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Outside the spheres, the city is a colder place. In the nearby neighborhood of Wallingford, a newly erected outpost of small wooden shacks offer shelter for 22 of Seattle's homeless residents. This is a "tiny house village," sanctioned by the city as a kind of middle ground between living at a street address and on the street. The buildings sit in the corner of a parking lot across from a seafood restaurant, shielded from view by a metal fence. Each shack, painted with one of the bold colors of a Crayola starter pack, offers electricity and a roof sturdier than the tents in Seattle's increasingly common homeless encampments. Every resident is issued a window fan for the occasional hot day, and the people here hope to receive heaters before winter. But the small collections of potted petunias and pothos that sit in front of their temporary homes are unlikely to survive the city's harshest months.
Seattle, like a lot of American cities, has become a boomtown split between haves and have-nots. Here, though, many of the haves can be ID'd from afar by the blue lanyards hanging from their necks as they swarm fast-casual restaurants during lunch hour. Amazon is Seattle's largest employer, its greatest occupier of office space, and its most prized economic engine. The company is also one of the reasons the city has endured skyrocketing housing prices, ever-expanding waves of gentrification, and a huge spike in homelessness over the past several years.
By reaching a level of success that outpaced even its own ambitious projections, Amazon has detonated what some critics call a "prosperity bomb" in Seattle, leaving the less affluent to deal with the fallout. Kshama Sawant, a City Council member who has cast herself as the local foil to CEO Jeff Bezos, wants to lob a bomb right back. "It is class warfare," she tells me, as the chants from an anti-ICE protest at Seattle's immigrant detention center ring out behind us. Here, among Seattle's activist left, she's in her element-passersby greet her warmly every few minutes, and a woman wearing a Seattle Fire Department sweatshirt swoops in to take a selfie. "We cannot base our needs for affordable housing on whether or not the billionaires are going to agree with us. ... This is a consequence of capitalism. So we cannot expect those that are benefiting from the system to fight against the system."
Sawant's main topics of conversation regularly veer from talking local policy to the scourge of the global capitalist system, two seemingly distinct topics that she sees as deeply interconnected. She is one of the only socialists elected to public office in the United States, and she doesn't shy away from the fact her ideology puts her squarely at odds with America's most successful companies. In her four years on Seattle's City Council, her platform has included a $15-per-hour minimum wage and rent control for tenants. This year, the cause that thrust her into national headlines was a campaign to enact a per-employee tax, commonly known as a head tax, on Amazon and other large businesses in Seattle. The money raised would have been used to fund efforts to increase affordable housing and curb homelessness. The "Amazon tax," as she calls it, "would have been a shot in the arm for people in other cities saying we want a tax on Big Tech, too."
The head tax battle dominated local politics this spring, leading to regular street protests, City Council meetings that doubled as screaming matches, and a gong rung 6,320 times in front of City Hall to represent each of the homeless people sleeping outside in Seattle's King County. The conflict was partially the doing of Amazon, which stopped construction on one of its buildings to oppose the proposal and poured money into an antitax political campaign. But it also belied a split between Seattle's traditional liberals and the so-called "far left," an ascendant faction nationally in the era of Donald Trump.
Riding a wave of disillusionment with both tech giants and the business-friendly policies of mainstream Democrats, Sawant has carved out a prominent space for leftist politics in local government. The backlash against the head tax, though, indicates that her platform may face resistance from corporate giants and everyday liberals alike. Her critics say her hardline rhetoric is a distraction that undermines efforts to achieve compromise between the government and the business community. But the head tax fight seems to have only calcified Sawant's us-vs.-them mentality. "If a politician is not willing to do the right thing because they face some opposition from big business, they are of no use to us," she says.
Comment: Black and white, us vs. them mentality. You can't reason with the ideologically possessed.
Whether it wants to be or not, Seattle has become an incubator for the ideological conflicts among liberals that are poised to erupt on the national stage during the midterm elections and beyond. As the city struggles to decide just how far left it wants to drift, housing prices, Amazon's head count, and the homeless population all continue to rise. "We're fighting for a tax on big business to build affordable housing," Sawant says. "But underlying that demand is really a deeper question: Who has the right to live in our cities?"
Even at a young age, Sawant was acutely aware of the economic chasm between the extremely wealthy and the "vast ocean of poverty and misery" in Mumbai, India, where she grew up. Her activist streak was inflamed when she came to the United States in the mid-'90s to work as an engineer in North Carolina and saw that income inequality was a problem here as well. "To come to America, the richest country in the world, and see homelessness, poverty, just absolutely rampant racism ... that's what ultimately was the next step in me getting radicalized."
Sawant speaks with a low hum of intensity that spikes when she's describing the vagaries of capitalism. She rarely breaks eye contact. Many politicians, especially local ones, communicate in facts and figures, but Sawant speaks in ideas. She's less a legislator arguing for a specific agenda than a polemicist mapping out a new world order - "We need international solidarity among working people" - and actively seeking recruits.
Comment: Wearing radicalism as a badge, eschewing facts for ideological talking points, actively seeking out recruits - these are all huge red flags. The idea of radically upending the global system, changing how everything works from the ground up, is never a good idea. Remember that revolutions are generally terrible and violent and claim many casualties. This woman should be looked upon as dangerous.
In 2009, working as an economics professor, she moved to Seattle and found a group that articulated her sense of disillusionment with the way the world functioned: the Socialist Alternative party. The political organization, which currently includes roughly 1,000 members across about 40 cities, advocates for public ownership of the world's 500 biggest corporations to upend the global capitalist system. This puts Sawant and her party far to the left of Bernie Sanders, who identified as a socialist but ran for president as a Democrat and supported private ownership of companies. "I recognized that this is what I've been looking for: an explanation of the global ills and a confirmation of my own understanding that these are systemic problems and will need systemic solutions," Sawant says. "That is what I got from being part of Socialist Alternative, a Marxist critique of capitalism. But not just that - a strategy to get organized as a working-class person."
Socialist Alternative was active in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with Sawant serving as an organizer in Occupy Seattle. The group wanted to channel the anticorporate furor of the moment into longer-lasting political action, so it backed Sawant as a candidate for state representative in 2012. She says she was "somewhat horrified" at the prospect of being a politician. She ran, though, to support the will of the party. She lost to the incumbent speaker of the house, but her nearly 30 percent share of the vote made Socialist Alternative think she was politically viable. "We don't want to run just to bring up issues," says Josh Koritz, a party member who worked on Sawant's 2012 campaign. "We want to run to win."
The next year she ran for Seattle City Council, making the burgeoning $15-per-hour minimum wage movement the centerpiece of her platform. She beat a 16-year council incumbent by about 3,000 votes, and Seattle became the first major city to institute such a high minimum wage in 2014. "She was a very effective candidate in 2012, and she's only gotten better since then," Koritz says. "She's very good at connecting with the anger that people have and bringing it to the surface."
Eventually, her ire turned toward Amazon. The online retail giant spent its first decade in Seattle in a few office buildings spread throughout the city, but in the mid-2000s committed to building a centralized urban campus. The company secured nearly 2 million square feet of office space in the largely undeveloped South Lake Union, a massive land grab that was supposed to accommodate Amazon's growth through 2016. But by 2012, the company had committed to another 3.3 million-square-foot complex closer to the core of downtown, which would include several high rises and the tropical workspace housed in glass spheres. Today Amazon controls more than 8 million square feet in the city, nearly 20 percent of Seattle's prime office space. It's gone from 5,000 local employees to 45,000 in eight years. "They grew at a pace that even they didn't expect, and nobody really expected," says Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, a lobbying group for Seattle businesses.
The strain on the city during this period has been obvious. Housing stock has not kept pace with the torrid job growth spurred by Amazon and expanded footprints for rivals Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Apartment rents increased 64 percent between 2010 and 2017, and home prices seem to reach record highs every month. The median household income rose nearly $10,000 in a single year, a signal less of a rising tide than a tsunami of well-paid transplants. In an assessment of the 100 largest metro areas in the United States, the Brookings Institution found that Seattle ranked third in prosperity, measuring the increase in wealth in a community. But the city ranked 86th in inclusion, measuring how that wealth is distributed among individuals. "Seattle has gotten much more expensive. Even if my wage is going up, [if] it's not going up as fast as the cost of living is rising, then my real standard of living is actually declining," says Joe Parilla, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. "You have people who are earning a lot of money at a company like Amazon right next to people that are either serving them coffee or working at a restaurant."
Still, Parilla says it's unfair to lay the problems associated with Seattle's growth solely at Amazon's feet. The company notes that its presence has led to the creation of 53,000 other jobs in Seattle and helped drive the unemployment rate down from 9 percent in 2010 to 3.7 percent today. Amazon estimates that it brought an additional $38 billion to the local economy between 2010 and 2016, outside its own multibillion-dollar outlay. And it says it has paid tens of millions of dollars to the city for affordable housing. Through a partnership with Mary's Place, a local nonprofit serving homeless women and families, the company has provided shelter for more than 350 families since 2016. Amid its current building spree, Amazon is planning a Mary's Place shelter in one of its downtown office buildings, which will house at least 300 people per night. "It's our first permanent home," says Mary's Place executive director Marty Hartman. Typically the nonprofit converts vacated buildings slated for demolition into temporary shelters. "Knowing that we don't have to leave is something every family wants, right? To be stable, to set roots. And for Mary's Place, [Amazon has] made that possible."
Despite Amazon's charitable efforts, Seattle infrastructure is increasingly littered with graffiti tags like "Amazon Get Out" and "Fuck Bezos." The tensions between Amazon and its home city came into stark relief when the company announced in September it was going to choose a second headquarters through a thirst-inducing public bidding process. The HQ2 search was an acknowledgement that Amazon was getting too big for Seattle. It also hinted that Seattle might be getting too unpleasant for Amazon. Five City Council members signed a letter to Bezos apologizing if the company felt "unwelcome" in the Puget Sound, an olive branch meant to keep HQ2 in Washington. Sawant dismissed the letter as "craven" and called for Amazon to be taken under democratic public ownership.
With no chance of an Amazon takeover, a tax would have to do. Sawant had been pushing for a head tax in Seattle since her first year on the City Council, to no avail-a previous head tax, adopted in 2006, was repealed after it was deemed a drag on the economy during the recession. But the optics of such a tax were changing fast. Seattle's homelessness problem was declared a state of emergency in 2015 and showed no signs of slowing, exceeding 12,000 people countywide this year. President Trump's corporate tax cut enriched big business, landing Amazon a windfall estimated at nearly $800 million. Thanks to the company's high-flying stock, Bezos became the richest man in the world in October.
In November, after another head tax measure failed, the City Council formed a task force to gather insight from the community on how best to raise money to fight homelessness. Amazon and other businesses were invited to participate. Most chose not to. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce said an onerous head tax was a "predetermined outcome" of the task force, so taking part didn't make sense.
As the task force's deliberations took place in City Hall, Sawant drummed up anti-Amazon sentiment on city streets. She hosted a Tax Amazon town hall in Seattle's historically black Central District, which she represents, and organized regular protests outside the company's tourist-friendly spheres. Socialist Alternative members crowded the City Council chambers, with one meeting growing so raucous that the council emptied the room. Not everyone agreed with Sawant's tactics, even among those who believed Amazon should be taxed. "She said the enemy is Bezos," says Teresa Mosqueda, a fellow City Council member. "I say the enemy is income inequality."
But Amazon itself helped turn the head tax debate into a sparring match on May 2. As the City Council was settling on a $500-per-employee tax proposal, Amazon paused construction on a new tower and floated the idea of subleasing its office space in another, pending the head tax vote. The tactic put the fate of 7,000 potential Seattle jobs in question. Mosqueda, who cosponsored the head tax and was among the City Council members in negotiations with Amazon, recalls officials from the company visiting her office that day. "They walked in and I held up that press release, or the news coverage of it, and I was like, 'What are you guys doing?'" she says. "It felt like a threat, and that's the reality of what it was."
As Amazon executives were starting to play hardball, some if its workers were mobilizing as well. Aubrey Pullman, a lighting artist in the company's video game division, was among about 60 employees who signed a letter to Amazon's leadership urging the company to support the head tax. Though he describes his work environment as mostly apolitical, he also spoke at City Council meetings in support of the tax, believing it was important for the community to know that not everyone at Amazon was against the initiative. He was surprised how vehemently his company opposed the tax, given its immense wealth. "When I first joined Amazon, I didn't really see the businesses as a problem," he says. "As I see how we've behaved in these situations where we're opposing a progressive business tax to support city services and the well-being of the city, I've become less positive about being an Amazon employee."
On May 14, when City Council members filed into their chambers to vote on the tax, they were greeted by hundreds of passionate citizens. Some, waving red signs saying, "Tax Amazon, Housing for All," and identifying as socialists, urged the council to pass as large a tax as possible. Others, waving green signs asking, "Results First: Where Has Our Money Gone?," argued that the escalating homelessness crisis showed that the City Council wasn't using taxpayer dollars responsibly.
In reality, the decision of how much to tax businesses had already been made. Over the weekend, Mayor Jenny Durkan had urged the City Council to lower the tax to $250 per employee. The figure represented the most Amazon had told the mayor it'd be willing to pay, according to the Seattle Times (Durkan's mayoral campaign was backed by a pro-business group funded heavily by Amazon). Ultimately, the mayor and the council settled on $275 per employee for companies earning $20 million or more in annual revenue. The tax would raise about $47 million per year for five years to fund 591 affordable housing units and a variety of services for the homeless. Amazon would have to pay about $11 million per year. Though it was a big reduction from $500, Sawant still claimed the new law as a victory. "The message that we are sending is that working people, not just in Seattle but in every other city, can have the courage to take on one of the most powerful corporations in the world and the richest man in the world," she said before the vote. "And you can build a movement that can win."
"She's the Donald Trump in our midst."
Saul Spady is devouring a deluxe cheeseburger and a strawberry milkshake at Dick's Drive-In, a burger joint in the style of the original McDonald's, where you have to walk up to the orange-and-white outdoor stand to order a meal. This is not millennial kitsch (though the gentrified Capitol Hill neighborhood is also full of that) - Spady's grandfather opened Dick's in 1954, and the company now has six restaurants across the metro area. It's now unlikely to open another one in town, Spady says, in part because of the policies advocated by Kshama Sawant.
Spady, and many others, see Sawant as a provocateur heavy on divisive rhetoric but light on practical policies. Her socialist credentials and protest photo-ops garner her national attention, but they've also earned her plenty of ire in the city she represents. A lot of people in Seattle care less about a globalist vision than what's happening on their own streets with their own tax dollars. What happened after the head tax was passed may prove Spady's point.
Mayor Durkan signed the City Council ordinance on a Wednesday evening. By Thursday morning, a range of business community leaders, including Spady and executives from Amazon, were gathered at the offices of the Downtown Seattle Association to strategize a way to defeat the new law. Overall about 600 businesses were to be subject to the tax, including low-margin operators such as restaurants and grocery stores. "[The City Council] talked about Amazon so much that they forgot Seattle is an incredibly diverse economy that has both blue- and white-collar [jobs], tech and businesses like Dick's Drive-In, who would have been included in the tax as well," Spady says.
The group decided to push for a referendum on the November ballot, which would require signatures from thousands of Seattle residents. Such political efforts typically involve paying signature gatherers to stand on street corners with clipboards and rope in would-be voters. With enough money, an organization can strong-arm nearly any cause onto the ballot, and the antitax alliance was flush with cash. Amazon donated $25,000, and regional trade groups for grocers and food suppliers poured in even more. The business community, under the banner No Tax on Jobs, built up a war chest of over $450,000.
The group also amassed an army of 2,000 volunteers, who it says collected about 17,000 of the 48,000 total signatures the campaign gathered. Polling showed that the head tax wasn't popular among Seattle voters, many of whom expressed frustration with the City Council's inability to curb homelessness despite a ballooning city budget. "I'm not evil for being a fiscally responsible progressive," says Spady. "What we're really missing is a place for a fiscally responsible, moderate progressive Democrat. ... There's a lot of those people here, and they're people who totally understand how to run a small business or a union or their own budget at home. They're asking the council to do the same thing."
Supporters of the head tax launched a countereffort called Bring Seattle Home. The campaign raised almost all of its $145,000 in funding from Service Employee International Union, which lobbies heavily to influence labor battles across the country. Members of Socialist Alternative and other activist groups staffed public tables in an effort to persuade people to cancel their referendum signatures.
Both sides were digging in for a long summer fight. Sawant was planning a meeting on June 30 to start organizing a grassroots movement to win in November. But the meeting never happened. On June 12, the City Council voted 7-2 to repeal the head tax, stunning advocates on both sides (Sawant and Mosqueda voted against the repeal).
In a meeting punctuated by jeers from the largely tax-supporting crowd, City Council members reiterated that they supported the tax in theory but felt that unfavorable polling and the deep pockets of the opposition made the referendum unwinnable in November. Nationally, headlines declared that the city had meekly "bowed to Amazon." Locals have plenty of other theories for what happened: The SEIU refused to fund a losing, monthslong campaign; the mayor didn't want the unpopular head tax sucking political oxygen from her other November initiatives; or council members feared losing their seats in the next election over the vote (City Council members Mike O'Brien and Lisa Herbold, who cosponsored the head tax proposal, did not respond to requests for comment). Whatever the case, the head tax was widely perceived as a political loser. Moments before the council killed the tax, though, Sawant was characteristically defiant. "It's magical thinking to believe that somehow you will be able to win a tax like this without making enemies out of Jeff Bezos," she said. "No, Jeff Bezos is our enemy."
Comment: It's amazing how focused on Bezos Sawant is. Maybe if she wasn't so obsessed with trying to best a mythical evil beast she'd uncloud her eyes enough to find a more practical solution.
The months of speeches, negotiations, anti-Amazon signs, and protests ultimately produced nothing for Seattle. Sawant had become the name most closely associated with the tax, but she did not cosponsor the initial ordinance or chair the task force that hammered out its details. Her coalition of working-class people did not encompass all of Seattle - at one of her protests she was shouted down by construction workers who'd been employed on Amazon projects and opposed the head tax. She was not even aware the tax was being killed off until it was already dead. Opponents of the head tax see this as proof that Sawant's lone-wolf, no-surrender strategy doesn't work. "The simplistic, politically convenient rhetoric, I don't think is meaningful and moves a lot of voters in Seattle," says Scholes, the Downtown Seattle Association president. "I think she was really unhelpful to [her] cause and helped galvanize the rest of the city."
Sawant insists that by knocking on doors and reaching out to everyday people, her side could have reversed public opinion on the head tax the same way they were able to build momentum for a $15-per-hour minimum wage. She seems to blame Democrats as much as she blames Amazon for the head tax's collapse. "All the council members in Seattle are Democrats except for me," she says. "And seven of them engaged in this cowardly capitulation at the first sign of attack from big business. That is why it is really important for our movement to build our own strength independent of the Democratic Party."
Greg Casar watched the head tax saga unfold with great interest from Austin, Texas, where he serves as a City Council member for one of the city's lowest-income districts. Austin is one of the finalist cities for Amazon's HQ2, along with 19 others that have been placed in a kind of municipal deathmatch by the tech giant. The way Amazon influenced the head tax debate made Casar more wary of bringing Amazon's new headquarters to his home. "Having seen Amazon lead the fight to repeal such a reasonable tax in Seattle, that would help significantly address issues of homelessness in that city, it really cast a doubt in my mind about whether or not we want to see Amazon expand in Austin," he says. "We already in Texas have had so many laws repealed and options taken away from us, that having Amazon be a part of that I think could make things even worse."
Casar was one of five City Council members in HQ2 cities to sign a joint statement urging finalists not to offer Amazon cushy tax incentives. If Amazon does come to Austin, he wants the company to be proactive in helping address the inevitable challenges regarding affordable housing and income inequality. "If they want to participate as a part of our community, then their labor practices, their antiunion stance, their antiredistribution stance need to change," he says. "Based on their behavior in Seattle, it seems unlikely that they're going to step up and offer more."
Casar is a Democrat, but he's also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States. DSA has more than quadrupled its membership since the election of Trump, to about 37,000 as of May. The organization, and socialist ideals more generally, got another huge boost last month, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off a surprise victory over a 19-year congressional veteran in New York's Democratic primary. Casar paraphrased the DSA's newly world-famous member when we spoke: "In the richest country in the world, people shouldn't be too poor to live."
Ocasio-Cortez is not the only leftist to rise to prominence in the Trump era. Four women backed by DSA won Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania's state Legislature in May. Black Lives Matter organizer and DSA member khalid kamau recently won a City Council seat in South Fulton, Georgia. Socialist Alternative member Ginger Jentzen raised the most money ever in a Minneapolis City Council campaign, though she lost her race. All told, the DSA now has at least 35 members serving in public office across the United States. That's a far cry from the thousand-plus socialists elected in the early 20th century, but it's an improvement for the movement over 2013, when Sawant's election was a complete outlier.
This is the lens through which Sawant tries to frame the head tax defeat. She sees her work in Seattle as part of a broader national and international cause, the beginnings of a long struggle against "capitalist-oriented politics." "It's a confirmation of what we've been saying in Socialist Alternative, that there's a huge openness to socialist ideas," she says of the recent leftist victories. "I think that for millions of young people in the United States-the millennial generation, people in their teens, 20s, 30s, even in their 40s-socialism is not a dirty word. What's crystallizing in the minds of millions of these young people is the capitalist system, as it's on offer, is not working."
Comment: Actually, it seems to be the opposite: more millennials seem to be turning to more conservative viewpoints. See:
Despite the advances of her movement nationally, Seattle's housing crisis is no closer to being solved than when the head tax debate started. Sawant is vague on next steps, saying that the confirmation of the annual city budget in the fall will provide a new opportunity to raise the housing issue. Spady envisions leasing government-owned lands to developers at a discounted rate in exchange for mixed-income, dorm-style housing near public transit stations. He also sees Amazon's partnership with Mary's Place as a promising development model. But rezoning residential areas is an entirely separate political battle just as controversial as raising taxes. What's more concrete is the typical political wrangling for council seats - Socialist Alternative wants to assemble a team of leftist candidates to run with Sawant in 2019, while Spady is hoping to oust all the councilmembers up for reelection and install a fresh, more business-friendly regime.
As for Amazon, the company is set to announce its HQ2 city (and likely a huge tax incentive package) later this year. On Monday, its stock hit an all-time high. Sawant, its most vocal local critic, is defeated for now, left only to seethe about "the ferocity of big business and the capitalist class." Life inside the great glass bubble couldn't be much better.
Comment: Massive corporations that exploit workers and drive a further gap between income brackets are indeed a problem. But the socialist proposed solution is naive on its surface and downright dangerous at its core. If solutions are to be found, the ideologues should be shunted to the sidelines while those with a realistic understanding of the problem try to work it out.
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