Chris Hedges has written a piece on Kshama Sawant of Seatle in another blog, and has described her as the “The Most Dangerous Woman in America” because she wants a $15 p/hr minimum wage, and she has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent.
She poses a real threat to our corporate masters and their agenda for our future.
The elites cannot let the Sawants of the world proliferate. Corporate power is throwing everything at its disposal—including sponsorship of a rival woman candidate of color—into this election in the city’s 3rd District.I'm a child of the sixties, so I think many of her proposals are just about right, but the children of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, I'm afraid are not so sure.They did not grow up in a time when families had to think about their son's being drafted and sent to a war that many of us knew we could not win, and should not be fought. Many of us took much longer to realize that Washington lied to us because they knew that the war could not be won while 58K brothers, friends and others went off to fight and/or serve. As always we have a generation gap of experiences. We lived during the time when JFK was President, and MLK Jr. spoke and organized. We also lived during a time when we landed men on the Moon, but also, we saw our President, his brother, Malcolm X, and MLK Jr. shoot down. We have different frames of reference that most of the new adults that are around us, and many of us are not happy with how we got from in many ways the better standard of living of our youth to today's horrible conditions. This time our country again is in deep trouble, because 90% of the country's wealth is held by 10% of the people, and 10% of the wealth is left to be divided by the remaining 90% of the people. The elites own this place like never before in our lifetime, and they are not good at sharing. The elites like it this way, and have worked for 40 or so years, to get it back this way again, and people like Kshama Sawant are beginning to challenge their idea of how things should be.
Sawant believes that because of the presidency of Barack Obama—who has served corporate power, expanded imperial wars, carried out a massive assault on civil liberties and failed to address the needs of the mounting numbers who are unemployed or underemployed—many people, especially young people, are hungry for political alternatives to “the two big business parties.”So, Daily Kos, is Chris Hedges right? Should we join with the elites to build fear of her and work to demonize and defeat her efforts, or is it possible she might be onto something that might make things better for our country's future?
