News
Street Roots • September 22-28, 2017
PH O TO S C O U R T E S Y O F K SH A M A SAW AN T
BY EMILY GREEN
forced them to recognize it and respond. A
year and a half ago, the mayor of Seattle -
now going to be the former mayor - Ed
Murray, stated an emergency around the
homelessness crisis. But the actual policies
that have followed have been anywhere from
meager to nonexistent.
One policy that has been followed
systematically is the one policy that should
not be carried out - sweeps of homeless
STAFF WRITER
efore Kshama Sawant won a seat on
the Seattle City Council, she was a
prominent organizer within the city’s
Occupy movement. Now in her fourth year
at City Hall, the former software engineer
B
and economics professor has rem ained
com m itted to activism.
A member of the Socialist Alternative
party, Sawant is a proponent of democratic
socialism and has been successful in leading
grassroots campaigns to benefit the working
class of her city. First came the Fight for
$15; more recently an income tax on the
rich; next up is rent control.
Originally from India, a country known for
extreme income inequality, she said it was
the breadth of poverty she witnessed in the
U.S. that she credits for her radicalization.
According to the party platform, Socialist
Alternative members believe the capitalist
system is the root cause of economic crisis,
poverty, discrimination, war and
environmental destruction. The party aims
to build a movement that will take the top
500 corporations into public ownership
under democratic control to end elite control
of global competition for profits and power.
During her bid for City Council, Sawant
announced she would take home no more
pay than the average Seattle worker. She
has lived up to that campaign promise,
keeping $40,000 of her $117,000 annual
salary and donating the rest to social justice
movements.
She’ll be in Portland on Sept. 30 to give
the keynote address at Portland Jobs with
Justice’s annual dinner, a fundraiser for the
coalition of more than 100 labor
organizations and community groups.
Sawant said Portland Jobs with Justice
has focused its efforts on the struggles she
believes working people in cities across the
country should be addressing. She plans to
discuss organizing, movement building and
the direction of the left at the Portland
dinner.
In advance of her Portland appearance,
encam pm ents, because (the sweeps) they
K sham a Saw ant (above) participates in a March 31 rally urging A m azon to hold its
contractors accountable. Security Industry Specialists, a security contractor, came underfire
fo r its treatment o f M uslim workers. Sawant, a socialist activist, has also fought against big
banks’ unethical practices and fo r defunding the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Sawant spoke with Street Roots about her
strategy for fighting homelessness in Seattle
and how the nation needs to strengthen its
labor movement. We began our interview
with a question from Street Roots vendor
Charles McPherson.
C harles M cPherson: My wife and I want
to start a recreational marijuana grow and
use the money to build homes for the homeless.
What do you think about private businesses
fu n d in g housing for the homeless?
K sham a (“Shaw-m a”) Sawant: I think
given the massive crisis in affordable
housing and the explosion of homelessness,
we have to pinpoint that the sources are not
at all what the economists and many
corporate politicians will have us believe,
which is individual responsibility. But as a
matter of fact, the explosion of the
homelessness crisis is a symptom of how
deeply dysfunctional capitalism is and also
how much worse living standards have
gotten with the last several decades of the
pushback against labor unions and against
organizing and the decimation of mass
movements.
I think one of the starting points to
change this situation is for us to build mass
movements, and we demand that big
business is taxed to deal with the question of
homelessness, specifically, taxing big
corporations to generate the revenues to
build enough affordable housing units so that
we can completely eliminate the problem of
homelessness. I absolutely think that we
should be doing that. I would focus primarily
on the most profitable organizations that
have made millions if not billions for a small
number of people who have benefited from it
and left the rest of us at the wayside.
I want to add one more point on the
question of homelessness, because it’s on
the forefront of the homelessness issue in
Seattle, and that is the question of how the
City Council and the mayor respond to the
problem of homelessness.
Homelessness now, not just in Seattle but
in King County, the greater Seattle region,
has been so acute that it has forced
politicians - even though they may
ordinarily simply pay lip service - it has
are inhumane and ineffective. In this last
year alone, the mayor carried out 601
sweeps of homeless encampments. And it
hasn’t made, as you might imagine, any dent
in the homelessness problem because when
you sweep homeless people without any real
options for housing, they’re just going to
come back there or go somewhere else
because they need to exist somewhere, but
the homelessness situation remains
unchanged. And we don’t even know how
much money our city has spent on this
because there is no budget line item that
says, “This is how much the mayor spent on
sweeps.” All the departments - the
department of public utilities, the
department of transportation, the police
department - the personnel of those
departments are used on a regular basis to
carry out these sweeps. So I would estimate,
without adding a number that I have asked
for but not got, I would imagine at least
millions have been spent on those hundreds
of sweeps - millions of taxpayer money in
the context of the most regressive tax
system in the entire nation.*
There is massive outrage at the fact these
sweeps are being carried out with almost
zero solutions for housing. I am outraged
about it, and what we are talking about right
now, our movement, is to make the business
tax more progressive but also put more on
big corporations so that small businesses
pay less than they are now but big
businesses pay more than they are now, so
that we can raise $160 million over five
years to build 1,000 units of affordable
housing every year that could be targeted
See SAWANT, page 5