Meet Kshama Sawant. Seattle's newest city council member. A member of the Socialist party.

[Birnin Zana]

Damn, $15/hr is still only $31,200/yr.

And that's before taxes.

 

[Colilluminati]

I hope they get it.

 

[No1]

I don't know @The Real, @Ed MOTHERfukkING G may be onto something. I don't know much about the last paragraph though. It just looks like her ideas will be tough to implement.

Seattle City Councilmember-elect Kshama Sawant recently displaced a longtime business friendly incumbent from the city council, and is noteworthy for her status as an avowed socialist. In many ways, I hope her political career blossoms so as to provide sensible liberals with someone noteworthy to triangulate against. Senator Bernie Sanders is in some technical sense a socialist, but his views don't seem distinct from those of a dozen or two other Democratic Party Senators.

By contrast, this from Sawant is some real socialism. Boeing is getting a bunch of orders for its new 777X planes. They tried to use the lure of building those planes in Washington State to get the Machinists' Union to agree to some concessions in other areas of negotiation. The Machinists said no. So on the face of it, 777X-production is going to end up somewhere else. Sawant thinks the union should counter by seizing the means of production:

“The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don't need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do,” she said.
Sawant says after workers “take-over” the Everett Boeing plant; they could build things everyone can use.

“We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she told KIRO 7.
Can Boeing's front-line workers actually retool an airplane factory and turn it to bus production and win contracts to sell buses that raise enough revenue to keep everyone employed? Only time will tell for sure, but in the real world the answer is "no." This is exactly what you need executives for. Retooling plants, establishing relationships with suppliers and customers, understanding the size of the market for buses, and all that other stuff is a non-trivial task.

Meanwhile, here's the socialist take on land use:

“The first thing we need is a council that will defend existing housing and not destroy existing housing in the name of density & sustainability.”

Let's just say I disagree. I have seen some interesting research, though, on urban planning in the communist bloc. What it shows is that whereas in capitalist countries urban cores are denser than urban fringes because the land in the core is more expensive, that's not the case in socialist cities such as Moscow. In those places a relatively non-dense core tends to be ringed with new high-density construction, because the high market price of land in the core doesn't translate into new development. Why it would be good for Seattle to emulate that pattern and push investment out into the suburbs and encourage sprawl is beyond me.
​

He definitely kind of went off target there at the end, but it's food for thought and it's something I personally know noting about. But like him, I hope she is successful politically. Ideas like her become less fringe and more open to mainstream discussion can only help.

 

[Ed MOTHERFUCKING G]

She is literally talking about the workers union taking over a production plant owned by a private business and using it for their own use....because they think they dont need their bosses...

Wow


@KingpinOG
Your thoughts.

 

[Type Username Here]

She is literally talking about the workers union taking over a production plant owned by a private business and using it for their own use....because they think they dont need their bosses...

Wow


@KingpinOG
Your thoughts.

Yes, she is literally advocating socialism. I expect a socialist to do that.

 

[Ed MOTHERFUCKING G]

Yes, she is literally advocating socialism. I expect a socialist to do that.

Point taken lol

 

[The Real]

I don't know @The Real, @Ed MOTHERfukkING G may be onto something. I don't know much about the last paragraph though. It just looks like her ideas will be tough to implement.



He definitely kind of went off target there at the end, but it's food for thought and it's something I personally know noting about. But like him, I hope she is successful politically. Ideas like her become less fringe and more open to mainstream discussion can only help.

To me, that looks like inflated rhetoric designed to appeal to the workers (typical politician talk,) but as we're just looking at soundbites, it's difficult for me to judge. It also looks more like a threat to Boeing than an ideal plan of action. Anyway, if indeed she's being absolutely clear that should Boeing move, they'll just repurpose the plant, there are proper ways of going about such a thing. I'd find it hard to believe that she means that workers will just take over the plant with no executives whatsoever and that it will magically turn into an automobile factory or whatever overnight.

 

[No1]

To me, that looks like inflated rhetoric designed to appeal to the workers (typical politician talk,) but as we're just looking at soundbites, it's difficult for me to judge. It also looks more like a threat to Boeing than an ideal plan of action. Anyway, if indeed she's being absolutely clear that should Boeing move, they'll just repurpose the plant, there are proper ways of going about such a thing. I'd find it hard to believe that she means that workers will just take over the plant with no executives whatsoever and that it will magically turn into an automobile factory or whatever overnight.

I'd hope not, it just happened to show up in my Twitter feed. It sounded like Worker's Control Theory gone wrong.

 

[88m3]

A good start would be a guillotine in every city square.


Unemployment could also drop if the disenfranchised are hired to round up the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.

 

[Type Username Here]

A good start would be a guillotine in every city square.


Unemployment could also drop if the disenfranchised are hired to round up the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.

Now you're talking.

 

[Black smoke and cac jokes]

m is thousand, mm is million, and i illustrated their options, one of which is raising prices.

Try again kiddo.

So there's still no need to fire people due to the increase. It will benefit the economy long-run, no matter what the initial downturn or panic is, something the government seriously need to consider.

 

[Ed MOTHERFUCKING G]

So there's still no need to fire people due to the increase. It will benefit the economy long-run, no matter what the initial downturn or panic is, something the government seriously need to consider.

You have a radical misunderstanding of both micro and macroeconomics, in addition to inflation and its effect on growth.

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

You have a radical misunderstanding of both micro and macroeconomics, in addition to inflation and its effect on growth.

Inflation is understated for sure, but raising minimum wage wouldnt affect that much, and if it did, it may even reduce it. Could reduce welfare payments by the gov't, assuming there wouldn't be massive layoffs..which I think is a fallacious law as defined in finance/micro/macro.

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Honestly, it makes sense in theory that more people will lose jobs with a higher minimum wage, but if you think about it..who and where would the loss in jobs come from, practically speaking? McDonalds gonna develop machinery to produce their food instead of pay employees a little more? If anything, super small businesses would take a hit, but they could receive some added tax breaks or put more employees on commission as an offset.

There is something to be said in the companies could invest in equipment that could eventually be written off in depreciation, but that is an age old practice and I believe that the companies who can do that, pretty much already do.

 

[Black smoke and cac jokes]

You have a radical misunderstanding of both micro and macroeconomics, in addition to inflation and its effect on growth.

oh I do, then enlighten me wise one