What Kshama Stands For

Fight the Rich, Not Their Wars! End All Military Aid to Israel

Kshama is running for Congress to build a movement that can end the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza and to put a stop to the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the U.S. to fund wars around the world. We need an immediate end to all military funding for the Israeli war machine and to the brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. We need an end to the military assault on Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other nations.

Kshama is the only candidate in this race fighting for an end to: 

  • All military aid to Israel
  • All weapons and tech, including AI, for genocide and imperialist war 
  • All financing mechanisms for the Israeli military and violent occupation
  • All exports to, and imports from, Israel of weapons and goods that could serve military purposes

Kshama is the only candidate in the race calling for a permanent arms embargo on Israel. 

Kshama’s main opponent, 29-year incumbent Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith has the blood of hundreds of thousands Palestinians on his hands. He has voted for tens of billions of dollars for the genocide and has repeatedly voted to ban U.S. funding for United Nations food assistance for Gaza.

Smith has called antiwar activists “left-wing fascists” and demanded that they be arrested. As the former chair and current ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith has been one of the main leaders of war and genocide funding. Kshama’s campaign is a historic opportunity to throw this genocidal politician out of office.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties continue to fund the genocide and the Israeli state — 173 House Democrats voted for the 2024 bill that gave over $26 billion to Israel for the genocide. The genocide in Gaza passed its 1,000-day mark in early July of this year. The violence and bloodshed has expanded to the West Bank and to Lebanon. Genocide and imperialist war is a source of obscene profits for the billionaires and multimillionaires. AI is now a central component of genocide and imperialist war, ICE terror, mass layoffs, the surveillance state, and climate crisis because AI is the new frontier for super-profits for the super-rich. The genocide will not be ended on the basis of electing Democratic politicians, because the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, has supported the murderous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people for nearly eight decades. The Democratic Party is not a “lesser evil”, but  one of the two most powerful parties of global capitalism and imperialism. 

The American antiwar movement urgently needs leaders who understand the need to fight against both of the parties of the genocidal billionaire class. Not only have many self-described progressives in the Democratic Party voted to blatantly fund the genocide, virtually all of them, including AOC, have voted for Israeli military equipment such as the Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling, which they claim are “defensive.” 

No aspect of the genocidal project can be considered “defensive.” Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling are all part of the genocidal hardware of the Israeli state. They have allowed Israel to carry out slaughter in Gaza with impunity. They have also enabled Israel to brutally attack Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen. Israel has bombed Yemen on 16 separate occasions just last year. There is nothing defensive, or defensible, about any of this.

We need elected leaders in the U.S. Congress who will not only consistently vote against funding the genocide, but also use their office to mobilize a grassroots army of hundreds of thousands of working people to fight the Democratic and Republican parties, the Zionist lobby, and the billionaires profiting from war and genocide. Democrats like AOC are doing none of this. Voting against war and genocide is the LOWEST possible bar, and politicians like AOC have repeatedly failed to even do that.

Kshama has pledged that if elected to Congress, she will turn her Congressional inauguration into a mass rally of ten thousand people in Washington D.C., and immediately use her office to launch militant national movements to fight for an end to all military aid to Israel.

The occupation of Palestinian lands has long been backed by U.S. imperialism because Western billionaires and multimillionaires see Israel as a strategic outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli state was created in the first place in order to serve the interests of the capitalist class. This is why Democratic Party politician Joe Biden, long ago when he was a U.S. Senator, said that: “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”  

The Israeli state serves as a terrorizing check against any rebellions by working and oppressed people in a geopolitically and economically pivotal region of the world. While the policy of forever war is primarily driven by Western imperialism, it is aided by, and serves, not only the capitalist class in the West but also the ruling elite in nations like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. 

Ending the occupation and bringing about the liberation of the Palestinian people are tied to the liberation of the working class in the Middle East and internationally. It will need revolutionary fightback by working people and the labor movement in the United States as well as in the Middle East in order to break U.S. military support for the ruling classes in Israel and neighboring countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. 

By the same token, working people cannot have any faith in Chinese or Russian imperialism or in any nation’s capitalist class. Working people’s allies are other working people everywhere, not the capitalist class or their politicians anywhere. Our campaign also opposes the inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. We don’t support U.S. imperialism, Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism in that bloody conflict, or either bloc in the larger US/China conflict. None of these imperialist powers represent the interests of working people in Ukraine, Russia, or anywhere else. We need money for healthcare, education, jobs, and housing, not for war.

We need to build a global antiwar and workers’ movement made up of workers of all nations and ethnicities fighting against the bosses’ wars and for our common interests. Working-class action has stopped wars in the past. Today, working people and the labor movement need to organize a one-day general strike in the U.S., demanding an end to all military aid to Israel.

As the only elected socialist on the Seattle City Council, Kshama fought for and won the nation’s second and strongest ceasefire resolution in November 2023 for a ceasefire in Gaza. It took a movement of Arab & Muslim community members, socialists, antiwar activists, union members, and other working people to win that resolution, overcoming the opposition of the Democratic Party Councilmembers. It will take an even bigger movement to defeat AIPAC, the weapons manufacturers, and the Democratic and Republican Parties to end U.S. military aid to Israel and the genocide.

Free Healthcare for All — Tax the Rich!

There has never been a clearer opportunity to launch a serious fight to win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, and take down the deeply dysfunctional, for-profit American healthcare system.

We’re dying from unaffordable healthcare as the pharma bosses and for-profit health insurance industry make bank off our sickness. We need to tax the rich hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fund free healthcare for all — a fully public system covering all services, including preventive care, surgeries, vision, hearing, dental, gender-affirming care, free abortion, ambulances, and Emergency Room visits.

We need to go beyond that, and build militant movements to win state-of-the-art, free healthcare for all owned and democratically run by working people. We need to bring big pharma and the hospitals into democratic public ownership, run by healthcare workers, with patients having the right to choose their physicians and specialists. We need to end the private insurance industry — no more denial of care, no more profits from sickness! As part of our free healthcare for all system, we need a major expansion of clinics and hospitals around the country.

Despite being hugely popular with working people, the demand for Medicare for All has been stalled because of the utterly failed strategy of relying on “progressive” Democrats to fight for it. This will never happen, because the Democratic Party is tied at the hip to the insurance industry and Big Pharma. What’s needed instead is an independent, national movement that can harness the resurgent discussion around Medicare for All and growing anger at the health insurance corporations, and go on the offensive to win free healthcare for all by taxing the rich. This should include local and state ballot initiatives.

Alongside her campaign for Congress, Kshama has launched a campaign for a Seattle ballot initiative to expand the Amazon Tax our movement won in 2020 by approximately $5 billion a year to make healthcare free. This can act as a launchpad to push forward the fight for Medicare for All nationally.

Fight for National Rent Control

We face an epidemic of unaffordable housing—the rent is too damn high! We need strong rent control with no rent increases above inflation for all rental properties. We need a massive expansion of publicly owned, high-quality, highly energy-efficient affordable housing by taxing the rich, as our movement won in Seattle when Kshama Sawant led the fight for the Amazon Tax. The Amazon Tax raises hundreds of millions of dollars a year to build affordable housing by taxing the city’s wealthiest corporations.

We also need a movement to organize renters around the country to fight against exploitative corporate landlords and for a National Renters’ Bill of Rights. Kshama built movements to win landmark renters’ protections in Seattle — a $10/month cap on late rent fees, six months’ notice of rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, caps on security deposits and move-in fees, and economic evictions assistance, which requires landlords to pay renters three-months rent if they are forced to move due to a 10%+ rent increase. We need to expand those victories nationally, and fight for more — including strong residential and commercial rent control. Kshama also helped renters to collectively organize to stop rent increases and force landlords to make needed repairs. We need fighting tenants’ unions nationally, and working-class leaders like Kshama who will stand with them.

The private housing market has failed us—we need to take the big real estate corporations and banks into democratic public ownership. We need housing for all! New housing construction should be planned in coordination with free, frequent, and highly convenient mass transit routes. Every unit of new affordable housing should be built with good-paying union labor, like Kshama fought for with Seattle’s Amazon Tax.

Shut Down ICE and the Detention Centers! Stop the Deportations!

Working people must unite against the deportations being carried out by Trump and both parties of the billionaires, which represent a brutal attack on the entire working class. 

Kshama is fighting to shut down ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and the detention centers and to stop the deportations. Kshama’s campaign is also fighting to win a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee, free healthcare for all, and a massive expansion of publicly-owned affordable housing, available to all working people regardless of citizenship status and funded by taxing the billionaires and multimillionaires.

Trump is carrying out a horrific escalation against immigrant community members, with ICE arresting a shocking 10,000 people over a five-day period at the end of June. But attacks on the immigrant community have been a bipartisan agenda. Kshama’s main opponent Adam Smith voted in favor of Republican President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Act, which created ICE. Smith and his fellow Democrats in the House and Senate have voted repeatedly to fund ICE. In fact, Smith has voted on a total of nearly $115 billion dollars for ICE funding since its inception. Democratic President Obama became known as the “Deporter-in-Chief” and Democratic President Biden deported four million people, far more than Trump did in his first term. According to a September 2024 National Immigrant Justice Center report, an estimated 37,000 people were detained each day under Biden, a 140 percent increase since Trump left office after his first term. In his last year in office, Biden approved $3.4 billion for ICE “to jail an average of 41,500 immigrants per day, historically high funding surpassing all four years of the Trump administration.” Most of that money went to private corporations like The GEO Group, which profit off brutally inhumane detention centers which are often deadly for vulnerable detainees (such as elderly, pregnant, youth, and those with serious medical conditions).

Billionaires and multimillionaires make huge profits from ICE and the detention centers and receive lucrative contracts from both Democratic and Republican administrations. Palantir, the dystopian corporation owned by warmongering billionaires Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, and Joe Lonsdale, has been an ICE contractor under Obama, Biden, and Trump. 

The bosses’ super-exploitation and marginalization of immigrants is used to undermine the wages and conditions of all workers, both native-born and immigrant, and as a weapon to divide us. Native-born and immigrant workers must stand together to fight for better wages and conditions, and defend the right of all workers to unionize without fear of retaliation, including deportation. 

We need mass action, including mass strike action and civil disobedience, to beat back workplace immigration raids and to stop the deportations. We need ICE out of our workplaces, schools and neighborhoods. We need to shut down the detention centers that both parties of the billionaires have been using to carry out their terror campaign against immigrants. We need to put those billions of dollars towards education, housing, and healthcare for all. 

The criminal ICE agents and private prison administrators directly responsible for the horrific conditions inside the detention centers should be prosecuted. As a City Councilmember, Kshama fought for and won the “Right to Counsel,” for free legal representation for all renters facing eviction. We need to do the same for immigrants: we need to fund free legal defense for any immigrant facing deportation.

Kshama has a long track record of fighting in solidarity with immigrant community members and building movements against the billionaire class. Her campaign has strongly supported detainees on a courageous labor and hunger strike at Delaney Hall, the notorious immigrant detention center in New Jersey! Kshama also stands with anti-ICE protestors who have been facing off against the full weight not only of Trump’s ICE but also city and state police departments under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Most of the massive corporations are owned by the same handful of so-called “asset manager” corporations on Wall Street, such as Vanguard, which has $12 trillion in assets, and BlackRock, which owns majority shares in GEO and has $13 trillion in assets. Most of the wealth in these asset accumulations are, in turn, owned by the same small elite club. Many of the same billionaires and multimillionaires also have trillions of dollars at stake in AI. They are making AI an increasingly central component of war and bloodshed. Their investments in AI are now the principal reason for mass layoffs. AI is increasingly also the backbone of ICE terror. The fight to shut down ICE and the detention centers needs to go hand in hand with the antiwar movement to end the genocide, military aid to Israel, and the forever wars, the struggle to stop the proliferation of AI data centers, and the fight to take Big Tech and Big Energy into democratic public ownership of workers.

The alternative to the bosses’ attacks on immigrants, and to anti-worker “free trade” agreements like NAFTA, is for the labor movement to launch mass organizing drives and build fighting unions not only in the United States, but also around the world. We must combat the race to the bottom by the bosses, which seeks to pit workers in different nations against each other. Instead of corporate globalization, economic nationalism, and imperialism, we need working-class internationalism. We need to build a militant international labor movement to unite all workers in the fight for living wages and good working conditions for all.

Workers Need a Real Raise — $25/Hour Minimum Wage

Democrats and Republicans in Congress keep giving themselves raises but won’t even pass a bare $15/hour federal minimum wage for working people. The federal minimum wage is still at a shocking poverty-level $7.25/hour.

Kshama and our movement are fighting for a $25/hour federal minimum wage — in major cities, this should be at least $30/hour. With prices sky-high on everything from food to housing to transportation, we need to fight for an across-the-board 35% raise for all workers with automatic cost-of-living increases above inflation going forward.

Kshama led the fight to make Seattle the first major city to win a $15/hour minimum wage, in 2014. Immediately after being elected in 2013, she launched the 15 Now movement. She won, despite vicious opposition from big business and the Democratic Party, and even opposition from some labor leaders. Because of the inflation adjustments that Kshama and our movement won as part of that victory, the minimum wage in Seattle is now $21.30 an hour, the highest in the country. This was a historic victory which set off the “Fight for 15” around the country, but after ten years of price-gouging, inflation, and record profits by big business, workers everywhere need a real raise.

Instead of long hours and multiple jobs just to pay the bills, we need to shorten the workweek to 30 hours a week with no loss in pay or benefits. Unionized auto workers with UAW have recently raised a similar demand. A 30-hour work week is possible, but winning it will take a massive fight, including mass strike action and the revival of a fighting labor movement.

Kshama pledges to take only the average worker’s wage, as she did in her decade on the Seattle City Council. Democrats and Republicans in Congress make nearly $200,000 a year and are completely out of touch with regular working people. Kshama will donate the rest of her six-figure salary to support strikes, worker organizing, and social movements.

Fight Mass Layoffs! Public-Sector Living-Wage Jobs Guarantee — Protect the Right of Workers to Unionize and Strike!

Billionaires and multimillionaires are making obscene profits at the expense of workers. We need a living-wage, unionized jobs guarantee, dramatically expanding union rights and vital public services by taxing the rich. Millions of jobs can be created by funding the urgent needs of society.  Roads, bridges, public schools, and other infrastructure urgently need to be repaired or rebuilt. We need more teachers, teaching assistants, mental health specialists in public schools, most of which are severely and chronically underfunded. Winning free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich will also create hundreds of thousands of jobs in healthcare (not private insurance jobs denying coverage for community members facing illnesses). We need to fund a lightning-fast transition to clean energy and stop fossil fuel extraction while providing a just transition and guaranteed jobs for these workers.

Unions are the key tool workers have to fight the bosses for the things we desperately need. Organize the unorganized—unionize Amazon and every workplace! 

We need representatives in Congress who unambiguously fight for working people and actively support unionization and strikes. As a City Councilmember in Seattle, Kshama used her office to build the workers’ movement, including winning historic victories for workers and by donating tens of thousands from her salary to support strike and unionization efforts. 

Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and President Biden, together blatantly carried out the bidding of billionaires and multimillionaires and broke the railroad workers’ strike in 2022. This shameful vote included all self-described progressive Democrats. In contrast, Kshama used her City Council office to unambiguously stand with the railroad workers and called out the progressive Democrats for their strikebreaking vote. 

We need to build a fighting workers’ movement that arms itself with clear, bold demands and is prepared to go on strike to win them. We don’t need more representatives in Congress who pay lip service to workers’ rights and then stab us in the back as the progressive Democrats did with the railroad workers. Instead they need representatives who will go all out to fight for their interests, actively support strikes, and use their platform to help organize and strengthen them. We need to repeal Right to Work and every anti-union law nationwide, and build a movement to win the PRO Act.

We need to restore the traditions on which the American labor movement was built — class struggle not “class snuggle,” bold strike action that shuts down profits, and wide working-class unity against the bosses and billionaires. The labor movement needs to break with the Democrats once and for all and launch a new party for working people.

Tech workers, and the working class as a whole, need to get organized against the mass layoffs happening throughout the nation.

Mass layoffs of tens of thousands of workers, mainly in the tech sector, are becoming shockingly commonplace, making for what many are calling a “layoff bloodbath.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the main drivers of mass tech layoffs. 

On March 31st, between 20,000 and 30,000 Oracle workers, roughly 18% of the company’s global workforce, woke up to a cold five-line email from “Oracle Leadership” at 6am. No phone call. No meeting with HR. No warning from their managers. Just a message telling them their roles had been eliminated, that today was their last working day, and that their access to company systems had already been cut.

Oracle is not a company in distress. It posted a 95 percent jump in profits last quarter, $6.13 billion in a single quarter. The principal owner of Oracle stock, Larry Ellison, owns $200 billion in wealth and is the sixth-richest person in the world. 

The layoffs are about mega profits — billionaires and multimillionaires hoarding wealth and redirecting tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure while discarding the workers who built the company.

Oracle is far from an exception. It’s also Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, SalesForce, Ericsson, Block, Intel, Pinterest, Autodesk — the list goes on.

The super rich people who own these corporations plan to spend nearly a trillion more dollars on AI infrastructure over the coming year, and the layoffs are becoming a primary avenue for their fundraising. 

On top of that is the fact that the bosses are trying to replace human workers with AI-driven machines. Workers in multiple industries — from drivers to actors and writers to teachers to tech workers — face the prospect of whole areas of employment completely disappearing. The capitalists who run Goldman Sachs and OpenAI have given sinister numbers, claiming that they think that 18 percent or 300 million jobs globally can soon be automated by AI. None of automation is being used to raise the living standards of working people, much less train and create new jobs for the millions of workers made jobless.

We need to fight the billionaires and their mass layoffs with a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee.

Stop the AI Data Centers! Bring AI & Big Tech Into Public Control, Make Billionaires Pay!

Data centers have existed since the World Wide Web took off in the mid-1990s. But in the last five years, what are mainly being built are absolutely massive “hyperscale” data centers for AI, used for AI training and inference at unprecedented scale. There are nearly 4,500 data centers in the United States, accounting for about 45 percent of all facilities globally. 

Standard data centers may have a few thousand servers. These new hyperscale facilities exceed 5,000 servers and can go up to hundreds of thousands of servers and can occupy millions of square feet. One hyperscale data-center campus can demand anywhere from 200 to more than 500 megawatts of electricity—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. 

There are approximately 600 to 650 operational hyperscale data centers in the United States, 54 percent of the total worldwide number.

These hyperscale data centers are already dramatically pushing up electricity bills for working people. Data Centers not only use up insane amounts of electricity, they also distort the flow of electricity to homes, increasing the risk of electrical fires and blackouts. Hyperscale data centers can also consume millions of gallons of water daily, sometimes leaving surrounding residences with dry taps. They cause air pollution, water pollution, and sound pollution, which have huge negative impacts on working people nearby and which come at a time when the climate crisis is already at a breaking point.

No wonder that seven out of ten Americans oppose the data centers and there is massive opposition to the proliferation of AI. 

Protests by working people have shut down the plans for about 48 of these data centers, equating roughly $68 billion worth of projects. But there are over 670 more hyperscale data centers in the pipeline. And countless more mass layoffs. 

Overall, an expected $3 to $7 trillion is expected to be spent just on AI hyperscale data centers in the next five years or so. The super-rich are determined to ram through the data centers because of the trillions of dollars of profits that are at stake. AI is now a central component of genocide and imperialist war, ICE terror, mass layoffs, the surveillance state, and climate crisis because AI is the new frontier for super-profits for the super-rich. 

The capitalist class will do anything they need to in order to keep expanding and profiting from AI. The institutions like the police, the courts, the U.S. Congress, State Legislatures, City Councils exist mainly to enforce the ability of the capitalist class to make maximum profits. They will intimidate, threaten, and try to crush the growing movement against data centers with arrests and lawsuits against those who dare to fight back. They have begun accusing opponents of AI data centers (most Americans) of “anti-tech extremism.”

The ruling class will absolutely not stop the AI and data center juggernaut unless threatened by a powerful nationwide mass movement with leaders who have a backbone to go up against billionaires and the proven strategy to win for working people.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are owned by the billionaire class, and neither provides a path forward for working people. Kshama’s main opponent, 29-year genocidal incumbent Democrat Adam Smith, is the top Democrat being funded by Palantir and Anduril, which profit from war and surveillance AI. Even winning the minimal Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act (which would close the legal loophole that allows data brokers to sell Americans’ personal information to law enforcement and intelligence agencies without any court oversight) will require a serious fight against billionaires, a fight that no one currently in Congress wants to take on. In fact, more House Democrats (109) voted against this bill (H.R. 4639) in 2024 than House Republicans (90). Adam Smith was one of the votes against it.

Kshama’s campaign is fighting for an end to data centers and to ban all tax incentives for the super-rich in tech and real estate for AI data centers. Kshama is fighting for a ban on the use of AI in wars. She is calling for a national ban on algorithmic rental price-fixing software. Kshama’s campaign is the only one calling for Big Tech and Big Energy corporations to be taken into democratic public ownership by workers. This is the only way that technology can be harnessed for the good of working people and all living species, because we cannot control what we do not own.

As the sole independent socialist on the Seattle City Council for ten years, Kshama used her office to build mass movements of working people to defeat the billionaires and multimillionaires to win the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, and unprecedented renters’ rights. If elected to Congress, she will use her office to build mass movements nationally to go to war against the billionaire class and their two parties, as she did in Seattle for a decade.

With the billionaires playing for trillions of dollars of wealth from AI, they are gambling with the lives of billions of working people. Kshama is demanding that Wall Street and the super-rich must pay for the coming economic recession, not working people.

The data center and mass layoff onslaught is not a machines versus humans war — it is class war by the wealthy against billions of working and poor people. That’s why ending it will require an organized class war back against the bosses.

Stop Climate Catastrophe — Take Big Energy Corporations Into Public Ownership

Time is running out to avoid a climate apocalypse. We need a lightning-fast transition to a clean energy economy and an end to all fossil fuel use, with a just transition and free retraining for all fossil fuel workers. This must include a green unionized living-wage jobs program that employs millions of workers in the move to clean energy. 

We need free mass transit, an expansion of buses and high-speed rail, and energy efficiency retrofitting in commercial and residential buildings, paid for by taxing big business and the rich. As part of our Tax Amazon victory in 2020, Kshama fought for and won millions of dollars to go towards Green New Deal programs like retrofitting, weatherization, and energy efficiency for both new and old housing.

To avoid total climate disaster, we need to take the big energy corporations into democratic workers’ ownership and reorient them to 100 percent renewable energy production. This is a vital step, because we can’t control what we don’t own. Capitalism is a myopic, anarchic system which offers no way forward — it’s based on billionaire greed, not the needs of human beings, other animals, or the environment, and is completely incompatible with a sustainable world. 

End the War on Black People! Stop Mass Incarceration — Fund Housing, Healthcare, Education & Union Jobs!

American capitalism was built on the exploitation of enslaved Black people and the genocide of indigenous peoples. The horrors of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the ongoing exploitation of Black working people have provided unimaginable wealth for a tiny elite, while impoverishing generations of Black Americans and their communities.

Neither of the Democrats running in this race, Adam Smith and Melissa Chaudhry, even mention the needs of the Black community on their campaign websites. Kshama is the only candidate in this race fighting for Black working-class and poor people and the only candidate with the track record of winning victories for the Black community. 

Kshama is fighting for reparations for Black working-class and poor people, funded by taxing the rich. The net worth of the top one percent of the United States is at a shocking $55 trillion. We need to tax the rich to fund massive investment in Black and historically Black communities. We need quality affordable housing in Black communities, and strong national rent control. We need free public college and university, including a major increase in funding for Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) and an expansion of community colleges in Black neighborhoods. We need to build free public healthcare clinics in every Black community as part of a free national healthcare system. We need to expand mass transit and make it free, including by ensuring high-quality, frequent, accessible public transit routes in every Black community. 

Kshama is fighting for a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee funded by taxing the rich. As part of this, Kshama is also calling for a national program to create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Black workers to help carry out the critical work of rebuilding infrastructure, expanding mass transit, and transforming our energy system. 

We need to end mass incarceration, ban for-profit prisons, and stop forced, unpaid, and low-wage prison labor. We need to bring an end to racist policing and put police departments under the control of democratically elected community boards with full power over department policy, hiring, and firing. We need to put an end to the disastrous “war on drugs,” and instead fund healthcare, housing, education, and support for small businesses alongside a major expansion of living-wage union jobs. 

Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith, who is Kshama’s main opponent, has had a long record of slashing hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, social services, and public housing. He was also one of the many Democrats who voted for the bailouts of the billionaires in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. The bailout policies plundered the millions of working people who faced home foreclosures and handed over tens of billions of dollars worth of real estate to private equity. This bipartisan robbery against working people is a big reason why rents have been skyrocketing. All of these policies voted for by Adam Smith have disproportionately and severely undermined the living standards of Black working-class and poor people.

As the only socialist on Seattle’s City Council, Kshama Sawant led the fight to win the Amazon Tax, which funds hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing every year by taxing big corporations like Amazon. Kshama also campaigned for housing justice for Black working and poor people alongside “an expansive coalition of nonprofit organizations, faith-based institutions, and affordable housing providers,” including hosting a major rally for “reparations, unity, and affordable housing” in the summer of 2021. Kshama’s office used that public momentum to dedicate millions of dollars of the Amazon Tax she won in 2020 specifically towards building housing for the Black community in Seattle’s historically Black Central District, a form of reparations. She also helped win $500,000 to fund the Garfield Super Block and community center in the Central District. She helped organize Black and other marginalized-community tenants at Chateau Apartments and Rainier Court to successfully fight and win against the mass evictions and rent increases attempted by their exploitative landlords. We need to organize millions of people around the country and build a movement to win these kinds of victories on a much larger scale. Through her annual People’s Budget campaign, Kshama won full public funding for legal defense for any working-class renters facing eviction. Statistical evidence indicates that Black community members, particularly women, disproportionately face evictions and that trained legal counsel dramatically increases the likelihood of preventing evictions.

The greatest material improvement in the lives of Black American workers came through the mass labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s and the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which built fighting multiracial unions and helped to power the Civil Rights movement. We need to rebuild a fighting, anti-racist labor movement.

Fight Racism, Sexism, and All Oppression

Only the bosses profit from divisions among the working class. We need to build a united, multi-racial, multi-gendered movement of working people. We need to fight racism in all its forms, both in the United States and internationally. We must fight sexism and demand full and equal pay and benefits for women, paid parental leave, and free childcare. We need to organize to win legal, safe, free abortions for all who need them, as Kshama Sawant and our movement did in Seattle in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade. We need to defend immigrant workers from attacks by ICE and both parties of the billionaires, and organize fighting unions to defend their rights on the job and against workplace raids. We must fight back against anti-trans legislation and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and for free gender-affirming care. We must fight for full and equal rights for people with disabilities and against the brutal attacks on Medicare and disability services. 

Kshama has unambiguously fought alongside working, poor, and oppressed people, and helped win historic victories. As the only socialist on the Seattle City Council, she fought to make Seattle the first city in the country to get rid of the racist Columbus Day holiday and replace it with Indigenous People’s Day, and provide funding to the annual celebration organized by indigenous groups. She stood with Black working people both to win historic victories for renters’ rights and affordable housing, and also to fight back against racist policing and killings by the Seattle Police Department. Kshama spoke at the first Trans Pride day in 2013, which not a single Seattle Democrat agreed to attend. She led a movement alongside Indian, Muslim, and Sikh activists to pass a resolution against the racist, anti-Muslim CAA/NRC law being implemented by the right-wing Modi government in India in 2019. In 2023, she led the historic fight to win the first ban on caste-based discrimination anywhere outside of South Asia, a victory we should fight to extend nationally, with a federal law against caste-based discrimination.

We have to fight to end the war on trans people, Black people, indigenous people, immigrants, disabled people, women  and other oppressed groups. Movements are how change happens—we need to unite working and oppressed people to fight for our rights. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Fight for Trans and Queer Rights

Trans and queer people are under horrific attack from Trump and both parties of the billionaire class. Working people need to go on the offensive to fight full LGBTQ+ rights — this is the best way to defend against attacks and prevent them in the first place. This fight should go hand in hand with the fight to win historic change for working people of all genders and sexualities.

Discrimination, oppression, and violence is endemic to capitalism because in order to squeeze billions of people for profit, the billionaires and multimillionaires need to keep the working class divided on gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and ethnicity, and citizenship status. We need to build united mass movements of the working class against the attempts of the right wing and billionaire class to divide us in order to keep exploiting us. 

Working people are being squeezed on every front trying to afford basic necessities like housing, healthcare, and even groceries. Trans people, especially trans people of color, face violence and discrimination that compound all those crises. One in five trans people have been fired or denied a job for being trans and one in eight evicted or denied housing. One in five transgender individuals have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.

Kshama is fighting for: 

  • Free healthcare for all, funded by taxing the rich
  • Free and full access to all gender affirming care, reproductive care, and LGBTQ+ counseling services
  • End anti-trans and all LGBTQ+ oppression! Stop the advance of anti-trans bills, and go on the offensive to fight for full LGBTQ+ rights.
  • The Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (including titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, and IX) to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, federally funded programs, credit, and jury service
  • Living-wage jobs guarantee and the right for all workers to unionize
  • National rent control to stop the price-gouging by corporate landlords, which forces LGBTQ+ people out of their communities by economic eviction 
  • Create millions of affordable homes, including free emergency housing for trans and queer people fleeing abuse, funded by taxing the billionaires and the wealthiest corporations  
  • End all military aid to Israel and cut the trillion-dollar war budget to fully fund education, transit, and other social services
  • AI-related regulations for safeguarding the rights of queer children and adults.

Kshama has endorsed the No Hate in Washington State campaign, which is calling for a NO vote on two proposed appalling anti-trans ballot measures that threaten the rights of all children. If passed, IL26-001 would deny basic protections for child abuse victims and IL26-628 would subject girls to invasive genital exams to play sports. It is absolutely crucial that working people and the labor movement ensure these measures are defeated by Washington State voters. The working class needs to stand in solidarity against every form of oppression as well as economic exploitation under the capitalist system. Kshama’s organization, Workers Strike Back, and her revolutionary socialist campaign for the U.S. Congress will be doing everything they can to support the No Hate campaign.

Trump and the Republicans have demonized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants in order to deflect genuine anger working people feel against the billionaires. But Democratic politicians have not fought for LGBTQ+ rights in any meaningful way, and instead have used superficial and performative rhetoric while repeatedly betraying queer and all working people. Some Democratic Congressmembers pay lip service to LGBTQ+ issues, but they have not won, or led on, any substantive victories. Now, many prominent Democrats have started abandoning even those empty promises to pivot rightward for careerist reasons. 

Even a Democratic Party strategist, Charlotte Clymer, who is also a trans activist, admitted in 2025: “We’ve been largely abandoned by the Democratic Party… Looking at the past six months or so, it’s become pretty clear that most federal Democratic lawmakers have no clear or obvious intention in standing beside trans people in this critical moment.”

During her decade as the sole socialist on a Seattle City Council filled with Democratic Party politicians, Kshama consistently used her office to fight for queer and trans working people, often facing the sharp opposition of the Council Democrats. Working with the leadership of trans rights organizations, Kshama’s office helped build movements that won hundreds of thousands of dollars for an LGBTQ+ senior center in the heart of Capitol Hill, Seattle’s historically queer-friendly neighborhood, an LGBTQ+ wellness center at Seattle’s NOVA High School, and other trans community services. In partnership with the Gender Justice League and other LGBTQ+ organizations, Kshama’s office hosted a landmark LGBTQ+ Hate Crimes Forum in 2015, attended by hundreds of people, to highlight the surge in hate crimes against the queer community. This forum had so much public support that it forced the Democratic establishment to attend and take concrete steps following the forum. Alongside leaders like Danni Askini of the Gender Justice League and Marsha Botzer of the Ingersoll Gender Center, Kshama’s office passed proclamations in consecutive years for Trans Pride Day. 

Kshama is the only candidate in the race with the track record of fighting and winning for LGBTQ+ rights.  She is also the only candidate in this race fighting for demands that would dramatically improve the lives of trans and other queer community members.

We need a new political party for the multigender, multiracial working class to organize mass struggles against the rich and their political servants. Fighting for Kshama to be elected to the U.S. Congress will be a historic breakthrough towards that goal.

Cancel Student & Medical Debt

Over 45 million American working and young people (one in six Americans) carry student debt that totals nearly $2 trillion. Almost half of the class of 2024 undergraduate degree recipients carry an average student loan debt of over $29,000 in federal and private student loans. Over 14 million working people together are burdened by $220 billion in medical debt. About 3 million people owe medical debt of more than $10,000. Student debt and medical debt, not surprisingly, land disproportionately on communities of color, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrant communities. 

Like any other industry under capitalism, student and medical debt is a way for the billionaires and multimillionaires to make super profits by exploiting ordinary people. They not only profit from the usurious interest rates they charge working people, but they do far worse. Wall Street banks and the so-called student loan “servicing” corporations routinely deny millions of the most vulnerable borrowers legally-required basic protections and saddle them with illegally-generated billions of dollars in additional debt, ruin borrowers’ credit though illegal furnishing errors, charge borrowers totally illegal fees, and demand balloon payments from borrowers after failing to correct account errors.

After the 2008 Great Recession, the Bush and Obama administrations and the U.S. Congress bailed out the very billionaires who precipitated the economic crisis. A little-known part of the bailout was the so-called Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act (ECASLA). Purportedly to protect working people struggling with student debt, the ECASLA was in reality a giant $100 billion bailout of the corporations who profit from exploiting student loan borrowers. Every single Democrat in the U.S. House, including Adam Smith, voted in favor of this bailout of the super-rich.

These same bailed-out corporations also lobbied aggressively for further loopholes to be able to continue ripping off servicemembers, veterans, public school workers, and borrowers who were simply trying to repay their student loans. 

Kshama’s campaign is calling to cancel all student debt and medical debt while strongly supporting every possible stopgap measure that would alleviate the suffering of those facing such debt. 

  • Cancel all student debt — make college and university education free
  • Cancel all medical debt — free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich
  • Tax the big corporations, Wall Street banks, vulture funds, and hedge funds
  • Student and medical debt must be completely excluded from credit reports 
  • Ban for-profit collection agencies
  • Cap interest rates to the rate of inflation
  • Extend payment periods to reduce monthly burdens

Winning any of these demands will require a mass fightback against the billionaires. But this will not fully solve the problem because capitalism is a fundamentally parasitic system. Student and medical debt exists not for any social benefit, but purely in order for billionaires and multimillionaires to brutally exploit and profit off working and poor people, generating untold misery for millions of us.

That’s why Kshama is also fighting to take big corporations into democratic public ownership to be run by working people.

Bring Down Trump, the Billionaires, and their Two Parties

The Democratic Party not only failed to stop Trump — they prepared the ground for much of his agenda. Now they are standing aside (or even joining in) as he brutally attacks workers, immigrants, Palestinians, trans people, people with disabilities, and antiwar activists. 

Many of Trump’s attacks — like major tariffs (causing major inflation), tax cuts for the rich, or undermining workers’ rights and healthcare — will have devastating effects on millions of working people. Regardless of how people voted in the 2024 election, we must unite against Trump’s anti-worker, far-right agenda on the broadest possible basis, independent of the bankrupt Democratic Party. We need joint protests organized by left organizations, labor unions, and regular working people. We need to organize mass civil disobedience, including coordinated national days of action. Labor unions need to use the power of mass coordinated strike action to defend against these attacks, and build toward a nationwide general strike. Rank-and-file union members need to lead efforts to bring their unions into the fight.

Crucially, we need independent working-class representatives who are willing to call for and organize such action, as Kshama did over her decade as a socialist councilmember.

We must consistently connect our fight against Trump to the fight against the wealthy elite who are backing him, expecting to profit from his increasingly dangerous agenda. Elon Musk and a number of other billionaires have directly helped Trump carry out his attacks, regardless of their differences over parts of his agenda or any personal falling out. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also contributed to Kshama’s opponent, warmongering Democrat Adam Smith, in every election since 2010. And Smith is backed by many other corporations, billionaires, and right-wing interests like AIPAC. We must be clear that both political parties, Democratic and Republican, are weapons wielded by the billionaires against working people. 

In an earlier era, Richard Nixon was brought down by the combined strength of the antiwar, civil rights, women’s, and workers’ movements — the Watergate scandal was just the formal basis for his removal. While we can’t know at present exactly how Trump will be defeated, we do know that we need to urgently build the strongest possible movement to bring down this administration, the billionaire class, and their system of capitalism. We completely reject the Democrats’ fake efforts to pose as the “Resistance.” They represent the wing of the capitalist class which fully backed the genocide in Gaza, broke the railroad workers’ strike, and put Trump back in the White House. Throughout its history, the Democratic Party has expanded wars around the world and carried out endless attacks on working and oppressed people in the US. We need a new mass party basing itself on fighting methods of class struggle and working-class power.

No More Sellouts — We Need a New Party!

The Democrats and Republicans both serve the rich; that’s why working people keep getting screwed. 

Kshama is fighting back against Trump and the right wing to defend democratic rights, including the basic voting rights protections in The For the People Act, which would be a step forward against the systematic disenfranchisement of oppressed, poor, and working-class people. It would make voter registration automatic, restore voting rights to people with felony convictions who have completed their sentence, simplify voting by mail, end partisan gerrymandering at the federal level, make the rules for drawing maps uniform nationwide, give ordinary people a chance to review maps and provide input, and ban the laundering of campaign funds through front groups. 

However, we simply cannot rely on either the Democratic or Republican parties to win even basic rights such as these. Both parties use gerrymandering, corporate PACs, and voter disenfranchisement to make electoral gains, while ensuring that tens of millions of Americans remain straitjacketed within the two parties of the billionaire class. 

The so-called progressive Democrats in Congress have completely betrayed working people and offer no solutions. Trump is a dangerous representative of the billionaire class. We need a new, multiracial, mass working-class party that organizes movements and fights unambiguously for our needs. In such a party, all elected leaders would accept only the average workers’ wage, as Kshama Sawant has done. We need elected leaders to be fully accountable to working people and our demands, or else be removed. We need a party that consistently opposes war and imperialism, and fights unambiguously for working people and the oppressed. 

Kshama will use her campaign, and her office if elected, to build the foundations for such a party, alongside her organization Workers Strike Back. We need to begin organizing workers in the tens of thousands — and soon in the millions — to build a truly working-class party that can go up against both billionaire-backed parties and win what workers need.

Under capitalism, the bosses call the shots and have a dictatorship over our workplaces. We need a fundamentally different kind of society — run by and for working people, not the billionaires. We need to fight the rich and bring an end to the billionaire class and their system. We need a socialist society.

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