There are 43 days until the November 5 general election - but working people are fighting for a better Washington in their workplaces right now.

Here’s a short thread of ways we can support a few pivotal labor struggles.

Please highlight others in the QTs and replies. ✊🏾🏛️ Machinists are engaged in an important fight to save Boeing from itself, with contractual quality control measures that will make air travel safer for us all. Support them by signing the @IAM751 solidarity pledge, and pick up a picket line shift.

thestand.org/2024/09/how-to…

Last week, @soultypechild, @spekulation and I launched the effort to urge City Council to subpoena Seattle PD union president Mike Solan.

100s of Seattleites have contacted the Office of Civil Rights with that demand.

Here's an update on the progress of #SubpoenaSolan: There's been an outcry police accountability after several Seattle PD officers participated in the coup attempt of January 6th.

We discussed the demands of the #SubpoenaSolan campaign on Tuesday with @Omarisal (13-minute mark):

I wrote in @Crosscut about why defunding the police is about Seattle ending its centuries-long battle with its own form of Jim Crow.

When the fight for "reform" takes place in literally every generation, the only way forward is some version of abolition. crosscut.com/2020/06/time-a… Seattle, 1865: A week after Lincoln signs off on the 13th Amendment, Seattle's first City Council bans Indigenous people from appearing in Seattle city limits. The Seattle Police Department is founded in 1869, but doesn't hire a Black officer until 1890.

crosscut.com/2020/06/time-a…

Police departments operate as active political forces, not just passive enforcers of the law.

Seen that way, Seattle organizers are in the opening stages of a long campaign against Seattle PD. The cop union getting expelled from our county's AFL-CIO federation is the first win. The next step has to be defunding the Seattle Police Department to rubble. This is a longer, much less "exciting" fight that will need to take place iteratively.

Seattle operates on a biennial budget. What is defunded today can reappear 2 years later.

Or 2 years after that.

Racist policing is legally embedded in Seattle's Municipal Code.

On the road to police abolition and dismantling the carceral state, here are two actions Seattle City Council must take to correct that ASAP: 1️⃣ Seattle City Council should repeal SMC 12A.20.050, the "Drug-traffic Loitering" Ordinance.

It was crafted in 1990 and last modified in 1992, when racist Republicans & carceral Democrats enlisted local cops to fight the "War on Drugs."

The Mayor of Seattle is calling for a more exacting degree of police scrutiny in Minneapolis than she wants for officers in her own city, where Seattle PD is already under a DOJ consent decree that the city, with her help, is attempting to have prematurely lifted.

https://twitter.com/MayorJenny/status/1266166663621140481

These calls from Mayor Durkan to "prosecute" murderous cops were nowhere to be found when Seattle PD executed Che Taylor and Charleena Lyles; the latter when Durkan was a frontrunner for Mayor in 2017, the former while she was ***literally a U.S. prosecutor.***

Seattleites observing Minneapolis need to internalize that @SeattlePD is still under federal investigation for sustained patterns of racist policing. 2 of their officers once sued *a sitting city councilmember* for correctly calling their dispensation of Che Taylor "murder." White liberals at the highest levels of government in the city pretend to care about the issue, but then rush to ratify police contracts which reward the same officers who blew away Charleena Lyles--a pregnant Black mother--with impunity.

I wrote a few words in @Crosscut about how Seattle could address the present crises of Covid-19 and looming recession with the city’s emergency reserve funds.

crosscut.com/2020/03/corona… Presently, there is a great movement underway to tax large corporations to pay for economic relief.

We should support the leadership being shown by @cmkshama and @CMTammyMorales by signing and circulating this petition.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

I was proud to cast my ballot for Bernie Sanders in the #WashingtonPrimary because he’s the clear choice for transformative change on climate justice and ending the prison-industrial complex.

Get your ballots in today for democratic socialist leadership in the White House. 🌹🗳 After I came up short in my City Council race last year, I suffered a brief lack of direction. I was exhausted and didn’t know what my future would look like.

Then I got a text from a friend explaining that Bernie’s team was interested in hiring me.

“Me?”

Per the WA Sec. of State website, turnout for the Washington Presidential Primary currently sits at 21.6%.

There are still so many voters to reach. Let's make sure Bernie comes out of WA with a commanding victory.

Here are some canvasses I'm leading this weekend.

👇🏾🔥🍎 At 11AM on Sat 3.7 I'll be at Sandel Park in Greenwood for a canvass launch.

We'll be joined by a few very special guests/coalition partners that I'll be excited to announce in a few days.

RSVP to come to Saturday's canvass and hit doors for Bernie: mobilize.us/sanderswa/even…

Early morning Brotha of Bernard salesman at your service, Spokane-bound for a rally in desert.

Making my way through airport security and I feel safer already.

✈️🌹😇 they let a dude in a 49ers hat through without searching him, get me off this plane immediately

So many in Washington are watching the situation in Iowa with justified frustration, and a renewed resolve to make sure that @BernieSanders secures a dominant victory in our March 10th vote-by-mail primary. 🍎🔥

Thankfully, there are tons of ways to get involved.

A thread: This Friday, @carinchase and I will be hosting a debate watch party at Roanoke Park Place (near Eastlake). Watch the debate with other Bernie supporters, and sign up for volunteer shifts.

mobilize.us/sanderswa/even…

What if we had up-to-the-minute Woj bombs, but for permafrost melting in the arctic? “Sources close to the situation say first it started to melt, and then it melted.”

SEATTLE:

Our campaign to capture the District 4 seat on the Seattle City Council for an inclusive vision for Seattle is super close to reaching 1st place in the total amount of Democracy Vouchers received ((citywide.)) Over 40 candidates are running in seven City Council races. We're currently in 2nd place, with 2000+ vouchers received. We need just a few dozen vouchers to close the distance between us and 1st place citywide.

POC writers/thinkers lose points in the public eye for “over intellectualizing,” while white scholars of POC issues get professional advancement to study our condition, and it kinda makes you think the knowledge economy, like much else under capitalism, is pretty rigged. I’ve heard womxn and LGBTQIA+ folks say similar things about gender studies: that there’s pressure to make your work have some kind of vaguely defined “emotional, visceral” impact, whereas male scholars *in the same field* have no such constraint, are free to pontificate away.

Have we talked about this? “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” —The Guy on My Credit Card.

Yesterday during my @SeattleDSA endorsement rap, I accidentally said “reinvestment in the public trust,” but caught myself and corrected to “recommitment.”

For Millennials like me who have known nothing else, the exploitative neoliberal paradigm takes daily vigilance to resist. This may seem academic, but it isn’t.

We shouldn’t pursue free transit, public housing, climate justice, and ending the carceral state because we’ll get something in return (“investment”).

We should do it because it’s right and that’s the kind of city we want to live in.

Watching the narrative being driven online by Black womxn with respect to the R. Kelly doc makes me feel like we missed their voices in the 90s, when journalists like dream hampton were a relative rarity in the male-dominated field of music journalism. #SurvivingRKelly For so long I dismissed most critiques of misogyny in rap/R&B because they came from carceral-minded establishment politicians that wanted to criminalize Black cultural expression; the Tipper Gore, Rush Limbaugh types...

Reed frames left identity politics as this Clintonite plot—when in reality, nobody is happier to see the most visible cohort of socialists fumble the identity question than libs, who constantly exploit this seam to make socialists look like out of touch reductionists. Meanwhile, the difference between the anti-socialist think pieces of 2016 and @miguelxsalazar’s article is that these critiques are coming from within. We’re in DSA; we pay dues; we’re socialists; we’ve read the same books as you...and we still think you’re screwing up.

I’m running to represent District 4 on Seattle’s City Council because I have a vision for my city and my communities that can’t be compromised. Read more about it in today’s announcement op-Ed in ⁦@TheStranger⁩. ✊🏾🏙 thestranger.com/slog/2018/11/2… We’re going to win this race because we’re tired of politics that capitulate with forces that don’t have our best interests in mind. Participate in our campaign to fight for the right to our city here on Twitter at @ElectScott2019.

I remember when I landed a gig in college. On my first day at work, the boss placed a stopwatch over my neck and set it for 30 minutes when I took my lunch break. I was 21 and it both humiliated and radicalized me. #NationalBossDay The incident deepened my understanding of the cross section between racism and capitalism. There was something perfect and tragic about this white lady placing a rope around my neck in the name of productivity, profit.