GOOD LUCK WITH THAT NOW: Does Seattle deserve better than Carmen Best?

Last Monday night the council voted by a 7-1 margin to initiate their first series of cuts to the police budget, putting in motion the events that led directly to Chief Best’s departure 24 hours later. The lone holdout was 46-year-old, Indian-born city councilwoman Kshama Sawant, a socialist who believes that her adopted city is a ‘playground for the rich’ — rich who need to be punitively taxed. Among other public effusions, Sawant has called for the Seattle-based Amazon to be taken into public ownership, and once denounced tributes to the late Barbara Bush as ‘giving cover to the ruling class, and ultimately undermining struggles against oppression’.

Just to be clear: Councilwoman Sawant wasn’t voting against the first round of Seattle’s police cuts because she was concerned they might adversely affect morale, jeopardize public safety, and make it impossible for Chief Best to remain in her job. Just the opposite. She voted against them not because they were too radical, but because they weren’t radical enough.

As a wise man once said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”