JAISAL NOOR: Welcome to The
Real News. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore. "Tax the rich." That was the
rallying cry as the Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously passed an income
tax for its wealthiest residents. Critics are vowing a legal challenge, but
supporters like our next guest say the 2.25% tax on those earning more than a
quarter of a million dollars or households earning more than half a million
dollars will annually raise about $140 million every year, help fund social
services, and perhaps lead to a lowering of some of Seattle's other high taxes,
which are considered some of the most regressive in the country.
Now joining us to discuss this
is the bill's cosponsor, Kshama Sawant. She's the first socialist elected to
Seattle's City Council in over a century. Thanks so much for joining us.
KSHAMA SAWANT: Thank you for
having me.
JAISAL NOOR: I wanted to first
get your response to critics who say this is unconstitutional and it's illegal
in the state of Washington because no income tax is allowed in Washington. Give
us your response to that.
KSHAMA SAWANT: First of all,
Jaisal, if you don't mind I just wanted to give a certain background context
for your viewers about what this actually means. We are in an era of Donald
Trump, a racist, misogynist bigot who's in the White House who's vowed a war
against workers and labor unions and is a billionaire himself and has an
administration that is wealthier than any other US presidential administration
in history. At that same moment, we are seeing incredible victories being won
by social movements organized by workers and young people. For example, 15 Now,
the movement that we started in Seattle, that Socialist Alternative started in
Seattle, has now gone nationwide. Just less than a week ago, 15 Now Minnesota
just won a landmark victory with winning $15 an hour for Minneapolis workers.
This is the first Midwestern state to win $15 an hour.
Yesterday in Seattle, as you
said, Jaisal, we just won a tax on Seattle's rich. This was won because of the
movement of working people, as I said, and led by socialists and other
activists. If you look at the state of Washington, where Seattle is, Washington
has the most regressive tax system in the entire nation. For decades, a
ferocious, punishing burden of tax revenues has been put on the shoulders of the
poorest people, of lower-income people, of middle-class households, while the
richest corporations, like Boeing and Microsoft, make out like bandits, not to
mention the billionaire and millionaire super-wealthy households. This tax is
extremely important.
The state law at this moment
is at best ambiguous about it. We know there will be a lawsuit by Republicans,
by the right wing, by the billionaire class, but the point is, throughout
history we've seen that where you have unjust laws, you can't ... If you have a
different vision of society, you can't just sit back and say, "Well, we
have an unjust law. What can you do?" No. The example of abortion rights,
civil rights, marriage equality, all of these examples show that when
grassroots activists take to the street, build fighting movement in their
cities and in their states, their supreme court will follow, so we want to
challenge this in the court.
JAISAL NOOR: Critics say this
is going to drive away the wealthy from Seattle. I wanted to play a clip of Fox
Business News's Stuart Varney. He had some choice words for the bill. Let's
give it a listen.
STUART VARNEY: Can we be
clear? This tax is punitive. It is punishment for success, and it won't work.
Remember, Maryland imposed a millionaire's tax some years ago. That didn't
work. The rich simply moved. Remember also that Seattle imposed a much bigger,
higher minimum wage. That led to employees working fewer hours and taking home
less pay. The poor are no better off. In fact, they lose ground. Youth unemployment
goes through the roof. Businesses move and hire fewer people, and the rich move
to Texas or Florida.
JAISAL NOOR: That's Fox
Business News. That is the outlet for the right-wing elite. They're saying it's
not going to work. Give us your response.
KSHAMA SAWANT: It's not
surprising that the right wing and the business class and wealthy people have
this completely false, as far as I'm concerned, false narrative of capitalism.
He says this is going to be punitive? No. Actually, what we have right now, the
status quo under capitalism is that working people, young people, the poor, and
the middle class are punished every single day, and they're the ones that are
responsible for the success, for productivity, for the creation of wealth. Who
creates the wealth? It's workers who go to work every day and make our cities
run and get so little in return that they are barely able to pay the
skyrocketing rents. They're barely able to pay for food, clothing, and
healthcare for their families.
As far as this economic argument
that Stuart Varney and other right-wing pundits are making, I speak not only as
a socialist right now but as a PhD economist, and I can tell you that there is
absolutely zero evidence for this voodoo economics that somehow minimum-wage
increases have resulted in economic destruction or that tax on wealthy people
will somehow result in all kinds of negative consequences. As a matter of fact,
all the evidence in economic studies, statistical evidence, shows that minimum
wage increases end up lifting workers out of poverty, and that a tax on
millionaires throughout history and geographically throughout the world has
been a social democratic measure under capitalism through which we can fund the
basic needs, the basic necessities of the millions of working people who go to
work every day and do not take home the lion's share of the wealth in our
system.
But I will make one more
statement, Jaisal. As a socialist, the reality is this. This is a bitter
reality, but it's absolutely necessary for us as social movements to confront
that the truth is that, even though minimum wage increases, taxes on the rich,
and such reforms will not have any direct negative impact on the economy, the
reality is that the capitalist class, the bosses, those who have an interest in
keeping this exploitative and oppressive system alive, they will find other
ways of undercutting our successes. It is not going to be enough simply to
fight for reforms like minimum wage increases or like taxing the rich. In fact,
we have to learn the lesson not only from the past but also what's happening in
other countries.
I'll give you an example. The
National Health Service in Britain has been a brilliant example of publicly
funded, affordable, quality healthcare, but by grossly underfunding it decade
after decade, both by Tories and by the Blairite Labour politicians, the NHS
right now is a shell of what it could be. It becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. If you're the boss, you underfund the program and you say, "Oh,
it doesn't work, so it needs to be taken back." Same with minimum wage
increases, taxes on the rich, and any other reform. They will find, the
capitalist class, the ruling class will find every other avenue to undercut the
reforms that we do win.
That is why my appeal to
everybody who's watching this is not only should we first of all get involved
in fighting movements to win these reforms — let's win a $15 minimum wage
federally, let's win a tax on the rich and tax on big corporations to fund
affordable and free public education, affordable Medicare for all, and all of
those gains — but let's go beyond that and fight for a different kind of system
than capitalism, because as long as the edifice of capitalism remains intact,
we will be forced to continue fighting for the same reforms over and over
again.
JAISAL NOOR: This speaks to
your point, but the other reason I wanted to play that clip is because it's not
just right-wing conservative Republicans that are opposing these measures. For
example, in Baltimore, the City Council, which is unanimously Democrat, earlier
this year passed a $15 minimum wage bill, but the Mayor of Baltimore, who's a
Democrat, who campaigned on promising to sign that legislation when it reached
her desk, she vetoed it. She vetoed it because she listened to those same
conservative arguments. I wanted to ask you, the rest of the City Council in
Seattle are Democrats as well. Talk about how you won them over to supporting
this measure and the other measures, like the $15 minimum wage that you've
championed.
KSHAMA SAWANT: Yes, Jaisal,
you're absolutely right, and I appreciate you mentioning what happened in
Baltimore, where the Democratic Mayor vetoed the $15 wage. A similar example we
saw only recently, where there was a grassroots movement for single payer
healthcare in the state of California. There were many rank-and-file just
regular people who identify as Democratic Party supporters who fought for it.
There were left-wing Democratic politicians who supported it. Then, at the end
of the day, the bill was pushed back and killed by the Democratic Speaker of
the House.
We see example after example
where, despite the differences, the real differences between the Democrats and
Republicans, at the end of the day, while the Democrats pay lip service, the
corporate Democratic establishment pays lip service to the needs of working
class people, at the end of the day their real allegiance and loyalty is to big
business, to the super wealthy, and to Wall Street.
To give you a counter-example,
as you said, we won Tax the Rich here, we won 15 here, and, as I said, recently
Minneapolis won 15.
How did they win that? They
don't have a socialist on the City Council even, yet, even though we have
Ginger Jentzen from Socialist Alternative running now for City Council from
Ward 3. But the reason they won in Minneapolis is the same reason that we won
15 here, is that we built 15 Now campaign, which is an independent grassroots
campaign, which means it is independent not only of big business but it is also
independent of the politicians that support big business. You build a momentum
strong enough that gets thousands of people out on the streets, you change
opinions, and polls indicate the strong support for 15.
It is under that kind of
pressure that the corporate politicians of City Hall in Minneapolis — again,
all Democrats, except for I think one Green Party Council Member — they all
voted yes because they were forced to. Only weeks before the City Council 15
Now vote in Minneapolis, they were hesitating on it, and the reason we won that
was because we built a grassroots campaign, like we did here. Tax the Rich, we
won that for the same reason.
Ever since I ran my first
campaign for City Council in 2013 as an open Socialist vowing to take the
average worker's wage and not taking a penny of corporate donations, it's since
then that we have been fighting for Tax the Rich. We raised it strongly on our
campaign banner in 2015 and during our reelection. This year there's been an
incredible coalition of organizations, including the labor movement, through a
[inaudible 00:11:42] Seattle effort in Seattle that we won this.
Other members here, even the
corporate council members, voted yes on it for two reasons. One is that it's
now become too politically expensive for them to oppose, because they will be
called out and it will be risky for their own reelections. But secondly, it's
also, you have to understand that the ruling class and its political
representatives, they pick and choose battles. They recognize that, because the
right wing ... The Democratic corporate politicians in Seattle recognize that
there will be a lawsuit in the state supreme court against this law, so why not
just get the credibility of the movement by saying, "I support it"?
Because you know it's going to be challenged anyway. I strongly feel that the
corporate politicians in the city have been talking to the business
representatives, the Chamber representatives that they hobnob with, and telling
them, "Don't worry, I'll vote yes on this, but it's going to be challenged
in the court."
The lesson to us is not only
that this victory shows we can win, but also we should not get hoodwinked by
this process and derive a lesson that we can just build a pressure group kind
of approach where we build a campaign but our main goal is to let politicians
know we're watching them and they should vote the right way. That goes only so
far. That is absolutely necessary, but that's only step one. We need to go
beyond that.
Our movements need to be
willing to break away and we need to break away from an organizing model where
we try to build relationships with individual corporate politicians, and
instead tell them, "We're fighting for workers. If you're on the side of
workers, you will vote the way we want. We are going to run independent candidates
of ourselves that represent the movement." We need that kind of deeper
challenge, and I hope that we can take the victories from Seattle and elsewhere
towards that effort.
JAISAL NOOR: Thank you so much
for joining us.
KSHAMA SAWANT: Thank you,
Jaisal.
JAISAL NOOR: You can go to
therealnews.com for all of our coverage on these important issues. Thank you so
much for joining us.
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