Sawant has blood on her hands Seattle is dying socialism head tax etc etc etc

Sawant is a self aggrandizing shit who only cares about herself and appearing to support the people. To terrorize the mayor like that was criminal - like or hate Durkin - who cares?. And to dilute the BLM protests for Amazon tax. WTF.

Don't we call releasing someone's address "Doxxing" when right wing lunatics do it? C'mon, showing up at the Mayor's house just makes us look bad. Protest at City Hall (where the Mayor actually was) - sends a much stronger mesage.

We got the Guillotine! You better run! We got the Guillotine!

Sawant is the trump of the left. I can’t believe her District was dumb enough to re-elect her.

And just like that, Durkan goes full Trump... 'lock her up!' Anything for her corporate clients. Democracy? Who cares? Criminalize the opposition.

Come now, Sawant deserves a fair trial.

Of course, if she weighs as much as a duck, she's a witch.

It takes guts to be a politician these days. But we need them. Sadly, at any given time, a segment of their constituents will resort to vandalism and harassment as if their passion justifies their means.

It never does.

So Trumpy.

I'm not a Durkan fan, but Sawant's behavior is frequently childish and self-serving. No way that stunt (at Durkan's home) on Sunday can be justified. Durkan understandably has a breaking point, and Sunday's "visit" was it. I'll give Durkan credit for patience (arguably too much so). Sawant uses ostensible concern for "the poor" and "the people" to mask her obsessional jealousy and self-important delusion. I'm glad Durkan is finally calling her out. And the City Council has generally been too lenient with Sawant; it's as if her left-wing icon status affords her protection others would not have, and the council members fear Sawant would retaliate against criticism by exposing their lack of authentic progressive street cred. They fear Sawant's disapproval, as if she epitomizes courageous progressivism. Sawant is merely jealous of anyone with more status than she has. She is a phrase-mongering bully and stalker demanding SHE be made king of the hill. Durkan has the nerve to stand up to her. Good for Durkan. This is overdue. The investigation should be fair, not vindictive--but it should also not be a whitewash to exonerate Sawant's presumed progressive sainthood.

I'm leaning towards recalling both. BG @ 4 has a great comment on the follow up Sawant's response thread.

As a progressive who believes we need massive social change, that we need an income tax, that police forces need massive overhauls, and that capitalism is a terrible, destructive system designed to create oligarchies while promoting existing aristocracies..

Sawant has never done anything except engage in political theater. She has made it almost impossible to enact progressive change in this city because everything has always been about her. She's reactionary, refuses to work with her colleagues, and is propped up by "disenfranchised" young white people who probably never even bothered to read any Marx (he was a Hegelian, and he promoted an idea of progress that was nothing more than a rehash of Neo-Platonic ideals predicated on a false dichotomy that was incapable of producing new ideas. No wonder his ideas have propped up disastrous personality-cults throughout the world. Socialism and progressivism needs to move on from the false prophet of a guy who literally lived off the largesse of a capitalist. Engels was a capitalist, and Marx lived in a privileged life in London, complete with servants. He was very good at criticizing capitalism--turns out it isn't that hard. He was entirely incapable of imagining a functioning system beyond capitalism because he was beholden to Judeo-Christian ideas.).

Time to move on from Sawant and find a real progressive leader who doesn't use their position to jeopardize the real work that needs to be done to make this city better. Has Sawant accomplished anything since being on the council, except alienating people?

I'm done with both of them. Neither have handled this well, at all. I may agree with some DemSoc policies, but I have never been able to trust Sawant. She's immature and very self-centered, and it detracts from the change her supporters are trying to achieve.

Durkan had a good reason to try to keep her address private. Anyone remember Tom Wales?

I wouldn't put it past Sawant to leak that info. She's a horrible person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Wales

@ 26 Yes, I remember Tom Wales, and, yes, Jenny Durkan knows that could have been her, too, taking a fatal bullet. And judges, attorneys, plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses have been attacked over the years at and around King County Courthouse. Nationally, judges have been assassinated walking out of their homes. Law firms have all kinds of clandestine protocols in place when attorneys lives are threatened, as they sometimes are. Civil rights activist Ed Pratt was assassinated in 1969 just outside his home in Shoreline. I have a thousand issues with Jenny Durkan, but, rich or not, she's entitled to have her address kept private, especially in light of her work as a prosecutor. Durkan should absolutely not let Sawant get away with this. I'm totally with Jenny Durkan on this.

Haha. Fuck sawant.

Inciting mob violence against an elected official is not free speech, it's harassment and intimidation. Threatening a person's family is about as low as it gets.

I did like The Stranger's dedication to performance in Winston Smith's job, though:

"Sawant and Durkan have never seen eye-to-eye."

Not listed on Sawant's list of grievances against Durkan: Durkan's crushing defeat of Sawant on the EHT, which seems to have effectively ended Sawant's career as a legislator. Down the Memory Hole with that one, eh? (Doubleplus unfact: the tens of thousands of real signatures, on real petitions, to put the EHT to Referendum. That was the leverage Durkan needed to defeat Sawant.)

Doxxing is taboo for the many good reasons mentioned above. Plus the rest of the neighborhood probably is not interested hosting a demonstration. Also Sawant did this latest publicity stunt on Pride weekend. Event Trump rescheduled his Juneteenth rally.

sawant doesn't give a fuck about LGBTQ+ people. She certainly doesn't represent me. She sent out a sycophant to hijack the first Pulse memorial to talk about rent control, as opposed to the people murdered at the Pulse nightclub. Fuck sawant.

Sawant was not involved in organizing, and neither was Socialist Alternative. (https://www.facebook.com/events/855913214917518) Organizers included Missing and Murdered Indigenous People & Families, Seattle DSA, Shaun Scott, and family of Charleena Lyles.

Sawant has turned into (and probably always was) an opportunist and a relative liar and con-artist (at least to some). She likes to play low-income and super-progressive yet lives in Leschi and owns a home valued between "$200,000 and $1,000,000" (sorry gang, but who in Seattle owns a home in Leschi that's valued at $200k?!).

Sawant has money but acts like she's "of the people." She does nothing for politics and when asked specifically about what she has done for the people of Capitol Hill, her responses are always very general - like, "well, she helped lead the protest to tax Amazon...," and "she's been fighting for rent control...". Okay, both of those are true, but here's the reality:

1) She has Microsoft money, so why not go after them?
2) The entire tax structure would have to change in order to tax a corporation.
3) The rent control is managed through State laws, not local ones. So changing this isn't gonna happen at the local level no matter how much she likes to put up her posters and say she can.

Sawant's a bad apple. I'm happy to see her go and would be even happier to push her out the door.

I just don't know Seattle anymore.

Papers, please.

@37- getting a bit pedantic with that nonsense.

@39: She was elected by the voters of the district and the campaign funding for her opponent came almost exclusively from corporations, none of whom had any real connection to her district.

And we are in the situation we're in because since 1981, keeping taxes and government spending-except on police and the war machine, the two most useless forms of such spending-has been the obsession of both major parties, to the exclusion of everything else.

It turns out you can't make progress on racism, or environmental issues, or poverty, or any major issue in this society by putting low taxes and low non-lethal government spending at the center of policymaking decisions.

And the truth is fredt, that your district is not a right-wing "law and order uber alles" district.

30: You mean, the moment when Durkan tried to make progressive change impossible in Seattle, since no progressive change can come WITHOUT increasing taxes on the rich.

23: Actually, virtually all of the U.S. left has moved beyond what YOU think of as Marxism(you are actually thinking of Marxism-Leninism, the "ideology" Stalin cobbed together as code for the idea that he personally should have absolute power and that any other "Marxist-Leninist" country had to copy the worst aspects of the USSR in the 1924-53 era). Marx himself never wanted anything remotely like that to be done in the name of his ideas, and cannot be held responsible for anything Lenin did after 1921-when he senselessly crushed the Krondstadt uprising against his growing repression)anything Stalin did, or anything Mao, any Kim, or any of the worst things either Castro brother did.

Sawant's own ideas have nothing in common with Stalinism or Maoism, and even when she is capable of sounding sectarian, there is a strongly democratic character to the ideas she and the SA back-which are based on democratic worker management of the economy, not bureaucratic state control.

And in the broad U.S. left, Marxism-Leninism is for all practical purposes extinct-the dominant ideas are much closer to anarcho-syndicalism, which is based on the creation of worker cooperatives as the dominant institution in the U.S. economy. In a land of worker cooperatives, no one would be oppressed and no one would be jobless, and the workplace itself would be creative, vibrant, and life-affirming, not the perpetual drag on the soul most workplaces are in the current system. Freed from work-lives that are not driven mainly by coercion, stress, and fear, and with a decent standard of living guaranteed, the conditions that cause white supremacism and other forms of bigotry would not exist.