On Nov. 2, 2021, voters in Seattle voted in city elections including for two council seats and an open seat mayoral election. On Dec. 7, however, voters in Seattle’s District 3 will have to return to the polls as one of the most prominent members of the City Council, Kshama Sawant, faces a recall election.
Sawant immediately stands apart from the other members of the Seattle City Council. In a heavily blue city, eight of the nine councilors are Democrats — Sawant, however, refuses to identify with the Democratic Party, and is instead aligned with the Socialist Alternative party. Sawant has built a reputation as a committed leftist, first running for office in 2013 on a pledge to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour (a year later, Seattle did precisely that; the national minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour). Since then, she has advocated for a Renters’s Bill of Rights — whose provisions included extending the advanced notice landlords must give before evicting renters —, led the effort against a planned $160 million police station, persuaded the City Council to cut ties with financial institutions that provided loans to the TransCanada or Keystone XL Pipeline, and more.
Yet where Sawant may have gained the most national attention is for her battles with Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle. In 2018, Sawant joined the other members of the Seattle City Council in unanimously voting for a head tax charging $275 per employee on large corporations making at least $20...
Law firms and advisers are charging fees to help migrants to fabricate sexual orientation-based asylum claims in order to remain in the United Kingdom (UK), a BBC investigation has revealed. In a...