More Cheering, Please, for Seattle - a podcast by Laura Flanders

I’m beginning to think the American Left is a lot like Eeyore. Our favorite food is thistles. Give us a week in which something extraordinary is won and we cheer for an instant before retuning to gloom.

On June 2, Seattle's City Council unanimously approved a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum.

The vote came amid a sea of dismal data showing how wage stagnation increases inequality and a chorus of righteous hand-wringing about the dire state of our democracy.

Just two days after the Seattle council voted, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute, released another report showing how growing productivity has not shrunk national poverty because the wages are too damn low. Thomas Piketty’s been in the headlines for weeks, with his charts showing how, in our finance-driven capitalist system, the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer because when it comes to financial returns, Main Street simply can’t compete with Wall St.

A new documentary about the Koch Brothers describes what people and corporations with mega-wealth can do to keep things that way: ban unions, vilify poor people, trash-talk government, then buy yourself a Congress and a Court. That should do it.

At the release of the EPI report in Washington, Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America let rip: "It's not going to matter what our policy ideas are if we don't build a working class democracy movement.... This democracy is literally in the trash can. " He said. "We keep pretending its not but it is."

A whole lot of people in Seattle have not been pretending. They weren't happy with the stagnant $7.25 federal minimum wage or with President Obama's proposed hike to $9 either.

Despite the talk of falling skies and economic crises, they joined the call raised by fast food and Wal-mart workers for $15 an hour, and with union support, they got $15 an hour on the ballot in the Seattle suburb of SeaTac last November. At the same time, Kshama Sawant, a Socialist challenger to a same-old-same-old incumbent Democrat made a city-wide $15-an-hour minimum the central focus of her campaign for seat on Seattle’s City Council. She won and SeaTac won, and within weeks of her taking office, Seattle's Mayor and every single council member was voting in favor. They’d seen the polls: audacious organizing had turned the tide.

As Sawant says, the law's not perfect. It doesn’t come in fast enough and it’s flawed by corporate loopholes, but heck, it's a victory worth celebrating.

Keep chewing on your thistles if you like, but remember, Eeyore also had a fondness as I recall for pots you can bang on and red balloons.

For interviews with audacious organizers who are building economic democracy across the country, check out GRITtv with Laura Flanders on YouTube or at GRITtv.org.

For GRITtv, I’m Laura Flanders.

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