# Fighting the Corporate Duopoly at the Ballot Box (w/ Kshama Sawant) | The Chris Hedges Report

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-chris-hedges-report-6977752/fighting-the-corporate-duopoly-at-the-ballot-box-w-kshama-sawant-the-chris-hedges-report
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-chris-hedges-report-6977752/fighting-the-corporate-duopoly-at-the-ballot-box-w-kshama-sawant-the-chris-hedges-report.md
Podcast: [The Chris Hedges Report](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-chris-hedges-report-6977752)
Published: 2026-06-25T00:34:22+00:00
Episode link: https://chrishedges.podbean.com/e/fighting-the-corporate-duopoly-at-the-ballot-box-w-kshama-sawant-the-chris-hedges-report/
Audio file: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/rmdb3j3jdtfcxys5/CHR_6-24-26_Kshama_Sawant_bv2f2.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3097

## Resource

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with Kshama Sawant, a revolutionary socialist based in Seattle, Washington, who is challenging long-time incumbent Democrat Adam Smith for Congress. Sawant served in the Seattle City Council for more than a decade during which she and her supporters won unprecedented victories for higher wages, affordable housing, taxing Amazon, LGBTQ rights and more. She then went on to organize a national working-class movement, Workers Strike Back. Sawant is building on that work by running a courageous and unabashed anti-capitalist campaign for the working class. Her platform includes defunding and opposing wars and genocide, supporting universal public health care, education and affordable housing, challenging the power of police and ICE agents, and advocating for LGBTQ rights, issues to which Democrats, even those who claim to be progressive, pay lip service at best. She frames her campaign in the current political moment where the billionaire class is wreaking havoc on people and the planet with the help of Democratic and Republican parties and gatekeepers in the labor movement who engage in ‘business unionism,’ which she describes as “being aligned with the bosses, having made peace with the bosses, which also means… being aligned, intertwined with the bosses’ parties.” Sawant, who has faced these attacks throughout her time in political office and prevailed, sheds light on how the Democrats, in collusion with Republicans, deploy Machiavellian schemes to thwart anti-establishment candidates; they will run multiple candidates to split the vote, exclude challengers, malign them in the media, and, if a figure becomes threatening enough, ignore them outright. She says, “If you are fighting for the working class, you wi…

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