the past.
Barack Obama gets this. Mitt Romney also gets this, but is hoping he can, with the help of the suits, buy enough votes and produce enough spin to get working folks to vote against their interests.
Let's hope that he doesn't succeed in his efforts.
Actually, Mr. Nesmith could still make a lot more movies if he wanted to. His mother invented and patented "Wite-Out" for Liquid Paper.
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@61 cattycat: Thanks for the update on Michael Nesmith. I'd forgotten that he and the late Davy Jones had the same birthday. I don't know---after avoiding Monkee reunions for so long, maybe Nesmith is finding peace?
McKenna is openly opposed to women's health issues--news flash!! HE'S not a woman!! What does he care??
McKenna has been proven not to know shit about basic math. How on Earth does this sudden;y make him a better choice for the economy of Washington State??
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