Leading Democrat Bernie Sanders a shoo-in with Trotskyists

FPI / February 19, 2020

A Trotskyist was on the march at a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle on Monday.

In her address to supporters of Sanders, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant called for a “powerful socialist movement to end all capitalist oppression and exploitation.”

Sawant is a member of Socialist Alternative, a Trotskyist organization which is fighting for a “socialist United States and a socialist world,” according to its website.

The Trotskyist group’s platform includes taking control of the “top 500 corporations and banks that dominate the U.S. economy” and paying compensation “on the basis of proven need to small investors, not millionaires.”

Additionally, in order to put an end to layoffs, the socialist group calls for taking “bankrupt and failing companies into public ownership.”

Sawant was formerly an activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Following President Donald Trump’s election victory, she reportedly used government resources to help organize anti-Trump “Occupy Inauguration” protests.

In his address to the rally on Monday, Sanders slammed Mike Bloomberg, who recently hired a campaign team in Washington state.

“Today, we say to Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg, ‘We are a democracy, not an oligarchy. You are not going to buy this election,' ” Sanders said, targeting Bloomberg’s spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on a national ad blitz.

Also at the rally, Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who is chairing Sanders’ campaign in the state, pushed back against criticism of the enormous costs of his policy proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. “We in America don’t suffer from scarcity. We suffer from greed,” she said.

Free Press International