For third time in a week, Fox News discusses porn-watching teacher story
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For third time in a week, Fox News discusses porn-watching teacher story
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Truthdigger of the Week: Kshama Sawant
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| Vince Hosea |
Seattle City Councilwoman-elect, Kshama Sawant. |
Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. It is not a lifetime achievement award. Rather, we’re looking for newsmakers whose actions in a given week are worth celebrating. Nominate our next Truthdigger here.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.—Mahatma Gandhi
The election of Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council this month has some of the city’s residents ill at ease. People I met in bars, restaurants and retail shops wondered aloud whether the socialist and Occupy Seattle activist understood the need for balance and compromise in her upcoming work alongside eight politically mainstream peers. At her campaign headquarters Thursday, inside Seattle’s spottily impoverished, multicultural Central District, Sawant assured me she takes these concerns seriously. She welcomes compromise by the city’s wealthiest residents, she said—executives of Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks among them—for the sake of making life for their working and poor fellow citizens a little more bearable, dignified and secure.
“We are constantly making compromises, we as working people, as elderly, as disabled, as students and low-wage workers,” Sawant told me. Right now, “compromise defines our life. … [We] need to actually stop compromising. … If people want to feel empowered, then they have to see this from another angle.”
For those who fall within or sympathize with Sawant’s categories of the dispossessed, her pugnacious tone should come as a welcome addition to the left side of American politics. In the past two decades, the Democratic Party—whose meritorious actions during the 20th century included the passage of Social Security, the Glass-Steagall prohibition on destructive banking and the Civil Rights Act—exported nearly three-quarters of a million manufacturing jobs, tore down Glass-Steagall’s time-tested protections, delivered a percentage of millions of Americans’ incomes to health insurance corporations, and expanded and strengthened the military-industrial complex’s domestic prerogatives, among other things. Democrats have long been aligned with Republicans in the effort to help corporations rob the public, and Sawant’s victory over a 16-year Democratic incumbent by a difference of more than 1,000 votes provides evidence that their abandonment of common people has created opportunities for different political ideas to take hold.
Sawant knows this intuitively. Raised in Mumbai, India, in neither excessive wealth nor poverty, she had enough chances to witness the horrors of inequality directly. “It wasn’t just a question of feeling outraged,” she told me, describing the experiences of her childhood, “it was also a logical question: How is it possible that human society hasn’t figured out a way of eliminating this enormous misery that is unleashed on billions of people while there is clearly so much wealth?” Why the persistence of “extreme degradation and indignity that is foisted upon people with no choice? … Even now I feel like the same child that I was that just basically felt it unbearable to think of any human being subject to that without crying out in outrage.”
I asked her to recall a specific instance that prompted this recognition. “I used to take the bus and the train on a regular basis,” she said. “I remember one time I was coming out of the train station. I was walking outside to the bus stop where I was going to take the bus back to my house. I remember this woman, an older woman who was begging for alms on the side of the street.” At this point Sawant stopped to clear her throat. She turned her eyes to the table between us. “And she, you know, she was completely damaged from leprosy.” She stopped again. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a tissue which she pressed to her watering eyes. “And um, I carry that image with me everywhere. And it’s so many years since that but I can never take it out of my—that image is burned on my brain.” She fell silent again. A few moments later she apologized for getting emotional.
This expression of grief struck me as genuine. Some politicians have a habit of crying in public, and when they do, large portions of the public approve. But my Internet searches turned up no similar routine for Sawant. She is not a career politician. After spending years working as a computer engineer, and then after a period of studying, an economics professor at Seattle University and Seattle Community College, Sawant was selected to run for the council by a vote of her peers in Socialist Alternative, the political party with which she is aligned. She became a socialist after hearing a speech by one of the group’s organizers in 2006 at age 33. It was the same year she moved to Seattle. Her cobbled path to political office bespeaks a character committed to understanding and driven by compassion. Contrary to the view of selfishness as a virtue under the dubious name of “personal responsibility—a view held by the vast majority of America’s political leaders—Sawant told me she believes that fundamentally, “compassion is a state of being for humanity.”
I have yet to conduct a formal poll, but my own conversations and experiences across numerous cities over the past 15 years lead me to suspect that view is foreign to many, if not most Americans. The same is probably true of the population of Seattle, and there is the central issue on which the success of Sawant’s leadership hangs. The socialist councilwoman is a rookie contender in a ring of veteran political animals, all of whom have spent long careers gruesomely fused to a single corporate-funded and consensus-driven partisan machine. Dominic Holden, a contributor to the local newspaper The Stranger, says the existing council fears Sawant will “be like a mountain lion set loose in a grocery store.” The expression of concern is rich. Sawant’s criticisms of the council are based on the facts of its cooperation with big business to adopt policy that deprives the public of its fair share of the fruits of enterprise enabled in many ways by tax dollars. No, Sawant’s future colleagues fear the absence of loyalty inherent in her outsider status, and her willingness to use her bully pulpit to tell the truth as she sees it loudly. Their branding of her as a rigid ideologue intent on tearing the chamber apart is intended to exploit the common public belief that politics is limited by whatever already is and is not amenable to the actions of large numbers of determined and imaginative people cooperating with a well-placed leader.
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Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
Zombified Youth Of America Believe Martin Luther King Died Last Week In A Car Accident
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Will “probably catch the funeral on TV”
Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Nov 11, 2013
Activist prankster Mark Dice is back with another video this week highlighting the ongoing zombification of the youth of America as he asks people for their reaction to the “recent death of Martin Luther King”.
Of course, the iconic civil rights leader was assassinated some 45 years ago now, but not one single person Dice interviewed seemed aware of this fact. Indeed they fully believed Dice when he told then that King had been run over by a car in Washington DC and died of internal injuries at the age of 84.
“I think it’s bad that he died, but other that that, y’know we just got to move forward from here, y’know and just change things.” said one man, stuttering over his scrambled response.
“That’s too bad, I don’t know what to say,” added another man, clearly unaware of who King was or what he stood for.”
“A lot of my friends are black people, I love black people.” said another man.
While some of those Dice interviewed knew who King was, they seemed blissfully unaware that King died in 1968, shot down in Memphis after devoting 13 years of his life to the civil rights movement.
“I just think a lot of people can learn from him, and his legacy should continue on.” another person told Dice, ignorant of the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s legacy has been living on for four decades already.
When Dice asked another man if he would be attending King’s funeral next week, he replied “No, but I wish I could though. I can’t make it.”
“I don’t know,” replied another, adding “where is the funeral? I would but I don’t have any money. I’ll probably just watch it on TV.”
“I will be watching.” said another man who declared that MLK had “done a lot for African Americans.”
When King was assassinated, Americans took to the streets as riots broke out in many U.S. cities. Clearly, as Dice’s video demonstrates, should any leading anti-establishment figure be killed today, the majority would probably opt to watch TV, or skateboard instead.
Dice has recently filmed himself asking Americans for their views on Al Qaeda building a base on the Moon, and Mount Rushmore being torn down to pay off government debt.
He has also regularly enticed people to sign petitions to implement a Nazi police state in America, to support repealing the Bill Of Rights, banning the First and Second Amendments, as well as throwing gun owners in prison, and enforcing mandatory euthanasia of elderly people.
Dice also recently gathered many signatures on a petition to grant President Obama complete immunity to commit any crimes he wishes while in office.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
This article was posted: Monday, November 11, 2013 at 1:48 pm
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COME TO SESSION: Gov. John Kitzhaber has called lawmakers to a second special session in less than a year.
By Shelby Sebens | Northwest Watchdog
From a special session in Oregon to raise taxes and cut pensions to what’s up next for Obamacare in Oregon, Northwest Watchdog has you covered.
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