Comments

1

OK, but, like...

| $200 - unemployed Michigander
| $2,362 - people "from universities"
| $400 - Minneapolis public schools
| $480 - Chicago public schools
| $240 - LA coffee shop workers
| $400 - Burlington, MA sandwich maker
| $250 - MN DoT
| $200 - Minneapolis Metro Transit
| $5,277 - assorted tech sector employees
+ __
| $9809

...so with > $83,000 in out-of-city spending, that leaves > $73,000 in outsider spending still unaccounted for-- or about 88 out of every 100 dollars from outside Seattle.

Why no link to the disclosure doc? That seems like a bit of an oversight, let's fix that:

http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/elections/poplist_v2.aspx?cid=635&listtype=contributors

Looks like quite a lot of "ordinary working folk" are donating the $500 max to a political campaign in a city they don't live in?

2

@1, I think "ordinary working folk" was spelled "обычный рабочий народ" when the Sawant campaign provided their response to these questions.

3

We don't (theoretically) allow Russian funding in our national races, why should we allow Minnesotan funding in Seattle races? I thought Minnesotans were deep into minding their own damn business.

4

Sawant may not be the worst Seattle councilperson (although, then again, has she done anything productive since $15/hr, or does she get to coast on that for the time being?) but she sure is the shadiest.

5

@4

The 15/hr campaign was (and is, across the US) a program initiated and organized by independent workers and the SEIU (consistently) plus various other groups (locally), but not Socialist Alternative, nor Sawant-- they carried signs in the strikes, but they didn't contribute to organizing or funding the campaign.

They're welcome on the bandwagon, to be sure, but it ain't their wagon

6

OMFG -- SOCIALISM?!!!

"Signs that socialism is gaining popularity in the United States are popping up everywhere. Publications such as The Economist, The Guardian and The New York Times have all been saying for some time that American millennials are more interested in socialism than capitalism these days.

Then there was Bernie Sanders’ unexpected popularity among young voters during the 2016 primaries, with polls showing that the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist 'won more votes from the under-30 crowd than Trump and Clinton combined.'

Add to this the rise of figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and polls showing that Democrats are increasingly embracing socialism, and it’s clear the term no longer holds the misguided Cold War stigma it did for decades.

Now a new Harris poll conducted for the show 'Axios on HBO' reveals 40% of Americans would take socialism over capitalism. Perhaps more significantly, the poll finds a whopping 55% of women between the ages of 18 and 54 would prefer to live under socialism. Given a lack of policies in capitalist America that benefit or protect women, these numbers should be unsurprising."

Democratic Socialism LOVES Women.
Does Unbridled Capitalism?

Yeah. Right.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/most-american-women-prefer-socialism-to-capitalism-poll/

7

@6

Meanwhile, in a nation somewhere outside the Twitter-left containment field, Bernie Sanders is polling about half the votes of someone called "Joe Biden."

Is he a socialist, too?

8

@6 Having actually grown up under actual Socialism, and witnessing its collapse, I'd wager 98% of those Americans in support of socialism define it as "free shit, now that I'm not living at home".

As opposed to, say, only having only one state-run airline etc. etc.

9

@7 Most of Bernie's white supporters (and they are whiter than white) seem to have misunderstood the difference between actually being poor and simply being unsuccessful.

Locally, look no further than Erica Barnett (failed journalist) , Spek (failed rapper), Brett Hamill (failed comedian) to witness the phenomenon. But hey, they have Twitter accounts!

10

Her average donations are roughly the same as the other candidates and she comes in second in per donor contribution. Being better at getting small donations doesn't make a candidate shady.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/06/12/40456394/where-is-kshama-sawants-campaign-money-coming-from-her-competition-wants-to-know

11

@10 learn math, and then logic, then how to use the world wide web, before coming back.

12

@9 What's your definition of success then? I would really love to read it.

13

@10

38% of Sawant's total contributed dollars come from donors contributing the $500 maximum:

http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/elections/charts.aspx?cycle=2019&n1=contributions&n2=size&n3=candidates&n4=council&n5=campaign635&n6=amount#aChartTop

No other candidate in her district comes close; the nearest is Logan Bowers at 12%. For all council candidates in total, only 7% of donated dollars are from $500 contributions. The only other candidate for council anywhere in the city with a higher proportion of max contributions than Sawant -- the only one anywhere close to her -- is Ari Hoffman, with 46% of total dollars coming from max $500 donations.

And if you know who Ari Hoffman is, that ought to put Sawant's contribution size distribution into sharp perspective.

14

Ah, the glorious International Communist Worker's movement returns to Seattle at last.

15

@6 - Socialism may have less stigma than it used to, but a (sort of) Democratic candidate who aligns with a philosophy that 40% of Americans prefer = Trump re-election. Someone should explain that to Bernie.

15

"What's your definition of success then?"

In Seattle and you're college educated, white and over 30?

You're have a job and you spend more time at it than being woke on Twitter or wondering if you have an overdraft.

16

@12

What our many-named friend is suggesting, in his all-too-imitable way, is that Sanders supporters are young people who have low incomes but also have the benefit of economically and socially secure upbringings, and the safety nets to match. In terms of social capital, they currently have low liquidity, but don't lack assets.

The counterargument (beyond #notallberniefans, of course) is that the declining compensation and later career-entry of Americans under 35 in the 3rd and 4th income quintiles has had a measurable drag on the economy, and is a real systemic problem no matter how many Avocado Toast jokes you crack at it.

17

"Sanders supporters are young people who have low incomes but also have the benefit of economically and socially secure upbringings, and the safety nets to match"

@16

Or if you're Matt "Spek" Watson, you just get your daddy to buy you a house in Seattle.

Yo, street cred!

18

See what I mean? I don't think he even realizes he was being insulted.

Usually he'd be trying to change the subject every other comment, too, but maybe the bait shop was all out of red herring today.

19

@6, Indeed Socialism is "spreading" around the US. That's because we have a bunch of unemployable Millennials with lame degrees in Women's Studies, Art History etc. who would like to have everything handed to them free, free, free!

What they fail to understand, because again their education was limited to learning about microagressions, gender pronouns, intersectionality and all that SJW crap, is that if everyone becomes a Socialist, then who will bother to invest their life's savings in being a landlord? Or pay the taxes to fund their free student loans, New Green Deal and other pie-in-the-sky ideas? At some point Other People's Money will run out. Smh!

20

Under socialism the worker does not own the rights to their own labor. Oh well, so much for "worker's rights."

21

Bitter Barista, you nailed it! The Stranger appeals to the intergenerational envy and hubris of the Lazy Lizzies who can't understand why they can't afford to buy a house on Capitol Hill straight out of college while working at a barista at Starbucks, despite that English major.

Erica Barnett and Spek are prime examples of entitled Wypipo powered by resentment.

22

Oh and under Socialism, you don't necessarily get to pick where you live or even what you study. But details details.

I guess the ideal would be to have your cake and eat it too. Get all the benefits from Socialism, paid for by the un-woke Capitalist scum. Got it!

23

@19

Those "unemployable" people with liberal arts degrees would do just fine if our weak, coddled Job Creators were still willing to roll up their sleeves and put in the work required to train and retain their employees, like their grandparents did.

Every internet company you can think of is crammed to overflowing with young people who graduated in the humanities, and then picked up skills on the job after getting hired through friend-of-a-friend networking. Software developers who majored in Computer Science are the exception in the workplace, not the rule-- to say nothing of QA, HR, Sales, CR, Facilities, Procurement, and the management hierarchy from PMs on up. The only difference between yesterday and today is that they've all had to do it via fake-it-till-you-make-it and stretched friendships instead of professional on-the-job training -- and the social-connection threshold for getting a foot in the door is much higher than it used to be.

The delayed career onset and suppressed incomes of the under-35 middle class are entirely due to Employers with an enormous sense of entitlement who act like it's their birthright to pluck a ripe Labor Unit out of someone else's Training Pot (preferably the state or at least a school-- wouldn't want to do that distasteful "competition" thing where you have to offer higher pay than another Job Creator!), drop the new hire on the floor, watch it hit the ground running, set it on fire, and then sweep out the charred remains in a year or two and go back to Somebody Else's Training Pot for more... bitching the whole time about how hard it is to find qualified workers.

24

Love to read boomer comments about how millennials are lazy and have degrees in women's studies.
Yep all those lazy millennials fighting in Afghanistan. And all the money flowing in to the UW to fund Women's studies and buildings named after great feminists.
What, like 85% of UW students are studying some garbage like ethnomusicology or something, right? Maybe its the SU students that are all feminism majors?
I'd love socialism but as I hear it there is simple no way to do it without the death squads.

25

12

Probably something to do with spending all day, nearly every day, creating new user accounts to have fake conversations with himself in the Slog comments sections. Winning!

19

We can all see why you're so threatened by education and college graduates.

26

@21 watching Erica Barnett begging at the Patreon bowl at the end of the month is pure entertainment. Now that the Atlantic magazine had to pull her story, going so far as to remove it, and are now being sued for what she wrote, she’s going to need a lot more than a Patreon account and wine to get by.

But not to worry, Matt “Spek“ Watson is about to drop some new beats on us next week. Maybe they will reach more than 650 views like this last music video? Bitter barista indeed. Turns out “making space for black folk“ in the Seattle rap scene didn’t work out for him since he didn’t really occupy any space to begin with.

All of this would make comedy gold for Brett Hamil, but rumor has it he had to get a real job. I guess, unlike Spek, his daddy didn’t buy him a house in Seattle.

27

None of this surprises. Sawant typically skates right up to the unethical, then resorts to us-versus-them, sanctimonious rich-blaming to hide her self-interested pragmatism about money. She's been doing this forever. Where is the capacity for acknowledging complexity or her own shortcomings, misgivings, or errors? She skillfully plays the feisty People's Champion and iconic left-wing legend. Her polarizing, blame-obsessed rhetoric might excite her base, and, yes, she might eke out a victory in November. I sense, though, more people in Seattle daily see how shallow and dishonest the class-warfare paradigm is. The world is not divided up between corporate shills and noble socialists or between rich exploiters and the oppressed poor. One can despise Sawant's self-important posturing and shallow class-warfare dichotomizing and still be a compassionate person. I will never support her, and I am working class and relatively poor.

29

@23 Why would you train an employee when there are already trained candidates around? It's not like fewer people are working today than before - it's that jobs today are much higher-skilled than in the past, the level of competition is higher, and the margins are slimmer. Where's the money for training going to actually come from?

30

Folks who aspire to take care of themselves and their families appreciate the opportunities American Capitalism provides.
Folks who think the world owes them stuff, who expect the government to give them stuff, for free, they long for "Socialism".

31

As we peer thru the window at Comrade Sawant we realize "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

32

@29

"Where's the money for training going to actually come from?"

Sorry, can't answer that right now, too busy negotiating my exec pay up to 400x what my lowest-paid worker earns while wrapping up another something-billion funding round. Or was it a stock buyback? Honestly, I can't even remember if I'm a publicly traded company or not anymore. Oh, and remind me to greenlight the buyout of that little 200-man development house in the burbs, they've got a painting in their cafeteria they wouldn't sell me. Can you even imagine? I think it'll put us into tax-refund territory for the year, too, if we use that thing Legal and Accounting came up with on their last retreat in Cabo.

34

@28 She wrote a false story on the Ron and Don show and the Atlantic corrected and then pulled the story from their website. Barnett pulled the “yeah, I got the facts totally wrong but look at the big picture!”

Needless to say, Barnett will not be writing for the Atlantic anytime soon.

35

Looks like somebody's pulled the curtain aside.

36

@26: The kicker is that Matt Watson bought a house on Beacon Hill! But being a gentrifier doesn't keep him from bloviating about the horrors of gentrification, oh no. (Conveniently, it became a problem only after he bought a house there; so much for his insight.)

But then, what doesn't he bloviate about?

If there is ever a Dunning-Kruger awards show, Matt Watson should write the score.

37

@27: Very well put.

38

@23 & @32 Dang, it’s like you’ve been living what I’ve lived. Weird.

39

@36 How the fuck did Spek afford a house in beacon Hill when his only claim to fame is getting fired as a barista from all city coffee in Georgetown?

Of course we know how, Spekulation’s daddy bought it for him. His daddy back in Connecticut. I’m guessing either a lawyer, investment banker.

I guess his anti capitalism doesn’t extend to his daddy sending checks.

40

Sad to see The Stranger jumping on the DNC's neo-McCarthyite bashing train for the sake of the 1%ers in Seattle. How come they weren't this concerned when the majority of District 5 Juarez' money was coming from the outside? Now, in her case, I'd be concerned ... since when has she stood up for anything in Seattle? For example RENT CONTROL? Where are you on this issue, Juarez? Notice ANYTHING about the insane rent increases in your district?? Just getting ready to bowl over for Seattle's version of Maga meets Clinton? Or do you, like Sawant, have "a pair" (of the female variety, in this case!) ? If so, PROVE IT!

41

Where are the Democratic Socialists (and marketable Democratic Socialists) running for District 5? RENTERS WHO SUPPORT RENT CONTROL??? And someone who actually cares enough about winning to campaign like hell?

42

@8 "other people's money is limited",

You know that username of yours on that post is on point, but not because it's accurate. There is FAR more than enough money in this country to provide a decent and humane standard of living for every single citizen, and then some. And that gets directly and precisely to the fundamental difference between capitalists and socialists. You all would rather greedy billionaires be permitted to hoard their superfluous wealth while allowing hundreds of thousands of less fortunate to unnecessarily suffer at their expense. We wouldn't. You should be ashamed.

43

@42 and once you take all their money, then what?

Print more?

Go to the IMF with cap in hand?

I’ve been there and seen that.

Making people eat their dogs when you run out of other peoples money ain’t compassion.

44

@32 lol the CEOs aren't gonna pay. They already would be if they were. But you answered correctly : the money won't come from anywhere and industry won't pay to train employees when there are already trained candidates available. It didn't matter if the CEO makes $1b/year or $1k/year - industry won't pay for something that is already freely available.

45

"too busy negotiating my exec pay up to 400x what my lowest-paid worker earns"

Jeff Bezos was paid $87,000 last year by Amazon. His wealth comes from people buying his privately held assets.

47

Clickbait, achieved.

48

We approved a law that says each Seattle City Council member gets elected by the people in their district to represent the people in their district. How about approving new legislation that only allows Seattle City Council Candidates to receive donations from Seattle Voters?


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