Chris Hedges: How to Defeat the Billionaire Class

By Dilip -
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party have, for nearly a decade, waged one of the most effective battles against the city’s moneyed elites. She and the SA have adopted a series of unorthodox methods to fight the ruling oligarchs and, in that confrontation, exposed the Democratic Party leadership as craven tools of the billionaire class. Her success is one that should be closely studied and replicated in city after city if we are to dismantle corporate tyranny.

Sawant, who lives on $40,000 of her $140,000 salary and places the rest into a political fund that she uses for social justice campaigns, helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 an hour minimum wage. Following a three-year struggle against Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $231 million a year.

She was part of the movement that led to Seattle’s successful ban on school year evictions of school children, their families and school employees. She was one of the sponsors of a bill that protects tenants from being evicted at the end of their term leases, requiring landlords to provide tenants with the right to renew their leases and a bill that prohibits landlords from evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent if the rent was due during the COVID emergency and the renter could not pay due to financial hardship.

The billionaire class has targeted her since she assumed office in January 2014....



Hedges: The Age of Self-Delusion


Defying capitalism and socialism, Kumarappa and Gandhi had imagined a decentralised Indian economy - Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Malghan


How With This Rage. BY CHRIS HEDGES (2005)


Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?


Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?


WHITNEY WEBB: Wall Street now monetizes nature


Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality


Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid


Ravi Bhoothalingam: Coronavirus and the Mandate of Heaven


George Monbiot - Asymmetric force: Pegasus spyware is the latest tool autocrats are using to stay in power


George Lakey on Capitalism, public health and the Nordic model


Lynn Parramore: The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves


CHRIS HEDGES - The execution of Julian Assange: He exposed the crimes of empire; and that can't be tolerated


William Astore: The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars // Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most


Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide Machine


Jesus sermon from the Rev. Chris Hedges


Chris Hedges: Imploding the myth of Israel


Chris Hedges - Israel's big lie: This isn't self defense, it's a war crime, aided and abetted by the U.S.


Jorge Luis Borges - Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)


Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The True Costs of America’s All-Consuming War-Culture / Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold


Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’


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