this is what this is about i would like more than anything else i think we should mention that this whole city council is fascinated by members who make nearly or even over one hundred twenty thousand dollars per year now you tell me how can these people in any honesty represent put into building mass movement all the rest of the money will be used to build a mass movement dummy when was the last time you parse this from somebody running for city council but it should also be pointed out that common is not  the pockets of the downtown business association the construction industry and particularly paul allen the bulk of which is the borrowing real estate in the city while the rest of us are stuck struggling with skyrocketing rat and is going to be in this political space the only advocates for ordinary working people who are routinely shut out of the political dialogue in the city the rich are getting richer while the rest of us face county we're going to have an interview with this incredible young lady she's got a very dynamic platform she's looking at some very serious issues and seems to be addressing it very very noble  done doing today with this interview and it was a very big contender for a position to hear it's a sterile city council elections coming up this next month again i hope we all have some interest in listening to her she's very merry interesting and inspiring so i'm looking forward to this program and this is her contact information board and this is all a live and this is don daring to trace wallace eighty six hundred or you can even go into trace wellness and get germany spain which helps cure cancer diabetes it's more than just cannabis people it's time to wake up on that i hope you enjoyed this interview and please get back to me and that's judge david when miller but we're not worried about that right now but he will be on next week to hear from you as well get back to me will be wilsona g mail dot com thank you very much and enjoy the program looking really urgently looking for alternatives that really represent their interests becoming more and more an affordable for working people you can see a low wage jobs proliferating in the labor market many of the young people especially have you know the only jobs they can get are low wage jobs we have skyrocketing rent you know a real crisis in affordable you know housing and we can see that for the most part you know you know other than a few exceptions for the most part the city government does not really take these consideration they take these  you know take these problems into good that situation and we're running to highlight these problems that people are facing and to present solutions to them and so you know in an election year that is filled with  usual i'm the only grassroots candidates that's running for city council really don't take any money from big business and we are the only campaign that is fighting for fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage citywide but also calling for a  millionaires and rent control i wanted to ask you about the fifteen dollar minimum wage a lot of people think that if somebody gets fifteen dollars an hour that means that part of their pious going to be missing or taken  away can you explain how it really works how raising the minimum wage affects everybody so just in general if you look at you know the kind of jobs that people can find even college you know people with college education many of those jobs now in the post recessionary period are low grade jobs meaning you know to imagine you know a young person are straight out of college and they have like twenty thousand dollars of student debt and if the only job they can find is something that pays them maybe you know the state minimum wage or nine dollars ninety eight cents or ten dollars an hour then how are they actually going to make ends meet how are they going to be able to pay for housing which is getting more and more expensive in seattle how are they going to be the student debt and so on and that you know that's not even talking about all the people in seattle who are you know who have been stuck in low wage jobs for years in some cases even decades affected by this and so if you look at the way the minimum wage has worked all day you are going to you know here given the federal minimum wage but also in the cities that have to do to their own minimum wage having a higher minimum wage to a system where in order to actually make the economy function and for the growth rates to sustain themselves or increase you need guns ocean by a large group of people and people that are going to unless they have a decent wages but in terms of your question about you know does it actually affect other people adversely i mean a government question that's asked us would in that hundred small businesses would small businesses you know ongoing oh you know insolvent if they had to pay their workers fifteen dollars an hour  reality is that if you look at nationwide surveys of a large majority of small businesses already pay their workers higher than the federal minimum wage and that shows you that a lot of people who own small businesses are just you know regular people who want to do the right thing by their employees but the reality is that with the low wages it's both small businesses and working people who lose out and the only people who gain are corporate executives the big investor you know the these are billionaires the great talking about people who own big corporations and you know you were talking earlier about the world and so on and it's really big business investors and c e o s and corporate executives that that was actually championed by bill gates father it failed because of all the there's always this hysteria of oh if they go after them first then they're going to come after x next week  but i find it unconscionable that millionaires are not contributing more towards our our society in fact many of them nothing can you speak to that i know you mentioned something about a tax on millionaires yes how would that play out so f should mention you know in in the context we're going to go right here in seattle seattle is in washington state and washington state has the dubious distinction of having the most regressive tax system in the entire nation that the biggest corporations be especially the you know venture capitalists in the financial investors it is a fraction of what working people in small businesses speak so it's absolutely urgent necessity to bring about some sort of progressive taxation and we need to do that at the state level as well and we were you know we had a program for that when we were running for state house last year but at the city level we can institute a dogs on millionaires which would be  know proposed as a privilege to you because you know there's a there's a hundred year old state law that says that if you're not an income tax but bush of all i would say that you know that one hundred year law needs to be challenge its height i has people are suffering and people are working people are suffering at the you know or rather the wealthiest people and the billionaires are gaining at the expense of the vast majority of working people and we need to write down draw immediately and it can be done by passing a city wide privilege tax and so you know the framing is that in a city of the wage workers if somebody is making more than a million dollars a year that's a privilege and you need to pay for that and notice that i'm not using the word earning a million dollars because you know it's owning means that you actually work for it but the reality is that although they are of course work for it the the disparity that you seen income is not explained by somebody working harder than another person i mean who works harder than many of these fast food workers who are making so little so it's not really out about how much you work but it's about whether you happen to be fortunate enough to own stock options or you know other return to capital those are also incomes you know returns on capital investment that's something that most working people don't get much but people only have a paycheck and that's it and so we can have a tax on millionaires in order to have seattle as the you know seattle as the for the rest of the state with a progressive tax and that that sounds really great to me i i think most people who are very involved in working and trying to survive are probably don't have the luxury of doing a lot of research and finding out things that sometimes we can find out other ways one of the things i know that really got my head turned around was when i found out that the johnsons of johnson and johnson a family company they have trust fun's for children who have not yet been conceived that's what's going on behind the scenes and us working stiffs we don't see that we don't know that's what's going on that the that the deck is so stacked against us before we ever even get out of school before we ever get into school it's this kind of tax manipulation that the corporations and the extremely wealthy have done to protect their genealogy but we're the ones doing the work absolutely absolutely because because actually when they want to talk about a certain political party wants to talk about the job creators those people are not the job creators we are the job creators we're the ones out there doing the jobs making the jobs making the products making the money but we don't get to keep it absolutely in fact that is that is the old age and of this almost unimaginable consolidation of wealth that we see among a very elite and while the rest of us are being impoverished that is not a coincidence poverty is a direct consequence of wealth being consolidated by a small elite and we need to you know we need a city government that will actually first proposed it had majority support over sixty five percent and we're supporting it and this was on the entire state you know and if you look at the support that the ninety eight had in seattle and king county that was even hired and nationally if you look at opinion polls on what people think should be done a tax on very wealthy people is a very very popular idea what's happened here is that  the city government and actually the state government as well is is well to the right of what people are you know people with the majority of the people in seattle are well to the left of the city council but that opinion is not being reflected those values are not being reflected on the city council and on a good day you might have working people might have one or two weiss's that are advocating for them in city hall and for the most part the city council is you know is completely out of touch with the needs in urgent needs of ordinary working people and our opponent richard allen is really an excellent example of that out of touch corporate politics he was the only council member who voted against bates sick days for people and really stood studen stood against all the efforts to create affordable housing and we need that to happen that's why because you know one of the measures we're calling for has been control yes that that that's a topic that actually gets me very excited because because we've been we're seeing right now apartment rids just skyrocket in seattle and the surrounding areas and of course the surrounding areas are going to reflect what's happening in the city and so the controls were one of the things that i'm amazed with how is it possible that as a socialist that you come out and you fared so incredibly well in the primaries i mean you've got it down to two and i don't think somebody you know coming from the socialist movement has ever filled so well before is that it is actually historic all right is it yes yes you know we've got thirty five percent of the vote in the primary that itself  historic for you know an open socialist to be to get you know that significantly higher vote and also you know especially considering the fact that we have a fraction of the budget that the big business candidates have you know  successful this far is that people are hungry for this huge you know change the shift in political dialogue because people are tired of politician after politician year after year you know paying lip service to the things that they need you know things that working people need in every election year you'll see these politicians come out of the woodwork and try to talk to people and you know have downhaul that's why i'm mystified i understand that a city council members get one hundred twenty thousand dollars a year somebody making ten dollars an hour gets four hundred dollars a week which is about six thousand seven hundred dollars of a month so somebody getting ten thousand a month versus but begrudging somebody getting seven thousand eight hundred a month that makes my head fighting for fifteen dollars an hour and you only get it fighting for it and that's an interesting thing to point out because seattle city council members are the second highest paid city council members in the entire nation second only to los angeles so the question that seattle's borders need to  doing the second best job in the country and if not then you have some you know we have something to do and we need we need to elect grassroots candidates and we need for grassroots candidates to run in the first place and that's why you know we are running not only to win this seat but also so that we can provide an inspiration for other people from the grassroots to run because this can be done look at the echo that our campaign has got it means that there is a hunger out there for an alternate kind of weiss and the reason we've done so well despite this this label is because a socialist label is no longer a barrier if you look at opinion polls nationally especially among young people you know people age eighteen to thirty they're actually more in favor of socialism than capitalism and the reason is clear i mean they're thinking rationally they're looking out into the future in a recession economy and they can see that they're actually going to have worse standard of living than their parents did i mean this is this is something that economists  calling the lost generation and so they're actually thinking ok capitalism is not working for me i should look at other ideas so that's not a barrier for as what it is about here is the fact that people have been so demoralized and people feel disenfranchise you know look at the little voting rates you know why why don't everybody who is a registered voter go out and vote and especially low income people people of color you know the black community the latino community they don't go out and vote as often because they don't see anybody fighting for them and that's the difference with our campaign they're actually fighting for right for them and i also pledge that if i'm elected as a city council member i will take all of the average worker's salary not under twenty thousand dollars and i will donate the rest to building social justice movements i knew there was a reason why a lot of heat just speak briefly when i think of socialism the term in it and it's been gotten a lot of bad press from the reagan era in this sort of thing but when i think of socialist country socialist programs i think of norway i think of finland i think to sweden i think of places where they have health care not health insurance health care i think of where they have education i think of where they you know where they value money is valued less than personal relationships could you speak to socialism and how this is defined right now in two thousand and ten right so our idea of socialism you know which clarify is what we call democratic socialism meaning it's a an economy that actually works for everybody but the only way that can hoppen i mean if you talk about you know what is an economy that works for everybody then that has to be an economy that is free of poverty of want and as you said we don't want health insurance we want health care genuine health care that will allow people to be healthy we need everybody to have nutritious safe food safe environments clean air good quality housing good quality walkable neighborhoods library sparkes access to the best end of living all that is totally possible we can provide you know that though human race at this point is that logically  and resource wise completely capable of providing that standard of living for everybody who lives on the planet today however what the problem is that the way resource resource ownership is organized under  of very tiny global elite owns all the you know all the you know corporations all the oil and all the other resources and the goal of the gap in the system is to maximize profits for those owners of you know all those resources and so regardless of how hard you and i and other working people are working we will never be able to achieve the standard of living that they have and so you see this massive you know inequality and if you if we are to address that inequality which is the first step then we need for working working people in the community to own communities to democratically all all of this together that's what you know we would mean by a socialist organization of the economy and i want to quickly also address that yes you're completely right that many of the scandinavian countries and other european countries have historically you know in the last fifty or sixty years been able to provide much higher quality and much more accessible human services like education health care housing and so on but the problem is that they you know what's happening right now is that they are they're not socialist countries they're social democracies meaning they're capital countries but they have a much better social programs because workers in the past for for them the labor movement of the past four for them but not many of those programs are under assault because under the name of the recession a lot of these programs are being cut so you really want to you know that we want to defend those existing programs and make them available to more people in the world then we need to go more and more of a need to have a more and more fundamental shift away from the current economy one of the things that concerns me in that i have a kind of passion about having had a store in the university district and seen so many homeless children it just hurts my heart homes families too but the children that most of which have left home because they've been abused they've been kicked out maybe they're gay maybe they're this they're that how can we help the hell can how can we in you as them being a member of the city council how will you be able to help us help him i'm really glad you asked about this done because that's an absolutely good drenching thing to think about you know especially homeless people in general and the miseries that you go to if you're homeless but especially homeless you would i mean mention you know they become homeless because they're trying to escape abusive domestic situation so while while i will say that homelessness is zero far bigger problem that cannot be addressed just in one you know one policy or another you know we need a very systematic and fundamental solutions to that and that has a lot to do with everything we were talking about earlier about any quicker nami just as economic justice that's all true but there are things that the city government could do today and we need  the city government to fight for full funding of social programs so that these kids get immediate help in terms of shelter counseling you know helping them to assimilate into the of victimized yeah and this can be done and the reason it's not being done in the way it should be i mean some services are off course in existence but the reason it's not being done in a tyro and comprehensive way that it should be done is because there's  you know most of the city government is not fighting for these interests you know they're busy trying to give big corporations yet another tax loophole they're busy trying to give away so you know city on learn to get another billionaire real estate investor and we need an advocate for regulated by the city and allowed to exist because they provide a really necessary stopgap measure for people who are homeless today and that's and it is an inhuman thing not to support that we have to you know be able to support that  salute if you are just want to support your campaign and i certainly hope everybody watching does help can they contact you and what can they do to help you they would be great if they could get in touch with those there are many ways of getting in touch with  campaign and you know list them in a second but i want to say very quickly to your viewers that you know we are genuinely grassroots campaign if we are able to win this election if we will indeed be making history it hasn't been  you know hasn't happened for decades that can be like ours has succeeded in and it shows that times are changing and i invite everybody who is listening even if they're not in seattle to help us out and be part of the making of history and one way you can find out more about us is by going to our website which appears on your screen you know w w w i want dot org or you can call us at the number that appears on your screen and we will get back to you but also  campaign i would like to ask when was the last time a big business candidate was able to inspire that kind of you know a response and you know people are flocking to this campaign because they're taking ownership of this as their own effort and that's what we want  and media figure job parish and after the speakers we can take any questions on board interviews from the media so just to introduce our first speaker tell us why she is an occupy inspired socials alternative candidate receive nearly thirty percent of the vote last year running against the washington state speaker of the house frank chops and her campaign last year was the first time she ever ran for office and she received the highest the first socialist in seattle in decades is also the open doors and strangely paper communication workers of america local thirty seven zero eight three also now to make a transit union local five eighty seven during the primary election and pastor rich weighing the university temple united methodist church is it that we just heard from about you with the city council meetings and just now i think that was the press conference that we held when we announced our candidacy for seattle city council interesting very interesting so you're running for seattle city council right and what we're looking at here is the circumstance where people are out of touch people that are in the city council right now most of them yeah yeah and so they're not really paying attention to things are happening around the planet right i mean am i wrong what they are paying attention  sharma she's a professor of economics in seattle city college which is really important because she has a grasp of economics and social justice and most of us aren't even exposed to so i think that's really important to come in with that kind of knowledge and experience and i really appreciate that john was also a member of the american federation of teachers and she belongs to the local seventeen eighty nine and unions are an issue that's real important to me so that really resonates my mother was a school teacher and she actually was on the bargaining committee and in those days back in eighteen zero two when i was young there actually were camps for instance the superintendent could make no more than twenty times the lowest teacher wage why would a superintendent need to have more than twenty times even that's pretty excessive cold but now that's all gone out the window anyway another thing i wanted to let the viewers know about shana is that she's a member of socialist alternative and that is a nationwide organization that promotes social and economic justice this essentially what that's about and so i'm really glad you're able to be with us this evening i had a few things that i wanted to ask you about i know one of the things that you've talked about quite a bit is rent control is that illegal yes in this state law  you know state is outlawed and outlawed going to hold meaning that if any municipality like a city of seattle were to enacted strength control than that makes it legally possible for the state to challenge that in code i would say that you know it's it's it's important for us to think about that but the show you know before we talk about the judicial aspect of it a legal aspects of it that we should talk about why we need to and do i feel like you are already convinced that maybe you need a control you were talking about the skyrocketing ground for most working people and their families in seattle and you see what's happening for it for a decade or two people are being pushed farther and farther outside the city limits and then one or two or sometimes in a bus transfers away from their place of work and combine that with the really abysmal state of public to and sit in the city and you have people struggling to somehow get through the day to day you know you might in single moms having to drop their kids off at school i mean to you know date buses to their place of work somewhere in downtown seattle having to go groceries because their children it's an ordeal and you know that's not not the quality of life that you would want for our children to have when they're growing up and so if you look at the skyrocketing rent in the city you know people  little time it you know a lot of people are getting notices from their landlord saying well your it is going on fifty percent seventy five percent hundred percent and in a period of six months that's not supply and demand that's not an act of god that's happening because a lot of large real estate investors financial investors are buying up a lot of the rental units in the city and they're you know artificially you know exponentially increasing rent so that they  can you know run them to somebody who's making a six figure salary say so we would meet with george if we don't it would make one wonder then why or why the state has a vested interest in supporting the rich landlords instead of the citizens of the state i think that i think that points to the problem in you know electoral politics in the united states in general it's not just where you need to seattle washington state the reality is that for the most part despite there being well meaning people within the democratic party especially the people who supported him of any party are very well meaning but the but the fact is that for the most part the democratic parties and the party's agenda are controlled by the wealthy and by big business and so even though there are differences between the republicans and democrats for the most part government as it exists does not work for ordinary working people and that is why you're seeing laws that don't control what you're completely right to point out that that doesn't even make sense you know we need rent control and we're trying to do would do is it would limit the increases in rents to some around the cost of living overall cost of living so it would you know it might make a run go up by a slight amount but it wouldn't know as far as whether it can be done yes it can be done the city has a right to pass it the state especially the right wing good day to the city to go or does that you know and and real estate investment firms will want to do that however the point is to me how have other leadership in the city government that is willing to fight for this look at how we had to get marijuana laws not marriage equality laws for both of those different states have to defy federal law in order to achieve that and that happened only because there were so many people you know in the know if you could look nationwide millions of people who were actively demanding that you had movements you know out of the street to demand marriage equality should remember you know the national quality marching we had the father daddy margin seattle it's the it's that kind of activism that is able to put so much pressure on the government that makes that going to social change happen so if if we wanted to rent control that is how we would do it a maybe we need a voice in the city going to advocate for it but at the same time we need movement out of the street and demanding that so which is what we need and he sued the people of seattle from going order referendum and the judge ruled that he was completely out of bounds in doing that and using the city website to remember years ago when i next day i went to worship in d c first for the equal rights amendment and at that time we had buttons so it was either sixty seven or sixty nine i can't remember what but that revisit represented how many pennies to the dollar we made compared to men we haven't made that much gain in the last thirty five years which is quite a long time actually think couple of generations and w what five for five ten percent gain still women are vastly underpaid for equal jobs spatially when we get into as you were talking about the suburbs in the areas outside of seattle that are so affected by what happens fifteen dollars an hour docks on millionaires and in control all of these policies will actually primarily benefit women and people of color and communities are the communities that are the most oppressed and they are the poorest and the they need the things the most and so everything that we're talking about relates directly to the needs of working women i'll give you one quick example if you look at child care workers they are some of the hardest working  write oh absolutely absolutely go well we're going to get to be supporting her in the city council which brings me to one kind of last question it's not enough just to vote what else can people do and i also would like to encourage all of you who are watching you do not live in the city of seattle center money come knock on doors come put that duff liars work for this woman's because what she does in seattle is going to help make the improvement in quality of life in the in the regional area of the region so what can we do besides book so besides voting i mean yes you said first of all we need financial contributions from working people like ourselves you know you young people the elderly everybody who thinks this is a good idea or inspired by this campaign we need that to happen because we don't take any money from the corporations and we need money to run the campaign and so all financial contributions will be greatly appreciated no financial contribution is ever too small so please you know make that donation and we will put your money to good use and in terms of you know what else is necessary if we really want to make these things possible and if you want to get fifty dollars an hour in the city if you want to rent control in the city then we have to policies but that's not going to be enough we need people out on the streets demanding the same things that i had in just a very quick example i'll give us how i will be different than most of the people in you know in politics is that  somebody was telling me this joke where they said that the number of public engagements candidates do when they are you know running for office that you know it should stop and then the rest the next four years they don't you know it shoots down and so we will do exactly the opposite in fact the number of town halls we will hold will go up once we are in to gaza because the real power for social change life not in the person who holds elected office the real power lies in people who live in that area the you know we are running this campaign in the background of our historic victory last year and i know that in the mainstream media victory in an election campaign is always measured by whether you actually get the occupy the seat but i will tell you as an activist that we measure our success by how much we were able to shape the debate in the in the mainstream media in what is actually just about far if you compare the debate that obama  ridiculous pretense of a debate to what we actually do if you're in in the city of the seattle in the forty third district that was in fact the only real debate that ordinary working people see where the other interests were put on the table the things that affect them were talked about by the question of taxing the billionaires and the gap this class was talked about and what we did was we should save the conversation from this beast can statements that these corporate politicians make two hundred real activist dialogues and we represented ordinary working people students people of alert women the elderly the disabled and so on and we will be doing that again we will be shipping those political debates in the city to the left and using every inch of our of space and we get to support social movements and mass movement this year we will be running against richard conlin was a sixteen year incumbent to the city council and of being the only council member who voted against a basic leave initiative which was absolutely necessary thing and which was supported hugely by rank and file workers he also shifted you know he also sort of got the monorail out of the popular agenda you know there was a positive support for that and more than anything else i think we should mention that this whole city council is fascinated by members who make nearly or even over one hundred twenty thousand dollars  more than the average worker's wages in seattle and the rest we will collectively put into building mass movement all the rest of the money will be used to build mass movement dummy when was the last time you parse this from somebody running for city council but it should also be pointed out that comment is not an exception to the rules he is the rules the mayor's office and the city council are both controlled by the studies by the establishment and indeed the city itself big business and the billionaires and the millionaires in our campaign this year is going to be in this political space the only advocates for ordinary working people who are routinely shut out of the political dial in the city the rich are getting richer while the rest of us face skyrocketing rents we're facing high taxes while the big business is spending historically low taxes and we're facing low wages and overall rising cost of living our county will be going for increasing the city's minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour and i say this is long overdue so high time let's fight for this together and we will also be speaking out