Kshama Sawant

The deadly coronavirus pandemic has shaken our world. Working people face a triple-emergency – illness and loss of loved ones, severe job and income losses, and a worsening housing emergency.

The emergency will, unfortunately, last well beyond 2020. We cannot afford to wait until the health crisis is over to set in motion the massive jobs and housing investments that workers will need.

That’s why we’re fighting to tax Amazon and other big businesses, to fund immediate COVID-19 relief for working people, and then to go on in 2021 and beyond to fund a massive expansion of new, affordable, social housing and Green New Deal renovations of existing homes. These programs have the potential to create and support thousands of good, union jobs. We’re also fighting for a statewide suspension of rent, mortgage, and utility payments, because hundreds of thousands of working Washingtonians have been laid off or have lost wages through unpaid stay-at-home.

Through the work we’ve done since 2013, my Council office has shown how we can successfully build a new party of the working class, accountable to working people. We’ve built movements and won the $15/hour minimum wage, breakthrough tenant rights, Indigenous Peoples Day, and funding to divert our youth from the racist prison-industrial complex. We’ve organized successfully to defend seniors fighting to stay in their homes, to win a new Central District Post Office, to stop gentrification and outrageous rent increases, and to defend struggling small businesses. We have joined workers on countless picket lines, and with youth in inspiring climate strike actions.

We live in one of the richest cities in the richest nation on earth. There is no shortage of resources. Yet the current economic and political system has given working people recession, unemployment, underemployment, and homelessness.

Another world is both possible. Indeed, it’s necessary.

If the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us anything, it’s that the existing profit-hungry capitalist system has failed the vast majority of working people. And it will continue to fail us. We must organize our own independent political movements, raise our demands, and fight for our rights as working people. As a member of Socialist Alternative, I recognize that we have to fight for a socialist society, one that puts people’s needs before corporate profits. My Council office will proudly continue to serve as an organizing center for movements to fight for that change. I welcome your ideas, your energy, and your involvement!

In solidarity,

Kshama Sawant
District 3