Sunday, September 10, 2017

In case you haven't been to Seattle ...

... here's something you won't want to miss.

Councilmember Kshama Sawant.  Trotskyist.

Elected by the people of Seattle to run their town.

On Boeing:

For decades, Boeing executives and billionaire shareholders have carried out systematic economic extortion by pitting cities and states against one another, forcing a race to the bottom for the living standards of workers, and crushing labor unions. 
 And now on Amazon:
we need to unionize, and to take these behemoths into democratic public ownership, so that they are run not for profit for a few, but in the interests of the majority of working people and of society. 
It is, of course, due to the innovation and productivity of the free market that people in the Seattle area (75,000 of them at Boeing and 24,000 at Amazon as of 2015) have these lucrative jobs and why Washington state and Seattle benefit from the taxes that they pay.

It doesn't bother me much that socialists don't learn from the lessons of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuala (to mention the first three failed socialist economies that come to mind), or that they think that Sweden and Norway provide a legitimate counter example (they don't, those countries are still living off the oil revenues of the 70s and are starting to have to scale back their socialistic tendencies).  There are people everywhere who are less than intelligent and motivated by envy.  What really bothers me is that over 50% of the voters in her district, Central Seattle, agree with her.  100,000 people apparently think, to the extent that they think rather than react, that Trotsky had it right.

So here's where I move from facts into snark and speculation.

From Sawant's Wikipedia page, she moved from Mumbai ("unhappy with the caste system") and then quit studying software engineering in favor of economics ("shocked by the poverty she saw").  What is unclear from any of the articles is whether she actually ever worked as an engineer and who taught her the garbage that she actually thinks passes for effective economic policy.  The idea that she moved from Mumbai and then was shocked by poverty once she arrived in the United States is ridiculous.  I'd also guess that since she is apparently "living" on $40,000 of her council salary while using the rest to promote various socialist causes, that she won cash and prizes when she divorced her actual software engineer husband.  She clearly isn't living off the salary of her current husband who has a degree in psychology and works as a "Socialist Alternative community organizer".

Either way, her political success makes me skeptical about the possibility of the United States actually returning to the free market capitalist policies that led to the wealth and success that are now funding the social welfare programs.  We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a free market society and haven't been for about a hundred years, but it takes a while to destroy all that freedom and success.  Meanwhile, the slide continues with the help of Trotskyists like Sawant and her husband and the ignorance and complicity of large blocks of voters.

2 comments:

Feather Blade said...

I'm guessing the truth of the matter is less "She was shocked at the poverty she say" and more "She was shocked that she saw poverty."


All Americans live in giant houses with big yards and have lots of electronics and guns, after all. /sarc

heresolong said...

Maybe. I'm thinking that she came looking for problems. After all, her socialist paradise of India is a poverty stricken hellhole in large part, but America is an evil capitalist society that exploits the workers. If she really was interested in improving the lives of the average person she'd be back in India doing it there, since our poor live like kings compared to those. Instead she came here, made a bucket of money one way or another using our freedoms and now is trying to destroy the system that allowed her to become well off.