Why Independent "Progressive" Media Ignores Kshama Sawant
Kshama Sawant recently achieved a landmark win for caste minorities in Seattle. On March 4th she launched her Workers Strike Back campaign with no support from progressives in office or their media
Kshama Shines.
Kshama Sawant made global news when her legislation to end caste discrimination passed, and Seattle became the first city outside of South East Asia to ban caste discrimination. We are already seeing the ripple effect of this groundbreaking legislation, as Toronto has become the second city to put a caste discrimination bill up to vote.
Caste discrimination is a severe social ill in South East Asia and its diaspora globally. Understanding how it specifically impacts the Indian community in the United States, Kshama Sawant has challenged the power of Hindu groups that are very politically active in the US. Right-wing Hindu groups are heavily intertwined with the growing Indian diaspora. For instance, they have previously contributed to congresspeople like Ro Khanna and Tulsi Gabbard’s campaigns.
However, this is not the first battle Kshama has been engaged in against power structures. Her fights can only be described as the David vs Goliath battles of this era. Sawant met with Amazon’s ire, challenging their practices in Seattle. She fought to raise the minimum wage in the city, making Seattle the first city in the USA to have a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Amazon challenged her council member position with a recall. Despite Amazon spending millions against her in advertising and direct contributions to her opponent, Kshama Sawant won her recall election. She remains a council member of the Seattle city council.
I have been following Kshama Sawant’s victories and her zest for the labour movement for years now. I have rarely come across a politician that is so unbossed and fearless. She reminds me of the 80’s Bernie Sanders when he was the mayor of Burlington or Jeremy Corbyn who never bowed down to any pressure. As a councilwoman, she fought against both the Democrats and the Republicans as she came from a third party, the Socialist Alternative Party.
They used to like her.
When Seattle won the $15 wage battle, Kshama Sawant was on all progressive independent media channels. Her recall vote was also covered in the mainstream news media.
Hence, I was shocked to see that the independent YouTube shows that covered Kshama’s victories had not mentioned her historic anti-caste discrimination legislative victory, or the launch of a national workers’ movement of Workers Strike Back.
Kshama’s caste bill was featured widely in India, Bangladesh, Srilanka and Thailand. What a shame it is to call yourself a left-independent media and not cover the most active leftist politician in the country.
When I looked into this phenomenon, I found that many of these progressive YouTubers stopped reporting on Kshama Sawant ever since she started calling out the progressives in office for not pushing the agenda they ran on.
How this began.
The Biden presidential win was the end of the “movement” Bernie Sanders said he was building. He and other progressive politicians succumbed to the Biden agenda without demanding policy concessions for their progressive working-class base. This disaffected many voters who looked up to Bernie Sanders and the progressives as their last hope of bringing about change. This is where Kshama Sawant began criticizing the progressives more openly than she did before 2020. Progressive Democrats were easily challenging Trump’s imperialist policies. However, when it came to a president from their own party, unlike Kshama, most progressives elected federally, became mush.
In 2020, Democrats in the House had a crucial majority with a progressive bloc called “the squad” having power like never before. From 4 “squad” members, they grew to 9, with extremely confrontational and bitter pro-Trump Republican opposition.
Nancy Pelosi’s speakership was up for a vote. The grassroots activists demanded the progressive caucus withhold their votes in exchange for a floor vote on Medicare For All, or any other progressive policy.
The progressives in power condescendingly talked down to the grassroots demands that put them in power. They claimed they were working “behind the scenes” with Pelosi and other senior Democrats to pass a $15 minimum wage that was part of the Biden campaign agenda.
Kshama Sawant urged the “squad” and other progressives to hold the Democrats accountable. A divide occurred in the progressive independent media networks. Media networks with higher viewership (except Jimmy Dore, who has over 1 million subscribers) defended progressive politicians, whereas those with newer independent networks criticized them. They smelled rot. This divided the left which is already small, into the FTV media and the Squad media or what I call the permission progressive media.
Despite once covering Kshama Sawant's brave victories, her support for forcing the vote for progressive demands from Pelosi, and her criticisms of the progressives, made her less likeable to these permission progressives.
Since Biden took office we have only seen progressives in office praise him. The chair of the Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal gave an ‘A’ rating to Joe Biden’s term.
The permission progressive media overtly defend the progressives despite them failing in their promises of “pushing Biden left”.
Kshama did not lose her roots. She did not abandon her values to get along with progressives in power or in the permission progressive media that used to cover her so favourably until she spoke truth about progressives.
Late last year, Democrats joined Republicans and squelched rail workers' strikes. This was it for Kshama. Only a single progressive voted against this betrayal of workers.
Since the Democrats busted a rail workers’ national strike, she has called for the Democratic Socialists of America to remove Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Jamaal Bowman as members. Kshama claims a socialist is inherently pro-union rank-and-file striking.
Since Joe Biden won the presidency, Kshama Sawant has stood by her values and principles and criticised the Biden regime and the progressive politicians covering up his debacles.
Permission Progressive (PP) Media
Throughout the Trump regime, the progressive media focused on him a lot, as they should have. A lot of these progressive independent channels criticized the Obama regime freely as well. It seemed all balanced. However there was a divide during the Trump regime between progressives who believed Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the elections in 2016, and those who knew this was classic CIA-FBI propaganda.
Fear-mongering about Trump and his politics took over the US political discourse entirely, where Donald Trump became this unique figure to be afraid of. This slowly eroded the conscience and ability to think in a historical context for those in the left-leaning independent media circles. Intelligence services that the Democrats have historically been wary of suddenly were being defended by the same Democrats.
Looking back, compare Donald Trump to Barrack Obama and George Bush Jr., was he really more dangerous than them policy-wise?
Fear-mongering politics has become the most profitable strategy for elected Democrats. If Trump opposes war, Democrats have to love war. The anti-Russia rhetoric for all the years Trump was in office has corroded the minds of those who were against the Iraq war, the war in Libya etc. Today most of them are in lockstep with neo-cons cheering on a proxy war against Russia.
Many larger independent progressive YouTubers have now become permission progressive media. They are adjusting their political coverage based on what their favourite politicians in office say, and do. If progressive politicians support a war, they have to call Russia an imperialist power and support the war. If they do not speak up about children in cages under Joe Biden, hey AOC, then these permission progressives will never cover it.
Permission progressives like the Majority Report, The Young Turks, The Humanist Report, Breaking Points, etc., have a massive following on social media. They have influence.
All these channels advocated for Sanders voters to vote for Joe Biden. They moved on to shame those disaffected voters who did not want to participate. This made them attract a larger audience, not often considered on the left.
The middle-class voters of Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, etc flocked to these channels because, during the general election of 2020, they acted gung ho against Donald Trump, generating a ton of clicks for their content.
Since the Democrats won and the progressive politicians have shown themselves to have no spine and are careerists, the permission progressive YouTubers cannot abandon the new, better-to-do followers they have made.
Their favourite politicians do not challenge the neo-con democrats because “Donald Trump is right around the corner”. Hence, the PP YouTubers now curate their content and push the narrative that Russia is the reason for everything wrong in the United States.
After being elected for being pro-workers, since the Biden presidency, progressives have remained fairly lukewarm, unless it benefits them somehow. For example, when Chris Smalls organized the Long Island Amazon warehouse workers, he urged progressives to join him in his struggle.
The workers won in their struggle to unionize and that is when the progressive politicians joined in to celebrate the victory. This was covered extensively by the PP media, following in the footsteps of celebrity politicians like AOC, for whom this was a PR stunt.
Ask yourself, isn’t the leftist independent media’s responsibility to cover labour activity that is not highlighted by the mainstream media?
Chris Smalls’ historic victory was covered by most mainstream news shows, including the right-wing Fox News. However, it was mostly Youtube channels with fewer audiences that had Mr Smalls on their shows regularly for months. I witnessed this myself.
Squad Leads The Permission Progressives (PP).
Independent media has to be confrontational to power, if not they are nothing but propagandists just like the mainstream media. The PP media is now indistinguishable from CNN or MSNBC. Kshama Sawant challenges the power they refuse to, making it extremely uncomfortable for those who have to keep defending the incapability of the politicians they have spent years defending. They can either choose to cover Kshama Sawant who speaks the truth about the spineless progressives, or to cover the grandstanding politics and theatre of the progressives in office.
We are now into the third year of the Biden presidency. Throughout the Trump regime, we were fearmongered into believing he would drive us to a nuclear war. Here is Joe Biden and all the Democrats, with progressives, pushing us closer than ever to a nuclear war on two fronts, with Russia and China.
Permission progressives are driving people away from the left, socialism, communism and justice. It is shameful that the Trump Republicans in office today, are those advocating for negotiations with Russia. However disingenuous they are, they are leading the conversation. It is the republican governor of Ohio suing the railroad company Northfork Southern that’s responsible for one of the largest ecological catastrophes in the US. The PP media was busy blaming Trump’s deregulations.
The Squad and Bernie Sanders were sold to us as anti-war, pro-worker candidates. They said they would create a ruckus if they came to power. They have not fought for a single promise they made. Instead, now they spend most of their time as celebrities or defending the corrupt Democrats they once ran against. Their partners in crime are the PP media personalities on Youtube, who look down upon working-class organizers and YouTubers. They portray rightful dissidents as nihilistic and immature.
While the progressives in Congress turned their backs on the working-class voters that voted for them and organized for them. Kshama Sawant was actively joining forces with strikers all over the country. She recognized that 2022 was a hotbed for union activity. Here she is talking about Starbucks employees who unionized over 100 stores across the US. She openly slams progressive Democrats for being ‘yes’ clowns to their party’s seniority and corruption.
Kshama Sawant, whose prior achievements were covered in-depth by these same permission progressives, ignored her recent achievements, and what she is doing to build a labour movement in the USA for the first time since the 1930s. However, Kshama is not taking this deliberate ignorance lying down. She debated PP journalist Ryan Grim when he was defending the “squad” celebrities after they voted for a bill that took striking rights away from railroad workers.
Do you still believe the squad or their permission progressives can save the day?
It is always a tough pill to swallow and accept you have been duped. After spending your hard-earned money, time and emotions for a movement, coming to accept that it was all a fraud is heartbreaking, demotivating and often turns people off of politics. I understand that, but we cannot look away from reality any longer. Instead of holding the progressives accountable for their betrayal of working-class voters, PP media is brainwashing people into not challenging these progressives.
If you believe in labour organizing, and building labour power is what can change the trajectory of the US, please support Workers Strike Back. Spread the word as far as you can, because these permission progressives are already alien to the working-class struggle. To further activate you, Kshama Sawant has achieved more in her decade-long career as a councilwoman, than the current progressives in office can ever begin to think of.
Let’s not wait for the brainwashers in permission progressive media to get on board with a grassroots labour movement. Their interests align more with the mostly white, professional-managerial class, than with the workers in the US, or around the world. They preach global leftist solidarity but do not practice it, as they constantly perpetuate US state propaganda without any critique. They are complicit in America’s worst business called US imperialism and shifting further into the belly of a right-wing beast.
What good is an independent grassroots media, that functions more like the guard dog of politicians, and fearmongers viewers, into supporting their dishonesty?
Kshama is covered so favorly in India, even though are a far-rightwing country today.
This week she picketed with my UFCW coworkers at PCC grocery for higher wages and better conditions. Made a big splash with media and helped get people talking!