Seattle’s working people need to stand together against the right-wing attempt to silence Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Black Lives Matter movement with a recall campaign! The recall campaign, if successful, would overturn last year’s re-election and push our working-class representative out of office. Most importantly, the recall petition is an attempt to undermine Seattle’s social movements, which have won major victories against big business.
If the court allows the recall petition to be approved, big business and big Republican donors can pour unlimited funds into a signature-gathering effort through February and try to put Councilmember Sawant up for recall in an upcoming special election.
On September 16, as the court reviews the recall petition, join us for a rally in front of the Seattle courthouse to defend progressive movements and our socialist seat for working people against this politically-motivated attack by the billionaire class!
The right wing and big business are furious about the Defund SPD campaign, our movement’s historic Amazon Tax victory, our renters rights victories, the $15 minimum wage, and how Kshama has used her socialist City Council office to fight relentlessly and unabashedly for working people and the oppressed.
During our 2019 re-election campaign, Amazon, big real-estate developers, and even Trump donors unleashed a record breaking onslaught of corporate cash in an unsuccessful attempt to drive out the most consistent fighter for working people to ever sit on Seattle’s City Council. Now, they are desperately searching for a do-over.
The recall petition filer himself has explicitly said that this is a reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, and three of the charges in the petition are directly against BLM. Councilmember Kshama Sawant is the only Seattle City Councilmember who has fought consistently against police violence, to defund the police, and who voted against the New Youth Jail and the racist rollback of accountability in 2018’s police guild contract. She has also helped lead a fight for affordable housing for Black working-class people. As racist violence persists, like both the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the vigilante attack on peaceful protesters in Kenosha, it’s clear that the #BlackLivesMatter movement is needed now, more than ever, to continue the fight to defund the police by at least 50%, win community control over the police, and to end police brutality and systemic racism.
*Please wear a mask and respect social distancing*