NWCN.com: Socialist Kshama Sawant will be on the next Seattle City Council.
Longtime Seattle City Council member Richard Conlin conceded to challenger Sawant Friday evening, after new election numbers showed her ever-widening lead of 1,640 votes in the race for Position 2.
“It has been a privilege to be your representative and I am proud of what we have done together,” Conlin said Friday after the election numbers were released.
Sawant sat down with KING 5 News on Friday. She admits she isn’t entirely accustomed to the political spotlight. “I didn’t set out to do this. I wasn’t thinking about holding an elective office. I just wanted to be an activist,” Sawant said.
Sawant, 41, grew up in Mumbai, India. She says she realized early on she was a socialist who hated the Indian caste system she grew up in. “I never bought into it. I was completely and I remain completely against the caste system,” she said.
Sawant came to America for a graduate degree in economics and moved to Seattle three years ago to become an economics teacher at Seattle Central Community College. She was also part of the Occupy Movement. Just three years ago she became an American citizen.
“And having me on the City Council as an immigrant woman of color with an Indian accent, I think that, I hope, will inspire other people,” she said. She believes that alone she won’t change City Council, but she’ll be part of a movement to bring change.
“There’s a real unrest in the American population for change and things are going to change more rapidly in the coming years,” Sawant added. In the coming months, Sawant will check in as the first socialist council member in recent Seattle history.
Here’s the background on this socialist:
Sawant grew up in Mumbai where she later studied computer science and graduated with a B.S. from the University of Mumbai in 1994. Sawant married her husband Vivek, an engineer at Microsoft, and moved to the United States. After moving to the United States Sawant decided to abandon the computer engineering field. She began to pursue study in economics due to what she described as her own “questions of economic inequality.” Sawant is a Marxist, a supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and a member of the Trotskyist political party Socialist Alternative, an affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International.
From her campaign web page:
For the first time in world history, 1 billion people will go hungry this year, too poor to afford food, despite record harvests. Income inequality in the U.S. has reached record heights, surpassing even the Great Depression. The richest 1% of households now own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined (Business Week, 11/1/04). (That’s a rather old statistic). The anarchy of the capitalist system is also dragging the planet into an environmental catastrophe of historic proportions. But as long as corporations are privately owned, no matter how regulated they are, they will be locked into a system of cut-throat competition and our entire society will be structured around one fundamental purpose – maximizing short-term corporate profits, not the needs of humanity or the environment.
Read the rest of her enlightened theories here.
Maybe she should speak with Bill Gates about turning the company her husband works for into a commune. Until the revolution changes everything, I bet she and her husband own lots of Microsoft stock and get nice dividends.
Good luck Seattle, you’re going to need it.
DCG
