Kshama Sawant, the socialist and former Seattle City Council member who won the battle for a $15 minimum wage, introduced the Amazon tax and championed unprecedented renter’s rights joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the 2024 election.
The two-party system is horrible, but how about we begin to change by electing third party candidates to lower level offices? City council, aldermen, congress, water boards, etc.
On my ballot, even the down ballot candidates are pro genocide lying shits who opposed our attempt to pass a ceasefire resolution from October through February. If it wasn’t for Stein/Ware I would have had to turn in a blank ballot. We need a new anti war anti genocide anti prison party of outspoken candidates to prevent the economy of developing and erasing concentration camps.
I'm of Arab descent so this is special to me. There is no excuse for what our administration is doing in Palestine. I call it the "Palestinian Holocaust" and Biden and his enablers should be brought up on genocide charges.
I remember what happened to Bush and Cheney with that phony war in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed millions...nothing.
That's a good idea. Don't forget state legislatures and school boards. Which is how the ultra right wing has managed to have such outsized and detrimental effects.
Sawant is a rare example of a public servant who stayed true to her principles and the needs of her constituents, rather than selling out both to serve her career. We spoke together on a segment with Briahna Joy Gray a few years ago and I was impressed by her thinking.
Sawant is also a consistent voice speaking on behalf of labor, even more consistent than labor leaders themselves, who are widely co-opted. She sets the kind of bold example that the labor movement could use more widely. It could offer a crucial counterpoint to the bipartisan consensus enabling the escalating genocide in Gaza. I wrote last year about the role that organized labor within the US could play in enforcing international human rights. https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/we-the-people-can-unplug-the-war?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios
If you don’t live in a swing state, please vote for Stein. I did in MA. If she gets 5% of the vote, she’ll get Federal matching funds to grow the Green Party’s reach for 2028.
I live in a swing state and I’m voting Stein because I vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with my principles (at least that’s what I thought this whole thing is about). As long as we keep voting out of fear the establishment will continue to win.
Especially the fear either a Harris or Trump win would allow for the continuation of a genocide. Harris I have no doubt will be no more then a puppet on a string and there will more and more wars.
I was listening to this on youtube a minute ago and didn't want to comment there. Kshama Sawant is wrong about the Tea Party being a movement that started because Obama broke his promises. Yes, he broke promises and gave his full support to the banks but the Tea Party was not in favor of anything resembling Medicare For All. If anything, they were against any more government involvement in the "healthcare" system. They were probably mad that he was just another capitalist, but they also called him a socialist. They were against the man and his supposedly "socialism" first. Wasn't the whole thing an astroturf thing, financed by the Koch brothers at the time?
She is right about who Obama was, wrong about the Tea Party being a a grassroots and pro-worker movement.
The congressman in the district I lived at the time was a tea pariter and only addressed Obama as "the socialist".
The Tea Party did start out as a grassroots movement. Of the working class majority angry because for decades we've been ignored by the neolib Dems and their corporate sponsored party. Of course they brushed off the declasse' yet again.
So the ultra right wing seized the opportunity. They poured money into it, taking over what had been a chaotic, disorganized movement, and converting it to astroturf. Despite the occasional language of worker rage, it became just another vehicle for 1%er domination. The rank and file did notice--that's why it faded away.
This is a tough one for me. Sawant is a great individual whose achievements are impressive, and there's no more honest or braver journalist around than Chris Hedges, but at this point in time I see a possible second presidency of Donald Trump as such a threat--an existential threat, really--that if we don't stop it, all other issues just might become irrelevant. “If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line,” sounds nice and wonderfully idealistic, but if it means voting for a candidate with no chance of winning the presidency this election, it's essentially just a gesture. Understand, I think Jill Stein is great, and I think it's great if citizens can form coalitions strong enough to take on the interests that have led us all into this neoliberal hellhole, and maybe that will happen, but it won't happen soon enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, let alone even begin to dismantle the institutions that are causing us so much damage. Noam Chomsky has noted that political structures always grow up around economic ones, and that's not something that's going to change any time soon. Voters face a grim choice this coming Tuesday, but I say we vote damage control.
"I see a possible second presidency of Donald Trump as such a threat--an existential threat, really--that if we don't stop it, all other issues just might become irrelevant." I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but did in 2020. I would never vote for Hilary Clinton for many reasons. I agreed with Assange who said in an interview with John Pilger that she was a very sick woman especially in her need for power, and I absolutely agree. No doubt you voted for Biden in 2020, and if you did are you pleased with your choice? Or are you disturbed that you voted for a man who in my book is basically responsible for some 600 thousand Ukrainian dead, and a man who is now assisting a genocide, killing children, women and men. Some say more then 100 thousand dead. He's a man who pushed all our Middle Eastern wars, our neocon driven middle eastern wars. I could go on and on. Do you really think Harris will be more then a puppet of the neocons who are strongly on the side of democrats, Blinken is one of those. Did it bother you that the democrats pushed the lie of Russia-gate, and continue to insist on the lie that a riot on Jan 6, was an insurrection, or Clinton calling his supporters deplorables or Biden referencing them just recently, as garbage? No question he did some bad things, but to hear some talk, like yourself, he is the devil himself. What new wars did he start in the 21st century of wars and more wars, death and more death?
You make this prediction, "I see a possible second presidency of Donald Trump as such a threat--an existential threat, really--that if we don't stop it, all other issues just might become irrelevant." Your predicting the end times should he win and sound like a crazed religious zealot and you call me a moral paragon. What a joke.
I am voting for Jill Stein because I really don't trust Trump on ending this genocide. Even as a child I hated the whole idea of wars. As the decades go by, especially in this century, we seem to becoming more and more crazy. I'm hoping if she gets a lot of votes it will send a message to the crazies in the White House.
I was going to write a snarky response, but thought better of it. If humans did embrace all creation in their tribe, the tribe would quickly splinter. Some factions would be griping that they didn't get their due share of the goodies, others would gripe that we haven't reached Nirvana yet and *our* faction could do a much better job of getting us there.
By the same token, if I wanted to implode Team D, the surest way to do so would be to take away Team R, or reduce it to irrelevance. Without a common enemy, the PMC yuppies and various grievance groups that make up Team D would quickly discover that they have little in common, and in fact, do not even like each other all that much.
Using the word "tribe" as a put-down is a current Euro and Euro-American intellectual fad. It conveniently side-steps several nasty issues.
Like how the word was applied to sub-Saharan Africans, the Native peoples of the Americas, and to indigenous Australians. Whereas Euro groups are "ethnic;" you know, civilized.
Study the actual behavior of so-called tribal people. Very, very few come close to the viciousness and violence of the western world, particularly its Anglophones.
Carl Jung met with a Comanche elder and shaman who told him: "The difference between the Red man and the White man is that we see everything as alive whereas you think everything is dead. Including other people." A concise characterization of neoliberalism and neoconservativism, the reigning rationalisms of the Atlanticists. Well described by the title of the book by Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul: //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West).//
Euros and Euro descendants should own their behavior and find an appropriate term for it. Rather than continuing to project onto indigenes their own uncivilized actions.
Yes its a description. Just like in the way people in the U.S call ourselves American as if Venezuela, Mexico & Canada weren’t every bit as AMERICAN. Its a corruption of the term
So then you get to decide what is or isn't p.c. Or silly. or games. Nice rationalization. I had expected you, as someone whose opinions as you know I usually agree with, to be open to what this feels like to a Native person. Besides, I meant it to be in general, not a specific criticism of you personally.
The term has had very real consequences and I gave examples as to how. It's NOT "just a descriptor." Like the N word is for bigots. It's amusing that you claim I'm side-stepping when that was among my objections. Which to me resembles my point about projecting.
Then you drag in a red herring, the logical fallacy of diversion, in the last sentence. As if everything I said were invalidated by evoking the horror of the Palestinians. Well, as non-Euro, they would be considered "tribal." And of course then subject to the genocide we other tribals know all too well as behavior of Euro and Euro-Americans.
Plus the nasty dig about misgendering. As if that cause, too, were an automatic disqualification. It's a fine example of the viciousness I mentioned above. And an ad hominem since I have often outed myself on this site as not only an old blue collar activist, but BIPOC and LGBTQ as well. It's also amusing because most often leftist claims about such being a distraction from class are made by white male armchair theoreticians who've never had to struggle for recognition. Nor, for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives. In a post-Einstein quantum reality, it's no longer the Aristotelian either/or, but multiplicities.
Thanks for the self-revelation. Be assured I'll leave you alone from now on.
If Trump does get back in, he has secretly promised Netanyahu the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb. The MOAB is also called “The Mother of all Bombs” by scientists and the community alike. He will temporarily withdraw from GAZA and saturate the area with this ordinance until there is no one left. Then GAZA will be fully annexed by Israel, and he will launch unfathomable campaign in the West Bank. Harris will not give these weapons to Netanyahu and will eventually force a peace. Now is not the time to vote or not vote emotionally, but strategically.
Sawant's efforts are commendable, honorable, as she is a model of good character. To carry on the struggle for a decent society with a decent government will abruptly end if Trump and his minions get control of the levers of power. Genocide is abominable but for the last 40 years, 25,000 children have died every day of the week in the world for lack of clean drinking water, disease, or starvation with the USA basically not turning a hair about this atrocity; that's a total of 383,250,000 deaths. Where's the outrage? Where's the "Red Line"? Recently, a leader in the Arab community in Michigan passionately stated regarding the 2024 presidential election: “Don’t vote your conscience, vote strategically.” Perhaps, as opposed to dying on this hill and taking the entire human race with you, it would be better to find the cracks in the "system" and being part of the solution. WE ALL HAVE BLOOD ON OUR HANDS! Nader wasn't successful, nor Perot, nor Bernie from within the "system", nor RFK, nor West, nor Stein; all TRUTH TELLERS!. As bad a chance as humanity has of surviving the next 50 years, trying to burn everything down to make a point is a losing strategy. I'll be voting for another imperfect leader, just like the last 45 leaders that served as president of the USA; GET OVER IT and get to work and find the answer to getting the truth heard. JLW
Well said. A little perspective is definitely called for. Realpolitik is damned bloody stuff, sometimes, but voting strategically makes a hell of a lot more sense than striking a pose as some moral paragon and letting Donald Trump inch closer to the White House.
NO! These arguments fail if Trump is re-elected. That's why I'm voting for Harris, the only candidate who can beat Trump. Trump has expressed admiration for Russia, China, North Korea, and other dictatorships. What these have in common is that there is no effective political opposition. Reforming the Democratic party will be meaningless when the Democratic party is gone. This might happen during a second Trump presidency, based on what he has said he wants to do.
Although living in the Bay area at the time, I'm a 5th gen. Seattleite (not counting Native ancestry) and so followed Sawant's City Council campaigns. Seattle has a long, proud radical history. My ancestors were there for the 1919 General Strike. My grandfather the logger was a Wobbly (I.W.W.) As a blue collar activist, I fought the neolib takeover of the Dem party. In Nov. 1999, I participated in the anti-WTO demonstrations I'm proud to say became known as The Battle of Seattle. And in 2003, I was part of a group of explicitly religious people arrested in protest of the invasion of Iraq.
My activist credentials are well established. But there is another aspect to human experience, one that gives meaning to life. One either ignored or outright opposed by left brain hemisphere dominant intellectuals and strident doctrinaire leftists who don't understand. That's the side of spiritual encounters and direct mystical experiences. While religion has its obvious detriments, as does the ideal of democracy, its structures can serve to connect people to this other aspect. As well as with ethnic traditions. Like the way the identities of indigenous peoples are connected to spiritual understandings.
That's why this time I voted for Cornel West. However, I voted for Jill Stein in 2016 and applaud anyone supporting her. To hell with the vile dual aspect uniparty with their lust for unipolar empire and the endless wars that requires.
Yes, she supports Palestinians, a top, if not the top, priority for me but my she played a central role in dragging the city I live in, Seattle, into a crime ridden shit hole which we are finally emerging from.
The two-party system is horrible, but how about we begin to change by electing third party candidates to lower level offices? City council, aldermen, congress, water boards, etc.
On my ballot, even the down ballot candidates are pro genocide lying shits who opposed our attempt to pass a ceasefire resolution from October through February. If it wasn’t for Stein/Ware I would have had to turn in a blank ballot. We need a new anti war anti genocide anti prison party of outspoken candidates to prevent the economy of developing and erasing concentration camps.
It's a sad state of affairs. I think of George Carlin.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RXPokkBnZ_U?app=desktop
"It's a sad state of affairs!" DUH
NO.
You have to stop supporting the Duopoly first and foremost.
Look at your kids in the USA....would you expect the world to come to your aid if this was happening to you?
I'm of Arab descent so this is special to me. There is no excuse for what our administration is doing in Palestine. I call it the "Palestinian Holocaust" and Biden and his enablers should be brought up on genocide charges.
I remember what happened to Bush and Cheney with that phony war in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed millions...nothing.
That's a good idea. Don't forget state legislatures and school boards. Which is how the ultra right wing has managed to have such outsized and detrimental effects.
Sawant is a rare example of a public servant who stayed true to her principles and the needs of her constituents, rather than selling out both to serve her career. We spoke together on a segment with Briahna Joy Gray a few years ago and I was impressed by her thinking.
Sawant is also a consistent voice speaking on behalf of labor, even more consistent than labor leaders themselves, who are widely co-opted. She sets the kind of bold example that the labor movement could use more widely. It could offer a crucial counterpoint to the bipartisan consensus enabling the escalating genocide in Gaza. I wrote last year about the role that organized labor within the US could play in enforcing international human rights. https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/we-the-people-can-unplug-the-war?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios
If you don’t live in a swing state, please vote for Stein. I did in MA. If she gets 5% of the vote, she’ll get Federal matching funds to grow the Green Party’s reach for 2028.
I live in a swing state and I’m voting Stein because I vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with my principles (at least that’s what I thought this whole thing is about). As long as we keep voting out of fear the establishment will continue to win.
Especially the fear either a Harris or Trump win would allow for the continuation of a genocide. Harris I have no doubt will be no more then a puppet on a string and there will more and more wars.
Especially *IF* you live in a swing state, vote for Stein.
Leverage is worthless if you will never use it.
As Margaret Kimberley framed it in Black Agenda Report: "Nothing reveals the corrupt nature of US politics like a presidential election".
I was listening to this on youtube a minute ago and didn't want to comment there. Kshama Sawant is wrong about the Tea Party being a movement that started because Obama broke his promises. Yes, he broke promises and gave his full support to the banks but the Tea Party was not in favor of anything resembling Medicare For All. If anything, they were against any more government involvement in the "healthcare" system. They were probably mad that he was just another capitalist, but they also called him a socialist. They were against the man and his supposedly "socialism" first. Wasn't the whole thing an astroturf thing, financed by the Koch brothers at the time?
She is right about who Obama was, wrong about the Tea Party being a a grassroots and pro-worker movement.
The congressman in the district I lived at the time was a tea pariter and only addressed Obama as "the socialist".
Not sure why Chris didn't push back on that
The Tea Party did start out as a grassroots movement. Of the working class majority angry because for decades we've been ignored by the neolib Dems and their corporate sponsored party. Of course they brushed off the declasse' yet again.
So the ultra right wing seized the opportunity. They poured money into it, taking over what had been a chaotic, disorganized movement, and converting it to astroturf. Despite the occasional language of worker rage, it became just another vehicle for 1%er domination. The rank and file did notice--that's why it faded away.
All three of my daughters and myself voted for Stein. My spouse no, I am ashamed to say. Blue, Red, both detestable.
I have always admired and respected Chris Hedges, and Kshama Sawant and no matter how this election goes, my esteem for these two will not change.
This is a tough one for me. Sawant is a great individual whose achievements are impressive, and there's no more honest or braver journalist around than Chris Hedges, but at this point in time I see a possible second presidency of Donald Trump as such a threat--an existential threat, really--that if we don't stop it, all other issues just might become irrelevant. “If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line,” sounds nice and wonderfully idealistic, but if it means voting for a candidate with no chance of winning the presidency this election, it's essentially just a gesture. Understand, I think Jill Stein is great, and I think it's great if citizens can form coalitions strong enough to take on the interests that have led us all into this neoliberal hellhole, and maybe that will happen, but it won't happen soon enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, let alone even begin to dismantle the institutions that are causing us so much damage. Noam Chomsky has noted that political structures always grow up around economic ones, and that's not something that's going to change any time soon. Voters face a grim choice this coming Tuesday, but I say we vote damage control.
"I see a possible second presidency of Donald Trump as such a threat--an existential threat, really--that if we don't stop it, all other issues just might become irrelevant." I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but did in 2020. I would never vote for Hilary Clinton for many reasons. I agreed with Assange who said in an interview with John Pilger that she was a very sick woman especially in her need for power, and I absolutely agree. No doubt you voted for Biden in 2020, and if you did are you pleased with your choice? Or are you disturbed that you voted for a man who in my book is basically responsible for some 600 thousand Ukrainian dead, and a man who is now assisting a genocide, killing children, women and men. Some say more then 100 thousand dead. He's a man who pushed all our Middle Eastern wars, our neocon driven middle eastern wars. I could go on and on. Do you really think Harris will be more then a puppet of the neocons who are strongly on the side of democrats, Blinken is one of those. Did it bother you that the democrats pushed the lie of Russia-gate, and continue to insist on the lie that a riot on Jan 6, was an insurrection, or Clinton calling his supporters deplorables or Biden referencing them just recently, as garbage? No question he did some bad things, but to hear some talk, like yourself, he is the devil himself. What new wars did he start in the 21st century of wars and more wars, death and more death?
Fran: Good comment.
I do believe the US needs Donald Trump. My reasons are.
DT is the catalyst (nothing more)
USA needs to experience what other countries have suffered in the 'name of Democracy.'
American people by and large are ill-educated and sheep.
Oh, how could I ever reply to a moral paragon like you? Anything you say, Fran. 🤪
You make this prediction, "I see a possible second presidency of Donald Trump as such a threat--an existential threat, really--that if we don't stop it, all other issues just might become irrelevant." Your predicting the end times should he win and sound like a crazed religious zealot and you call me a moral paragon. What a joke.
Take your meds and try to relax.
God, you are full of cliches and bullshit. Take a hike.
Oh. Go away. IF this 'genocide' was happening in the USA who would you vote for?
It's obvious to me that these people like you have absolutely NO idea what is coming for you the USA.
Who is going to help you when it comes?
NOT me.
Vote Jill Stein.
I am voting for Jill Stein because I really don't trust Trump on ending this genocide. Even as a child I hated the whole idea of wars. As the decades go by, especially in this century, we seem to becoming more and more crazy. I'm hoping if she gets a lot of votes it will send a message to the crazies in the White House.
Fran...IF I was in the USA there is absolutely NO doubt in my mind I would vote for Stein.
I feel that the coming election will see the US as a 'malignant tumour' on this earth/no different from the British Imperealists.
Where are the British now? Hanging onto the 'coat-tails' of a dying Empire.
I will NOT come to the aid of any Imperealist country.
Propaganda/disgusting education/greed are NOT my hero's.
MY only hope is that BRICS will make a difference.
I understand!
Fran. I lived in the US for 23yrs.
I have many friends.
We ALL mostly want peace and revenge is never sweet.
Humans are masters at rationalizing support for their tribe.
Supporting one’s tribe isn’t necessarily bad. We just need to include all humanity and the animal kingdom in our powwows.
I was going to write a snarky response, but thought better of it. If humans did embrace all creation in their tribe, the tribe would quickly splinter. Some factions would be griping that they didn't get their due share of the goodies, others would gripe that we haven't reached Nirvana yet and *our* faction could do a much better job of getting us there.
By the same token, if I wanted to implode Team D, the surest way to do so would be to take away Team R, or reduce it to irrelevance. Without a common enemy, the PMC yuppies and various grievance groups that make up Team D would quickly discover that they have little in common, and in fact, do not even like each other all that much.
Using the word "tribe" as a put-down is a current Euro and Euro-American intellectual fad. It conveniently side-steps several nasty issues.
Like how the word was applied to sub-Saharan Africans, the Native peoples of the Americas, and to indigenous Australians. Whereas Euro groups are "ethnic;" you know, civilized.
Study the actual behavior of so-called tribal people. Very, very few come close to the viciousness and violence of the western world, particularly its Anglophones.
Carl Jung met with a Comanche elder and shaman who told him: "The difference between the Red man and the White man is that we see everything as alive whereas you think everything is dead. Including other people." A concise characterization of neoliberalism and neoconservativism, the reigning rationalisms of the Atlanticists. Well described by the title of the book by Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul: //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West).//
Euros and Euro descendants should own their behavior and find an appropriate term for it. Rather than continuing to project onto indigenes their own uncivilized actions.
It's a descriptor, not a putdown, and by playing silly p.c. language games, you intentionally sidestep the point.
Genociding Palestinians is forgivable. As long as we don't misgender them.
Yes its a description. Just like in the way people in the U.S call ourselves American as if Venezuela, Mexico & Canada weren’t every bit as AMERICAN. Its a corruption of the term
So then you get to decide what is or isn't p.c. Or silly. or games. Nice rationalization. I had expected you, as someone whose opinions as you know I usually agree with, to be open to what this feels like to a Native person. Besides, I meant it to be in general, not a specific criticism of you personally.
The term has had very real consequences and I gave examples as to how. It's NOT "just a descriptor." Like the N word is for bigots. It's amusing that you claim I'm side-stepping when that was among my objections. Which to me resembles my point about projecting.
Then you drag in a red herring, the logical fallacy of diversion, in the last sentence. As if everything I said were invalidated by evoking the horror of the Palestinians. Well, as non-Euro, they would be considered "tribal." And of course then subject to the genocide we other tribals know all too well as behavior of Euro and Euro-Americans.
Plus the nasty dig about misgendering. As if that cause, too, were an automatic disqualification. It's a fine example of the viciousness I mentioned above. And an ad hominem since I have often outed myself on this site as not only an old blue collar activist, but BIPOC and LGBTQ as well. It's also amusing because most often leftist claims about such being a distraction from class are made by white male armchair theoreticians who've never had to struggle for recognition. Nor, for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives. In a post-Einstein quantum reality, it's no longer the Aristotelian either/or, but multiplicities.
Thanks for the self-revelation. Be assured I'll leave you alone from now on.
As if you get to decide what is and isn't consequential.
Apparently your playing Self Righteous Language Cop isn't a nasty dig, but my pointing out that your priorities are outta whack is.
If Trump does get back in, he has secretly promised Netanyahu the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb. The MOAB is also called “The Mother of all Bombs” by scientists and the community alike. He will temporarily withdraw from GAZA and saturate the area with this ordinance until there is no one left. Then GAZA will be fully annexed by Israel, and he will launch unfathomable campaign in the West Bank. Harris will not give these weapons to Netanyahu and will eventually force a peace. Now is not the time to vote or not vote emotionally, but strategically.
Sawant's efforts are commendable, honorable, as she is a model of good character. To carry on the struggle for a decent society with a decent government will abruptly end if Trump and his minions get control of the levers of power. Genocide is abominable but for the last 40 years, 25,000 children have died every day of the week in the world for lack of clean drinking water, disease, or starvation with the USA basically not turning a hair about this atrocity; that's a total of 383,250,000 deaths. Where's the outrage? Where's the "Red Line"? Recently, a leader in the Arab community in Michigan passionately stated regarding the 2024 presidential election: “Don’t vote your conscience, vote strategically.” Perhaps, as opposed to dying on this hill and taking the entire human race with you, it would be better to find the cracks in the "system" and being part of the solution. WE ALL HAVE BLOOD ON OUR HANDS! Nader wasn't successful, nor Perot, nor Bernie from within the "system", nor RFK, nor West, nor Stein; all TRUTH TELLERS!. As bad a chance as humanity has of surviving the next 50 years, trying to burn everything down to make a point is a losing strategy. I'll be voting for another imperfect leader, just like the last 45 leaders that served as president of the USA; GET OVER IT and get to work and find the answer to getting the truth heard. JLW
Well said. A little perspective is definitely called for. Realpolitik is damned bloody stuff, sometimes, but voting strategically makes a hell of a lot more sense than striking a pose as some moral paragon and letting Donald Trump inch closer to the White House.
I couldn't agree more. JLW
I would vote for Harris if I lived in a swing state.
I would prefer to be in opposition to her rather than in opposition to Trump.
I'm in California so I can send a message by voting for Stein.
NO! These arguments fail if Trump is re-elected. That's why I'm voting for Harris, the only candidate who can beat Trump. Trump has expressed admiration for Russia, China, North Korea, and other dictatorships. What these have in common is that there is no effective political opposition. Reforming the Democratic party will be meaningless when the Democratic party is gone. This might happen during a second Trump presidency, based on what he has said he wants to do.
Although living in the Bay area at the time, I'm a 5th gen. Seattleite (not counting Native ancestry) and so followed Sawant's City Council campaigns. Seattle has a long, proud radical history. My ancestors were there for the 1919 General Strike. My grandfather the logger was a Wobbly (I.W.W.) As a blue collar activist, I fought the neolib takeover of the Dem party. In Nov. 1999, I participated in the anti-WTO demonstrations I'm proud to say became known as The Battle of Seattle. And in 2003, I was part of a group of explicitly religious people arrested in protest of the invasion of Iraq.
My activist credentials are well established. But there is another aspect to human experience, one that gives meaning to life. One either ignored or outright opposed by left brain hemisphere dominant intellectuals and strident doctrinaire leftists who don't understand. That's the side of spiritual encounters and direct mystical experiences. While religion has its obvious detriments, as does the ideal of democracy, its structures can serve to connect people to this other aspect. As well as with ethnic traditions. Like the way the identities of indigenous peoples are connected to spiritual understandings.
That's why this time I voted for Cornel West. However, I voted for Jill Stein in 2016 and applaud anyone supporting her. To hell with the vile dual aspect uniparty with their lust for unipolar empire and the endless wars that requires.
Yes, she supports Palestinians, a top, if not the top, priority for me but my she played a central role in dragging the city I live in, Seattle, into a crime ridden shit hole which we are finally emerging from.
Thanks Chris. I admire Kshama Sawant, she is a trail blazer.