Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Hi, friends.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: This is talking strategy, making history. And we have a very special and I think excellent idea for today's episode.
It has to do with the electoral.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Results of recent times, which Dirac and.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: I have been talking about. Where most people on the left are really engaged in trying to understand and make use of and even celebrate these results.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: And the case we're going to talk.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: About today is that of Seattle.
New York has gotten this tremendous amount of publicity because of Mamdani's victory.
But in many ways the Seattle election of Kate Wilson is equally remarkable. And I think we have a good opportunity today to get the context historical and the groundwork that led to this electoral change transformation, if you will, or hope for transformation. We've got two people who have a lot of expertise, knowledge and insight in both of these areas.
Professor James Gregory of the University of Washington History Department, one of the leading labor historians in the United States, has among your other focal work. Focuses of your work has been understanding the history of labor struggle and the left in Seattle, I think. And Michael Laslett just recently retired as a national director of seiu, the Service Employees International Union, and based all these years, last 25, 30 years in Seattle, where he started as a organizer for SCIU decades ago and rose in the ranks of the union to be one of the leading organizer staff people there.
And he has a direct relationship with Kate Wilson over much of that time, which he will be sharing with us.
So, Jim, why don't you start with that historical background. I know you edited a book that was about the Seattle general Strike, which itself was a remarkable historical moment. So maybe that's an anchor or a beginning point for a quick capsule overview of why is Seattle politically fascinating, important, all of those things?
[00:02:43] Speaker C: Sure. Well, it's great to be with you. This is an exciting topic and we're awaiting the beginning of Kate Wilson's term in office. It was a surprise in many ways and because she came out of sort of out of left organizing and jumped into the race and defeated the favorite, Bruce Harrell. But in other ways, it's not a surprise Seattle has a reputation for radicalism, especially labor radicalism. It goes way well before the 1919 general strike, people were aware that Seattle was a place where radicals, IWWs and socialists in particular were very active in throughout. And the Seattle General Strike was one of a number of incidents that established an international reputation for Seattle.
Because of the headlines of that 1919 strikes, people began to associate Seattle with radicalism. And that's had an important political effect ever since.
A Reputation that has been renewed pretty much every generation by new groups of radicals. And partly the mechanism of renewal has to do with political migration.
A lot of the leftists, including Kate Wilson, who come to Seattle and do important things, innovative things, have arrived largely because of the reputation they're looking for, an interesting place to live. And they hear about Seattle's left wing reputation.
And that's been part of the whole process of renewing a tradition of radicalism across the generations.
So it happened after the general strike in the 1930s. There was a renewal in the 1960s and 70s, the renewal, and then, especially since the end of the millennium, Battle of Seattle. WTO demonstrations, which again caught international headlines, caused a lot of people around the world to know about Seattle as a place where interesting things are going on and some of them to move here, including Kate Wilson and her husband arriving a few years later, in part because they were looking for a place with this kind of political opportunities.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Where had they come from?
[00:05:12] Speaker C: They came from the East. She had been a student at Oxford and he was in the Bay Area for a while, as I understand.
And they got married and they both wanted to organize and were looking for new ways to be effective in creating lasting social movements.
And the story she tells is that they took Greyhound bus tour of several cities and decided Seattle is the place and moved here in 2004 and pretty quickly became very active in all sorts of political activities of the left.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: So I made the comment just a.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Moment ago that the general strike was itself remarkable.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: The very term general strike makes that 1919 event stand out. But what do we mean in this.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Case, just very briefly, what's the difference between a general strike and other kinds of strikes?
And briefly, what happened in Seattle?
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Well, the so called general strike is, I mean, it's a term used for calling out all or most of the labor movement in an act of solidarity. And that's what happened in 1919.
The shipyard workers launched a strike after World War I because they've been promised wage increases. And then they were denied. And when that strike started going sideways, they appealed to the Central Labor Council and all the unions. 101 union agreed to go out in solidarity with the shipyard workers. And so that's what the general strike was. It was a solidarity strike. And they've happened at other times in US history.
This was very memorable because of the context. It's right after World War I 1, the Red Scare is beginning. And so a lot of the media thought, oh, this is a revolutionary action. And they focused on the participation of the IWW and some others. So it. It attracted a lot of attention in newspapers around the world. It lasted only six days. And then the Central Labor Council decided it's not being effective. And then the unions went back to work. It had important effects in sustaining different kinds of radical energies in Seattle. But I think one of the most important effects had to do with the city's reputation. This idea that a lot of interesting radical things can happen have happened in Seattle and then other people moving here to be part of that, and then in doing so, they come up with new ideas that reinvent the kind of radicalism that's operating in the city.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Well, one other historical marker for me is illustrated by the name of the institute that you were director of, the Harry Bridges Labor Studies. And Harry Bridges was a notoriously dangerous.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Labor leader in the 30s.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: The FBI was after him all the time. He was came from Australia. There was constant effort to deport him. He was a communist by reputation. And now everything, everywhere you turn, there.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Are things named after him.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: And does he have a history in Seattle in particular?
[00:08:27] Speaker C: Well, he was based in San Francisco, a union that he kind of led first when it was part of the ILA and then created the ILWU a few years later in the 1930s, was largely based in San Francisco, but very active up and down the coast, including Seattle. So that the 1934 longshore strike that made the union was called. It became a general strike in San Francisco and nearly a general strike in Seattle at the same time, with a lot of other unions, in other words, supporting it. So, you know, that union has been very important to the history of this city as it is up and down the West Coast.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Yeah. And they helped. They sparked the general strike that we.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Were just talking about.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Daraka, do you have any questions right here.
[00:09:16] Speaker D: Well, I'm interested, Jim. Thank you for that introduction. But I'm interested if you could give an example of difference in political style or focus or issues sort of between these waves of radical upsurge in Seattle politics. Like, what's the difference between one wave to the next?
[00:09:39] Speaker C: Well, they're very different. That's a great question. And what we're seeing now is kind of unique. This is really the one time that Seattle's elected somebody who calls herself a socialist. And for most of these episodes, these waves, it's been more about labor radicalism in the streets and unions than it has been about electoral radicalism. So in the early part of the 20th century, there was a very active socialist movement here. And in some cities, Milwaukee, lots of cities, for that matter. Socialists managed to elect mayors and city council people.
A socialist ran for mayor in 1912 in Seattle and came in fourth for the most part. The Socialist party was too radical in this area and kind of tied to the IWW and not particularly interested in elections. So they were more interested in building unions and workplace power in that period in the 1930s.
That's where you see something that's somewhat similar to today, where after 1934, before 1934, socialists never wanted to run as Democrats. They hated the Democratic Party. 1934, that starts to change in California, Oregon and Washington with the epic movement of Upton Sinclair and what became the Washington Commonwealth Federation up here, where radicals moved into the Democratic party, organized a separate caucus, it was called the Washington Commonwealth Federation, put up candidates in primary elections, and they often won. So Seattle didn't elect a mayor in that period, but elected two congressmen, first Marion Zynchek and then Hugh Delacy. Both of them were basically communists and close to the Communist party.
And, you know, so there was an example of how the left kind of organized to do electoral politics using the Democratic Party. And all the way from about 34 to 1948 was very effective in this state. Several city council people were elected, but no mayor. So that's pretty similar.
But in the 60s and 70s, the left didn't really care about electoral politics. Organized directly for the fight for social justice, anti war and the like, not particularly interested in electoral politics. The return to an electoral strategy, I think is pretty recent. It really probably dates. And Michael will talk about this, I'm sure, from the minimum wage campaign, the fight for 15 in 2013 and 2014, which resulted in Seattle passing one of the first higher minimum wage laws in the nation.
And that was a political fight involved lobbying the city council.
And then a radical socialist, Shamma Sawant, Trotskyist socialist alternative, then ran for city council and won, to everybody's surprise. So she was really the first socialist in a couple of generations to appear to use electoral politics at a city level.
And ever since then, a number of other radicals have moved in and out of the city council.
And now we're going to have a mayor pulled off.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: So before we get into that, there's one other piece of the history that I think we ought to refer to, which has to do with the arrival of the gigantic high tech industry into Seattle. And how did that. And both. And Michael may want to comment on this too. How did that affect the city and the politics and all the rest of the.
[00:13:23] Speaker C: Well, that's really important. I mean, the demographic and political changes that have resulted in this, you know, turn turning Seattle into a cyber city, first with Microsoft, then with Amazon, employing hundreds of thousands of high tech workers, bringing high tech workers, has changed the whole feel of the city. The city has grown dramatically in the last 20 years in population.
It's changed the demography. It's a younger city more and more. I mean, I think it's one of the youngest adult populations of American cities because of tech workers, young tech workers being recruited. And then it's also changed the city from a city of homeowners to a city of renters. And so we have real. And the gentrification issues here have been really disruptive.
Much of the black population has been more or less forced out of the city by housing prices and rental evictions. And so housing is very expensive. It's led to a lot of grievances.
So Kate Wilson organized tenants and metro riders, bus riders, and speaks for the renting class in Seattle who are priced out of everything.
So young renters are who elected her and have really been very active at a city level in a way that's quite inspiring.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: So it sounds, if I can make this kind of comment, that Seattle is almost the perfect laboratory for examining the.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Class struggle in America.
That whole history that we just reviewed.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: We have pretty good information about who voted in the last election. And they're very clear zones where largely multifamily housing renters lived, as opposed to the single family housing district. So the renting class has been a big part of this, but a lot of them are high tech and highly paid young tech workers.
Guys, you know, the whole Amazon workforce is heavily male. They come straight out of the computer science programs and they're well paid. But I think what's interesting that we don't quite understand is that that group of employees, for all their privileges, seem to have a social conscious and a political conscious that has resulted in their willing to vote for radicals. And I think that that's kind of changing our whole sense of class and politics.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Yes, Michael, it really is your turn to pick up on this historical thread and bring it forward relating to the labor scene that you've been part of. You both you and Jim have been in that town before this advent of the Microsoft Amazon era. Right. And so you've been directly witnessing the very story that we were just talking about.
But let's talk about Kate Wilson and you.
[00:16:38] Speaker E: Okay, well, so I met Katie Wilson. So I've been a union organizer on and off for about 37 years. I moved to the Puget Sound to be part of the Labor Movement in 1993. And when I met Katie Wilson, I was at SCIU Local 925, which is an education and public service local of SCIU. SEIU as a whole is one of the top two largest unions in the state of Washington now. And I was working with employees at the University of Washington, actually, where Jim works. And we were embarking on what would now be called bargaining for the common good. We were looking for ways to engage not only the members of the union in bargaining, but also ways that the interests of the workers intersected with interests of community constituents.
And Katie had founded something called the Transit Riders Union, she and her husband and others.
And when we were kind of in a bargaining cycle in about 2015, 2016, one of the top issues that our members at the university were telling us mattered to them was the fact that they paid $600 a year for a transit pass. And you don't always get to predict what is the issue that's really going to spark people's outrage or interest, but this one really seemed to do that. And so we decided as kind of with our bargaining team and our rank and file leadership, to really make that an issue, that we were going to try and force the University of Washington to provide a free transit pass to its staff.
And part of that, I think, was provoked. People's anger about it was provoked by the fact that the staff were having to move farther and farther from the university because they just couldn't afford to live in the city anymore, and they couldn't afford to live specifically in the University district. So that was our campaign. We began building something called the U District Alliance. Katie Wilson and the Transit Riders Union joined us very, very early on. In fact, I was looking through some of my documents about it, and we wrote kind of a coalition letter to Ana Mari Cauce, who was a new president at the university at the time, calling on the university to address a series of issues, some of it having to do with transit, some having to do with housing, some having to do with the cost of childcare, you know, and just kind of the ways that the university was playing a role in the gentrification of the city. Because one thing we forget about at least, is for me, is that while Amazon is the largest employer in the city of Seattle, the University of Washington is the second largest employer. And so we built this coalition, and the campaign really lasted about three or four years. And Katie Wilson and the Transit Riders union stuck with Our coalition throughout. So, for instance, when we made demands on the university for a transit pass, Katie and her group would sometimes even come to the bargaining table and testify as a constituency group dedicated to affordable and high quality transit for why the university as an employer should help its employees get out of cars and use transit that they shouldn't have to pay out of their pockets to be able to do that. And she also was beginning has become much more sophisticated even since then. But even in those days, she was pretty smart about the ways that city politics could intersect with an institution like the University of Washington. And so at the same time that we were in bargaining over these issues, the university was in the middle of bargaining a new master plan with the city of Seattle. And that master plan kind of governs a lot of what the city is allowed to do as far as expansion and construction, etc. And so we had at our disposal kind of a lever, in addition to kind of our traditional bargaining power to try and get the university to do stuff. And so we went, with Katie's help and this coalition that we had built of other unions, other constituency groups, affordable housing organizations, to put pressure on the university through, through this master planning process around the issues that our members cared about. And over the course of those three years, we did win a free transit pass for staff at the university.
Interestingly, in the initial settlement, we only won it for union members. And so people who were, say, professional staff or were classified staff, but not covered by collective bargaining, they didn't get this at, you know, in the beginning, but kind of true to the, the ethos of bargaining for the common good, that you were trying to bargain over something bigger than just your own members, narrow interests. We said, well, that's not good enough. We need a free transit pass for everybody at the University of Washington. And so then it got expanded, you know, so we, we continued campaigning and Katie Wilson and the transit riders union went with us to regents meetings and other, you know, places that we could exercise leverage. And we continued to campaign for on this transit pass issue. And interestingly, our coalition included, say, neighborhood organizations that are around the university campus, who, they also would have preferred it that more employees at the university come to work on public transit so that, you know, the neighborhoods weren't clogged with traffic from everybody coming to work at the university.
In addition, we were fighting over affordable housing. The university is a huge landowner in the Seattle area, one of the biggest, you know, owners of large tracts of land. And so we kind of did research and figured out that part of their property could have could be turned over for the purposes of affordable housing. And Katie Wilson and the transit riders union had a pretty expansive view of what kind of the kinds of issues that they were willing to work on included. And so affordable housing was certainly part of it. So from that kind of experience with Katie Wilson and the transit riders union, one of the things that I would say about her run for mayor is that she had spent years and years and years building relationships of real trust with unions, with community organizations. And you know, when she first declared that she was going to run for mayor in the early part of this year, a lot of people that I knew, all of whom love Katie Wilson and the transit riders union, said, that's fabulous. But Bruce Harrell, who's the incumbent, kind of has this locked up. He had already gotten the big union endorsements. He'd gotten a lot of the progressive politician endorsements, Including Pramila Jayapal, kind of the leader of the progressive caucus in congress. And people were really surprised that Katie had decided to jump in and what looked like kind of a last minute and maybe kind of kind of quixotic run. Like, why was she doing this? What she's explained publicly is what motivated her to do it was that she had been very closely connected to an effort to organize for social housing in Seattle. And the movement really did not have a lot of support among kind of the official leaders of the city. Within the mayor's office, within the city council, There wasn't a lot of support for this notion of social housing. Katie was part of the coalition that first passed a citizens ballot initiative to create kind of an authority within the city of Seattle for social housing. That first effort did not include a funding mechanism. So they then had to go back to voters the following year to actually place a tax on wealthy corporations and individuals to fund a social housing system in the city. And in both cases, Bruce Harrell and the kind of established city elected leaders opposed the efforts of this citizen campaign. And what, what Katie says about why she thought she had a real chance was that the last vote on the funding mechanism for social housing had Bruce harrell as its very public opponent. He had put his face and name forward as the leader of the vote no campaign, and he lost that vote by like 20%. The community organization won that vote over organizing, won that vote overwhelmingly. Katie was seen as an acknowledged leader of that movement, and that's what made her believe that she could win. And so she began organizing and using these long standing relationships of real trust and respect that she had built over many, many years on transit, on affordable housing. She also led campaigns in some of the Seattle suburbs for a higher minimum wage. Seattle had led the way on that. Well, actually SeaTac had the place where the airport is, but other suburban towns began want, you know, workers wanted the same. And her, her organization, Transit riders union actually became the lead organization in some of the surrounding towns to win a higher, higher minimum wage.
So I think really she saw an opportunity based on the weakness of the political position of the existing leaders of the city who were opposed to being willing to take more aggressive steps to address affordable housing and other affordability crises in the city. She had strong relationships and she just began working a campaign that ultimately involved thousands and thousands of doorknockers and volunteers, not that dissimilarly from Mamdani in New York, and shocked the political establishment when she won the primary by 10%, beat Harold by 10%. She won an outright majority in a multi candidate race. And then she held on, frankly by her fingernails into the final election where Harrell had really gone after her in a much more aggressive way. But it didn't work. And as Jim said in his comments about kind of the changing demographics of the city, if you look at the breakdown of where she got her votes from, it overwhelmingly came from places where people were renters and not homeowners. And so people who were feeling the pinch of the unaffordability of the city voted for Katie Wilson in huge numbers.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Well, let's talk a little bit about the substantive housing issue, just because that's.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Such an issue that we're facing right.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Here in Santa Barbara and all many parts of the country in similar ways. So the initial ballot that created the social housing entity in the city, what was the name of that entity? What is it called?
[00:27:17] Speaker E: You know, I wish I knew. I actually don't know the name of it. Jim, do you know what it's called?
[00:27:21] Speaker C: I think it's the social housing developer.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: And that's interesting because the term social housing, it's sort of imported from Europe, but it's a great term. It's much better than public housing, which it got a very bad reputation when it was in its heyday in New York and other places. But social housing implies a variety of ways, nonprofit ways of finance, of creating housing that's affordable for working class, low income people have the somewhat benefit of, you know, certain kinds of very weak federal programs, but there's no public subsidy nationally for housing for working class people.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Above a certain income level.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: And so social housing can cover that, so that passed. That's. But that wasn't funded. So they tell me, tell us a little more about the proposal for funding because that really did target Amazon and the other high tech companies. What was the exact tax? Do you remember that?
What's the proposal?
[00:28:25] Speaker E: I think it was some version of an expansion of something that passed here about three or four, four or five years ago called the Jumpstart tax, which was basically a tax aimed very specifically at huge multinational corporations that paid employees over a certain salary. You know, as you, there's lots of legal maneuvering that happens based on local laws about what kinds of taxes can be raised. Washington state actually doesn't have an income tax and there's a state constitutional prohibition on income taxes here. And so kind of progressive revenue advocates have been, have had to be super creative in coming up with ways that will pass muster. And in fact the Amazon tax that passed here four or five years ago that many people claim authorship of, but Katie was certainly one of the people who helped drive that through, finally got signed off on by the state supreme Court about a year ago saying that yes, that was legal and the city of Seattle was allowed to start collecting that tax from five years ago. And I think that this tax for social housing was an expansion of that same idea.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: What was Harold's opposition to this? What, what was he, why was he so eager to oppose this? I mean, other than the.
[00:29:37] Speaker E: Well, that's a great question. I mean they put up, they put up a rival measure on the ballot. He and his allies, they wanted to force voters to choose between two separate kind of supposedly pro affordable housing measures. But his would not raise any new revenue. It would have basically taken existing revenues that were already dedicated to affordable housing and splitting it up, you know, multiple ways to include some pittance that would go to this social housing developer. And the thing that was very cool was that the people of Seattle said no, we explicitly want to tax rich people more because we think they should pay more to be able to fund social housing. And we're going to reject this idea of like just adding social housing in as another maybe newfangled interesting idea along with the other ways that we already do affordable housing. The voters said no, we actually think that the rich should pay more. And they voted explicitly for that, for that way of doing it.
[00:30:30] Speaker C: And let me add a detail. I think it's called the excise excess compensation tax. And as Michael said, it goes against company big companies have to pay. I think it's 5% of a certain amount above 7 million in their compensation. So it's Amazon, a bunch of other companies that have to pay this and it's estimated to raise 50 to 70 million dollars a year to go into the building of new housing under this social housing developer program.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: And it's nonprofit housing. That's a very important point because even the liberal Democrats in the California legislature seem to think the way to get affordable housing is, is to give incentives to private developers by stripping away regulations.
This is all, you know, there's no leadership statewide that I'm aware of in favor of social housing right now in California within the Democratic Party. And so if Seattle's any guide, maybe there's a big hole there that needs to be filled from the left.
[00:31:36] Speaker C: Well, I think this is the first citywide social housing program or law in the country. Obviously Vienna is the model where half the population live in social housing. But this is going to be a really interesting test. And what's important about the funding is that it's substantial. 50 million a year they're going to be able to build and operate, you know, increasing numbers of domiciles for, for people. So this will be worth watching. I think the country is going to watch it.
[00:32:10] Speaker F: Yeah. Well, to be sort of fair about comparing California and Washington, I mean like both states have the mixed blessing, you could say, or blessing and curse of having had waves of like progressive reformist politics. And so what that's meant is that in California, you know, it's actually constitutionally very hard to build social housing and you need to get sign offs and agreements from various levels of government and so forth. So it's not just a lack of, or it's not as simple as a lack of will on the part of legislative leadership. Like there's actual constitutional amendments that are necessary and we keep failing to get muster to do those things, you know, but it, the analogy is that you in Washington or the, the a similar thing is that in Washington state you have this like fakocta idea of not having an income tax that you have to work around as you sort of like chip away at maybe someday being able to like institute one. But you know, it takes, it takes a while. These are like foundational things and achievements of other political reactions to concentrated power in the western states and like often misguided and unintended consequences and so forth. But here we are. I mean this is all really interesting and I just have to say I really appreciate the like piecing together this historic historical narrative but also giving some of the specific policy backgrounds here, you know, because if there is a trend going on in American politics right now? It is that we have people like calling the bluff of a Democratic leadership that has just like cut too many deals on these core issues that lead to a lack of affordability for, you know, working people and just being them, telling the election after election that all we can do is, you know, 5% affordable on this or a little tweak on that and just, you know, people taking directly to the voters the, the very simple idea that government can do a hell of a lot more to shift the ground. So.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:15] Speaker F: Yeah, I really, I really appreciate that. I do have a question about the sort of specific electoral coalitions going on or whatever. Is it going to be a problem that Katie jumped in after unions and groups that didn't think there was a choice had made a choice? Is, is she going to be able to like build a broad coalition that includes the better parts of her opponent's coalition?
[00:34:41] Speaker E: You know, I think that's already happened because in fact, after she won the primary, a bunch of the unions then double endorsed and so did Prabhulla Jayapal. So the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who had, you know, decided to back Harold because they didn't think there was an alternative. Once she won the primary and showed herself to be a viable candidate, many, many of them backed her as well. They didn't withdraw endorsement from Harold, but they just dual endorsed. And then when she had her acceptance speech, when she won, she had her victory speech. She did it at the Labor Council. I think that people really like Katie Wilson. She just has these very deep relationships going for a long time. And I think people, even though I think people were thrilled that she was able to demonstrate that she was a viable candidate. I think there was a lot of skepticism about that in the beginning. But once she proved that she could do it, people, I mean the excitement on her side of the campaign, like who was in the streets, who was knocking doors, who was excited about it, it was all on Katie's side. It was not on Harold's side.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: So there's a little formula I'm trying to construct about how socialists can win power in cities if the New York and Seattle.
What's similar is you have a really smart, effective, attractive candidate and in Seattle case, quite well known, Mamdani was not well known. And then this on the same time, the candidate comes out of a movement with a lot of grassroots support already and has been putting their ear close to the ground to hear what the actual issues are that everyday voters, working class type voters are Actually concerned about and building around those. Those are three ingredients. Does that sound right? As a good.
[00:36:28] Speaker C: I would add youth, youth, youth. In these cases, the coalition, the people who are out in the streets knocking on doors. Thousands and thousands in the mom dummy campaign and impressive numbers here. They're mostly Gen Z. They're young, they're millennials and Gen Z and get excited, got excited about these candidates and what they promised to do. So I think that's really critical. The power vacuum in these both cities.
Harold had discredited himself, everybody, Cuomo, you know, the opposition had pretty much destroyed itself in New York. So I think that dynamic is. You can't.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: Oh, she doesn't necessarily have a majority on the council. Right. So that's part of what she's up against right away.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: Yes, several progressive council people were elected. It was kind of four years ago. There was a backlash, so called moderates. But law and order council people took over and tried to undo a lot of things that had been done previously. And this was what, a backlash against the backlash, a frontlash. And several and the most conservative people, including our city attorney, were defeated. And so it's now a pretty good progressive.
[00:37:48] Speaker E: Yeah, it was definitely part of a wave. It was definitely part of a wave.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: So what is the policy agenda that they're likely to try to be advancing at the city level, the city government level? Do we know?
[00:38:00] Speaker E: Well, I think a lot of it is around progressive revenue.
[00:38:02] Speaker C: Well, both Von Dami and Wilson have been very cagey and smart politically in their kind of early days to not attack big business, but instead try to bring people into the tent and make nice noises. And so Wilson's been meeting with the chamber of commerce types as well as everybody else. And Mamdani is doing the same. I think Wilson just announced that she's keeping the police chief, head of the fire department and other protection service agencies in order to kind of quiet that concern that she won't be tough on. Tough enough on crime, which was what defeated the last group. So I think she's being very careful and probably is going to be very smart and not try to overreach. I don't know. Michael, what do you think?
[00:38:53] Speaker E: Well, I think she's definitely positioned herself that way. I mean, the national press reported on Katie Wilson's candidacy and then victory as being another socialist who won in a city, but actually she didn't run that way. When she was asked like, are you a socialist? Her answer was, yes, I consider myself a socialist, but that's not, not why I'm running. It's like she didn't try to deflect the label, but it wasn't how she identified. And I think that is a bit different with Mount Ghani. And in fact, the DSA chapter in Seattle didn't endorse her. There was like an internal division within the DSA chapter. And some of that is because the DSA chapter in Seattle has a heavy influence from Shama Sawant's former organization. They are in the DSA here, and she, Shamma Sawant and Katie Wilson were at loggerheads with each other a lot. They were not allies. I mean, they would fight together on progressive issues like taxing Amazon, et cetera. But Katie would, like, would describe herself as, yes, I'm a socialist, but I'm not an ideologue. I'm not an ideological person. I want to get stuff done.
And in fact, I saw her do an interview after she won where someone asked her, well, what does it mean to you to be kind of a socialist mayor of a city? And her answer was, well, I think what it means basically is good governance. Which I thought was pretty interesting that she said it that way. Like, she didn't decide to say, well, it means we need to go after the rich. But she also doesn't hide from it. And I think that actually people appreciated that about her.
One thing I'll just say that is an advantage that I think Katie has over Mom Donnie, is that there is no preemption in Washington state for local jurisdictions to raise taxes on corporations or to raise taxes on the rich. Whereas Mamdani, as far as I understand it, has to get the state legislature of New York to allow him to raise the funds to enact a bunch of his program. Katie doesn't have that obstacle. She just has to be able to get voters to say, yes, we want to tax rich people and rich corporations. And if she can do that, then I think she's going to have a lot of room to run.
[00:41:03] Speaker D: Yeah, New York City is sort of like in permanent trusteeship with the state.
[00:41:08] Speaker E: That's a very good point.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: Aware of the need to have a grassroots base continuing to be there to push for the agenda. Right?
[00:41:15] Speaker E: Yeah. She's been explicit about that from the beginning. You know, in her victory speech again, she said, look, you can't just sit back now and watch me try and manipulate the levers of power. We need an inside, outside strategy. She's very explicit about that. You need to push to make sure that we carry out the program we ran on. You've got to push back on all of our opponents who are now going to try and undermine us. So she's very much a movement politician and she sees her connection to the kind of. To the grassroots as a key to her success.
[00:41:48] Speaker A: I think this is really important for people like us to keep our close attention to because the media tendency and election reporting is on the candidate and how charismatic, blah, blah, blah, and on their media strategies and their messaging. But the grassroots base, being a movement candidate is hardly ever reported, including on Mamdani, by the mainstream media. And I think people who are electoral junkies like Daraka and I tend to be some. Some people like that get into that same trap. It's a trap because it ignores that the real power lies in that kind of organizing if you're doing it. And since they both are organizers and had really built this incredible campaign organization, that's very promising. And I think Mamdani, like Wilson, has started to build that kind of structure in New York too. Any other thoughts on that?
[00:42:47] Speaker B: We're not going to get into the.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: Sectarian politics by the way of savant.
[00:42:53] Speaker D: That's unfortunate.
[00:42:55] Speaker A: I know you'd love to do it.
[00:42:57] Speaker F: Well, because I'm sorry, but like in my social media feed I'm getting ads from Sawant like trashing Mamdani as a sellout to the working class because blah, blah, blah.
[00:43:08] Speaker D: Also, the fight and struggle within DSA between, you know, lunacy and goodwill is.
[00:43:15] Speaker F: Something we talk about a lot. And so I'm very interested in sort of how that has played out in Seattle.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: All right, either Jim or Michael want to comment on that.
[00:43:24] Speaker C: Well, so you're talking about the left wing disease, as we know, movements destroy themselves through infighting, through trying to, you know, perfectionism that leads to breakups. And Swant has just broken up Socialist alliance, you know, which wasn't that big to begin with.
[00:43:42] Speaker D: Socialist alternative, wasn't it?
[00:43:45] Speaker C: Alternative, excuse me.
[00:43:46] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:43:47] Speaker D: So the People's Front of Judea get it right.
[00:43:53] Speaker C: This is a challenge. It's always been a challenge for the left. I think what Michael said about Katie Wilson and her very judicious way of talking about who she is and her political identity is a really, you know, it's a great way to begin.
Hopefully DSA will settle down and continue to, you know, try to be a big tent and not.
Not try to be too perfect about everything.
[00:44:19] Speaker E: It was like DSA unanimously said, we're not going to endorse her. There was a huge internal debate within DSA chapter in Seattle and I talked to lots of people on, you know, Both sides of that question. I think that many, many DSA members campaigned for her. There was this odd, like, line that the leadership, the kind of, I guess the majority leadership within DSA took that said, even though we're not endorsing her, it doesn't mean we're not voting for her, which was just a kind of an interesting thing to say. It's like we're not endorsing her because we have certain differences with her and we're trying to build a political party that holds people accountable to our program. But that doesn't mean we don't think that there's a real reason to vote for her over Bruce Harrell.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: It's a saving grace of the American left as a movement that the leadership has not been able to lead the masses of actual participants on a lot of these kinds of questions when push comes to shove. That's my. One of my generalization that's based on my SDS experience. Sds. I remember Jim. Jim and I go back to the. When I arrived here, Jim was a leader of the local, what was supposed to be an SDS chapter. But you didn't take cues from a national leadership at that point, did you?
[00:45:30] Speaker C: Yeah, well, SDS was a. Very loosely. It was a network instead of an organization.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Well, that was. In a way, I'm saying it's saving grace because it allowed people closer to everyday reality to do what they thought they should do. That's. That's my semi anarchist view of how the left should organize. But anyway, didn't.
[00:45:49] Speaker D: It didn't save it in the. Didn't save it by 60 at 69.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: Yes, but it didn't stop there. Anyway, that's a whole other discussion which we continuously have, I guess so till we're dead.
All right, well, so this you're feeling, both you, Michael and Jim are feeling pretty good about this, I would say. Right.
[00:46:11] Speaker E: I'm super excited about it. I think that Katie's gonna be a great leader for both, kind of as a person in office, but also of the movement in Seattle that's got very big aspirations for what it wants to try and accomplish. You know, I hope that part of what she accomplishes and sees as part of her role, which I'm sure she does because I know her well, is that part of her role in an elected position is to help the social movements gain power. So from a union point of view, that specifically means things like helping figure out ways that workers can have power and have. Whether it's traditional collective bargaining or other forms of collective power in their workplaces, even if they're excluded by the National Labor Relations act or even if they struggle to form traditional unions because the process is so tilted against them. Just be part of that. So that Katie just be part of that group of elected leaders who understand that unions are crucial and that she needs to use her role to help workers have collective power and be creative about how do you get around the obstacles that are out there. And so I'm very confident that she will. She and I have had conversations like that before.
[00:47:21] Speaker C: Before.
[00:47:22] Speaker E: But that's part of what it means to be a movement mayor is how do you use your position to build the movement.
[00:47:27] Speaker F: That's awesome.
[00:47:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:29] Speaker D: Very good to add.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: James, anything to add on that?
[00:47:32] Speaker C: Well, I think Michael's got it right. And part of what makes Seattle what it is is the strength of the organized labor movement. The Central Labor Council, the many unions. We're one of the most unionized cities.
And the unions for the last 20 years or the Central Labor Council has had a very progressive reputation and the state Labor Council the same. So it's not old style unionism. It's new style unionism dedicated to raising minimum wage. The kind of doing stuff for everyone that's so important. So the strength of that is something that Kitty Wilson will rely on. And I think that bodes very well for accomplishing things in the city. Both. You know, one of the first things she did was appear on the Starbucks picket line and tell people that, what is it? She said, I don't drink Starbucks. I don't drink Starbucks anymore, and you shouldn't either. So that was her message to the public.
And, you know, I think that kind of leadership will be very effective. She faces a hostile newspaper. We're a one newspaper town. And the Seattle Times is always been conservative. It got a little more kind of medium middle of the road, but came out really strongly against her and against some of these taxation measures so that, you know, people of a certain generation still read newspapers. I think that's a problem.
You know, Amazon has flexed his muscles repeatedly, tried to ram through, well, tried to defeat attacks, tried to reorganize the city council by pouring a lot of money into elections. It'll do that again. Jeff Bezos then left the state because he didn't want to face taxation. So Amazon has a lot of tools that it can use.
I think Microsoft plays it a little more quietly. But we have Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft, they're all really heavy hitters and. And they know how to mess with politics to their advantage. So that's going to be, you know, that's going to be a real challenge. We're not Santa Barbara. This is a big.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: Oh, Santa Barbara is real.
[00:49:52] Speaker C: But these are billionaires with big corporations.
[00:49:56] Speaker D: Yes, but, yeah, we, we have. Small peddly billionaires are still a pain in the ass, but they're not.
[00:50:03] Speaker A: Well, we have Ex Princes of England, too. You know, we've got our show, but.
[00:50:07] Speaker D: They don't meddle in our politics.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: No, I'm just kidding.
So anyway, here's the thing. Michael Laslett retired as a union leader, and he's always been. Had a great singing voice and been very interested in music, including socially conscious music. Tell us about your new career in the music performance world, Michael.
[00:50:28] Speaker E: Well, thank you, Dick. I will be very short about this. So, yeah, I love music. I was raised with kind of social justice music in my family. And so since I retired, I've been helping build a music brigade here where I live that goes to all of the no Kings rallies and all of the movement rallies to bring music to the movement.
And I do some performing with people, kind of a more traditional way. I'm a founding member of the Seattle Labor Chorus. We have a labor union chorus here in Seattle that was founded back in 97 when Pete Seeger came here for a folk festival and wanted a community choir to back him up on stage. That Labor Chorus is alive and growing and in fact, has recruited, you know, for a long time it was like a little retiree club of a bunch of old 60s hippies. But now there's a bunch of young people in the Labor Chorus because it reflects the rise of young peoples being interested in unions. So, yeah, so I love the music aspect of the movement.
[00:51:21] Speaker A: So the Labor Chorus actually has some recordings. People can look, look this up, right?
[00:51:26] Speaker E: That's right. Yep.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: There's seattleaborchourus.org so we try to end.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: These, each of these episodes with a musical selection. And we're going to end it with you not live, but I found you on YouTube and so we're going to put that on the end of this broadcast. This has been great, great experience to learn all of this because I think this is what those of us who want to save America and the world need to know about the details of how we can get these victories and how we can build on them.
And Jim and Michael, thank you so much for sharing all this with us.
Any final word, Daraka?
[00:52:10] Speaker D: No, just also very grateful for the insights. And now I'll have to put a bunch of, you know, follower Tags on Seattle News to keep up on it.
[00:52:21] Speaker C: There you go.
[00:52:22] Speaker D: Appreciate it.
[00:52:22] Speaker E: Thanks for having us.
[00:52:31] Speaker G: Don't you think it's crazy, this old world and its ways? Whoever thought the 60s would be called the good old days?
But like the weavers sang to us Wasn't that a tie?
We raised our hands and voices on.
[00:52:52] Speaker E: The line.
[00:52:54] Speaker G: And we all sang Bread and Roses Joe Hilled a union maid we linked our arms and told each other we are not afraid Solidarity forever Would go rolling through the hall we shall overcome together one and all.
[00:53:23] Speaker H: The more I study history the more I seem to find that in every generation There are times just like at that time when folks like you and me who thought they were all alone within this honored treasure found a home.
[00:53:48] Speaker G: And they all sang Bread and Roses Joe Hill and Union Maid they linked their arms and told each other we are not afraid Great. Solidarity forever Would go rolling through the hall we shall overcome together one and.
[00:54:11] Speaker E: All so, you know, if you've got that chorus figured out already, you're welcome to sing along.
[00:54:16] Speaker G: And though each generation fears that it will be the last Our presence here is witness to the power of the past and just as we have drawn our strength from those who now are gone Younger hands will take our work.
[00:54:36] Speaker E: And carry on.
[00:54:39] Speaker G: And they'll all sing Bread and Roses Joe Hill the union maid they'll link their arms and tell each other we are not not afraid Solidarity forever we'll go rolling through the hall we shall overcome together one and.
[00:55:02] Speaker C: All.
[00:55:05] Speaker G: We shall overcome together one and all.
[00:55:15] Speaker H: Michael laslett.
