Don’t Give Clinton Any Credit For $15: Instead, Thank Fast Food Workers And A Seattle Socialist

Hillary Clinton’s support for a $15 minimum wage (but only in New York, the rest of us apparently are only worth $12/hour) is now two days old. Her announcement of support for the effort to raise New York’s minimum wage comes as Bernie Sanders, a long time supporter of $15, is surging in the state’s polls. Clinton called New York a “watershed” moment in the Fight for 15. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

“I know it’s going to sweep our country,” Clinton said, according to the Washington Post on April 4th. “It shows the world what kind of community we are, and what we can get done when we work together.”

How she can support $15 for New York but not for the rest of the country brings to mind a botching of Mitt Romney’s infamous expression about geese and ganders, and we’ll have to come up with a new political phrase to describe what Hillary is doing when she says she doesn’t support $15 nationwide whilst simultaneously saying that $15 is “going to sweep the country” on stage with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (a Clinton ally, despite his own toying with the idea of running for president several years ago) during the grand celebration to celebrate the passage of $15.

What should we name such a maneuver? It isn’t a “-gate”, and it isn’t “fence sitting”, it’s her literally saying two contradictory things at once and calling it a singular issue position. Hmmmm.

Maybe we can call it “pulling a Hillary”.

Hillary’s supporters and surrogates have derided Bernie Sanders from every which way during this primary process and they have consistently argued that his platform, including $15, as a pie-in-the-sky flight of fancy. Now that Clinton supports $15 [offer not available in all areas and some restrictions may apply] those same supporters are all about $15. In what could only be described as a magical, overnight transformation, the same Clinton apologists have changed their tune on that particular socialist plank.

“$15 is a far left fantasy,” declared one local Democratic Party official in Pennsylvania (whose primary is on April 26th) that supports Clinton on the 19th of January. He did not give me permission to name him in this article. “It won’t play well in the rust belt or in the south, Casey. $9 was good, $10.10 was better, but Hillary’s plan for $12 nationwide is as progressive as it gets.”

Actually, It isn’t, but moving on. He then went on to rattle a list of places where $15 was a flight of left wing fantasy, ironically including New York’s upstate, which is more conservative than New York City, as well as his own Commonwealth.

“$15 might be politically possible in Seattle,” he said. “But Pennsylvania isn’t Seattle. I couldn’t support it. It’ll never be passed here. Never, ever, ever.”

He’s right about one thing: Pennsylvania is definitely NOT Seattle. Believe me, that fact is very, very obvious. #passiveaggressiveslam

This morning, however, that same local Democratic official’s Facebook update was, “So proud to stand with #HillaryClinton as she fights for a $15 minimum wage all across the State of New York! We are lucky to have such a grand progressive candidate #FightingForUs! Hillary has always led the fight to raise the minimum wage, and she will continue to lead the way as president!! #ImWithHer”

Ohhhh boy. To hack through that mountain of bullshittery in that one would require me to divide this article up into chapters, so I’ll just let you guys figure it out for yourself. Suffice it to say: No, Hillary Clinton has NOT led the fight to raise the minimum wage (more on that in just a few. Seriously, I’m getting to it, for real this time).

It’s like all of the #ImWithHer crowd suddenly their political power morphers and have transformed into Minimum Wage Power Rangers because their large headed leader Clin-don has given the effort her blessing. It won’t be long until she orders ‘Debbie 5’ Wasserman Shultz, the tiny robot that acts on Clin-don’s behest, to make the rounds on television news to explain how Hillary isn’t actually pulling a Hillary, but how this is just another one of her positions that’s she’s “always” believed, “deeply-rooted” in her “strongly-held” principles”.

Oh, I’m sorry, did I say Clin-don? I meant Hillarita Repulsa and her legion of political putties.

(For those keeping track, Hillary Clinton was opposed to $15 three days ago, believed marriage was a “sacred bond between a man and a woman” 1,089 days ago, and so on and so forth, you get the idea)

Here’s how it all went down in reality: $15 was dismissed as a west coast fad until New York, and Clinton’s surrogates have repeatedly insisted that it was just another thing that, like universal health care, “would never, ever come to pass”. Barack Obama first proposed $9 several years ago and then upped it to $10.10, and from then onward, that was Democratic gospel, even as the activists in a certain rainy city in the Pacific Northwest upped the ante (again, more on that in just a minute). $10.10 was then the magic number because Obama decreed it so, and even now, there are Democratic governors and senators that are still insisting on $10.10, which I’m not convinced wasn’t selected because it rhymes (that amount also would not be enough to cover rent in any major or mid size city, just FYI).

If Obama’s $10.10 was the new Democratic default, it gave Clinton the chance to change into her progressive costume by making $12 part of her platform.

But $15? LOL nope. That was “pie in the sky”, a “fantasy”, “idealist nonsense” according to the Clinton apologists on my social media news feed. Just like the rest of Bernie Sanders’ platform, it was an undoable number that just couldn’t be achieved. Some argued conservative talking points more befitting Fox News than a political discussion amongst Democrats and even engaged in classic, McCarthy-esque red baiting. They bashed it, along with the rest of Sanders’ social democratic ideas, and insisted that we be more “realistic”.

Today? Well, break out the trumpets and renaissance faire hats because — hear ye, hear ye! — the Queen has spoken and her subjects now loyally abide. Now that she’s changed her tune (or more accurately, now whistling two disharmonious tunes at once) they completely adopted her position and insist that they never said the things that they spent months saying about a $15 minimum wage: that it was a far left policy that would never see the light of day east of Idaho.

Remember that local Democratic official in Pennsylvania? When I asked him this morning about his thoughts about Clinton “pulling a Hillary” on the minimum wage and brought up what he’d said in the past in seeking a quote for this article, he said, “Casey, I never said that $15 was a fantasy, and you know it,” said the man who literally called a $15 a fantasy. “In fact, I’ve always kind of supported $15 for your information (author’s note: Um, no, ya didn’t dude :P) and I liked all of your Facebook posts about it when Seattle did it! Just who do you think you are? Don’t put words in my mouth (you mean, quote you back to yourself, verbatim?), and no you may not, I repeat, MAY NOT name me in your anti-Hillary hit piece.”

To him, I say: You said I couldn’t name you, not that I couldn’t quote you. Womp womp.

The real heart of this matter is the stagecrafting behind the event at which Hillary “pulled a Hillary”, because she made her announcement at an event with Gov. Cuomo to celebrate the passage of $15. Her speech and those who acknowledged her at the event, seemed to tacitly give her credit with supporting or helping with the movement for $15, with some Clinton supporters even inferring that she’d been on board with $15 from the beginning.

I can’t blame some of them for inferring that, because here their candidate was, the star attraction at a rally for a cause she doesn’t believe in, saying that she is happy that something she doesn’t support has passed into law and that while she doesn’t support it spreading across the nation, she hopes it spreads across the nation.

Yeah, If that sounds hella fucked up to you, that’s because it’s hella fucked up. Still, it’s what happened.

Regardless of who made that particularly dumb call there is one inarguable, unfuckwithable truth we can discern here: Hillary Clinton showed up for the $15 victory party having done nothing to make $15 happen (in fact, she hindered it) and hogged the spotlight. Whether intentional or not, Hillary Clinton’s presence and speech at that event with Cuomo is giving the impression that she was in favour of $15 since Jump Street, and that’s simply untrue.

If not Hillary, then who? New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo? No. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio? Nope. California Governor Jerry Brown? Negative. To find out who started the $15 movement, you’ve got to turn your calendar back even further, to before any city or state passed $15 into law; and there are some interesting parallels to how $15 got started to the 2016 presidential election contest between Sanders and Clinton.

Let me take you back to the year 2012 in Seattle, Washington when Kshama Sawant, an economics professor at Seattle Central College and former software engineer, lost her bid for state representative.

Kshama Sawant ran for the Washington House of Representatives seat occupied by Democratic House Speaker Frank Chopp, and ran as a member of Socialist Alternative, a political party that formed in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, of which Kshama was apart. Up against Chopp, a popular figure in his district, Kshama was unsuccessful in her bid for the House, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The following year, Kshama ran for an at-large seat on the Seattle City Council, again, as an open, out, and proud Socialist candidate. Her opponent was incumbent Democrat Richard Conlin, who began his bid for re-election to the City Council with the political talking heads not believing that Kshama could mount a significant challenge to his campaign. But those same talking heads weren’t listening to the people: Kshama’s unapologetically left message of a $15 minimum wage for the city resonated with voters and volunteers started coming out of the woodwork.

Conlin and the Democrats started to notice, but weren’t shaken. The Seattle Times (the most conservative of our newspapers) endorsed Conlin and said that Kshama was far too left for Seattle, that the people would never elect a Socialist, and that a $15 minimum wage was a pipe dream that simply was not going to happen. Surely a candidate who railed against the intrinsic evil of neoliberalist capitalism upon which the US Democratic Party has based its platform and its fundraising base could not feasibly beat an incumbent officeholder in a major city funded and shielded by that very system and pledged to protect it. Even as Sawant was recognized as having won the debates against Conlin and more and more people came out to volunteer in trademark red t-shirts and hoodies, the constant chatter of Seattle’s political commentators didn’t take Kshama seriously and still expected Conlin to come out victorious, albeit closely.

They were almost correct: On election night, the initial vote count showed Conlin defeating Sawant. The Democratic body politic had already decided to stick a fork in the race and expected the Socialist to concede. Concede, however, she did not. As Washington State doesn’t have polling places and instead uses a mail in ballot system, Sawant decided to hold out until all of the ballots were cast. As fate would have it, as the days ticked on, and the later votes were counted, the vote gap between Conlin and Sawant got narrower and narrower. When the final ballots were tallied, Sawant had won, and became the first Socialist to be elected in Seattle in nearly a century.

Although Conlin had a Democratic Party machine working in his favour, and had no problem taking donations from corporations and lobbyists, Kshama put her money where her mouth was during her victorious campaign by not taking one penny in corporate cash, had no political party infrastructure support apart from Socialist Alternative (that also shuns corporate funding), and by pledging to only take an average worker’s salary of $40,000/year once elected, a pledge which she fulfilled — the rest she donates to a Solidarity Fund to help fund social justice movements wherever that money is needed most.

To ask her about it, however, it never was about her. It was and remains about the people: the coalition that coalesced around her in support of her Socialist platform and policies: members of Seattle’s LGBTQ community, labour unions, immigrants, students, educators, environmentalists, communities of colour, and working people of all stripes that came together and decided to take a chance, defy tradition, and elect one of their own. In their minds, and in the mind of Kshama herself, it is THEIR seat; THEY hold it — Kshama just happens to be the one speaking for them.

On the streets, and crucial to Sawant’s victory, was a constantly growing number of hundreds of left political activists that marched, organized, and campaigned for and with Kshama. Dauntless and unwilling to rest on their laurels, the activists that propelled Sawant to the City Council did not stop to enjoy the air of victory they now found themselves surrounded in, and at the City Council inauguration, showed up en masse, packing City Hall and turning it into a massive rally for workers rights. They continued to demonstrate in the streets for $15, putting pressure on elected officials. They talked to Seattle’s pillar small businesses like Molly Moon’s and Cupcake Royale and got them on board for $15, knocked on countless doors, made even more phone calls, rallied the community at large, and began organizing a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 through the public vote. Meanwhile Sawant negotiated within the city government to get $15 passed legislatively.

They worked in tandem, and it culminated on International Workers Day, 2014 — the annual May Day march, when tens of thousands of people march through Seattle’s downtown, shutting down intersections, and draw attention to social, economic, and climate justice issues.

This author was there, as well. I marched for $15 and an end to the unjust and politically arbitrary deportations of undocumented immigrants by the Obama Administration.

Seattle’s media — particularly The Stranger newspaper — declared that no matter who won the battle, the war for $15 had already been won by Sawant and the activists, and that it was only a matter of when, not if, $15 would become law. On the 1st of May, 2014, under pressure from activists and after weeks of negotiations, Kshama Sawant announced that a deal had been made — and that $15 was going to pass.

She had been in office less than six months, and Sawant delivered on her signature campaign pledge, and dealt a significant blow against corporate politics and gave working people and the labour movement their first major victory in a long, long time. That victory — as well as Sawant’s presence on the Council — would not have been possible were it not for the activists and community members that organized with and for her, and would certainly not have been possible were it not for the fast food and low wage workers who, despite ridicule and zero support at the start, bravely went on strike for $15 and union rights in 2011.

Let’s see here: An independent left candidate that shuns corporate cash, pledges to dramatically change the political traditions and conditions including a $15 minimum wage, running up against a well funded and entrenched establishment Democrat (seen as an inevitable victor), who says that the aforementioned left independent has no chance of winning with an agenda that had no poltically feasible chance of being enacted.

Does that sound in any way… oh, I don’t know… familiar to you? Maybe? Kinda sorta?

Let me spell it out for you: Sawant is Sanders. Conlin is Clinton. Even their names sound similar.

(Oh, and FYI, the voters in Seattle were so pleased with her first term in office that they re-elected Kshama last year with 57% of the vote. I should know, I voted for her. Twice.)

The $15 movement began because low wage and fast food workers decided enough was enough and because a Socialist in Seattle chose to defy the political establishment and run on an unabashedly left platform, undeterred by those who said that her candidacy and her policies were impossible dreams.

They — we, if one is to count my small contribution to the cause when I moved to Seattle in 2013 — are the ones that deserve credit for $15. The only reason you even know about $15 in the first place is because one proud left wing candidate in the Pacific Northwest decided to grab a megaphone and hit the streets and the ballot for and with the people of her city.

Hillary Clinton had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

So when she took to the stage in New York and hailed the latest victory for a movement that she says she doesn’t support, smiling, waving, and holding Gov., Cuomo’s hand triumphantly in the air, imagine how incensed I was.

Hillary Clinton never even picked up a phone for $15, let alone for her own proposal for $12, and as Secretary of State, sided with the largest companies in the US and lobbied to keep international workers in low wage slavery — you know, if “wages” is really the term we’re using when we’re referring to the handful of pennies that these workers, often children, earn after toiling away for long hours every day in inhumane, untenable conditions.

In fact, the US State Department, at Clinton’s order, pressured the government of Haiti to rescind it’s minimum wage increase of less than one dollar at the behest of the US garment industry.

Clinton’s presence on that stage, her words, even her smile are offensive. It is the ultimate insult to the workers and activists who began the movement for $15 in North America not to mention the labourers that are sewing t-shirts for American consumers in Indonesia for pennies a day in sweatshops with whom those workers and activists are in solidarity with. It is an insult to every person who marched and risked retaliation for it or got tear gassed by cops. It is an insult to every person who risked employment and was fired from their job for striking without the protection of a union for better wages and working conditions for themselves and all of their fellow workers.

This writer had no intention of voting for Hillary Clinton before her announcement on the 4th of April… but now, I will actively campaign against her campaign for president if she somehow manages to obtain the Democratic Party’s nomination (note how I’m not using the term “win”), no matter what president of what party my decision ends up resulting in.

For me, it’s personal.

New York State and Pennsylvania have primaries coming up very, very soon. If you live in either of these places, please go vote for Bernie Sanders on election day. I don’t care if you have to crawl across shards of broken glass laid out on hot pavement on your hands and knees to do it, but you get to your polling place and you vote.

Because Hillary Clinton cannot be president under any circumstance. This was the last straw for this author. #BernieOrBust is not just a threat, it is a solemn promise.

So, as a certain Socialist anthem would hold: “So comrades, let’s go rally… and the last fight let us face.”