Joe Szwaja

As near as I can tell, all of the candidates for Seattle City Council are corporate whores, which is hardly a break from tradition. But Joe Szwaja is of particular interest for a couple reasons.</p>

First, I ought to love Joe Szwaja. The guy’s a leftist Green Party member from Madison, Wisconsin, which has apparently become sort of a Midwestern counterpart to San Francisco. He talks about rainforests and global warming. One of my neighbors, who is of a conservative bent, labeled him a “communist.”

Well, I’ve been called a communist, too, and at least one right-wing asshole offered to buy me a one-way ticket to Cuba. So Joe Szwaja and I ought to be allies. But we aren’t.

If you explore Swaza’s campaign website, you’ll find little evidence that he’s a teacher employed by the Seattle School District. His Issues page is heavy on rhetoric, but he doesn’t even mention schools or education. Szwaja was equally silent about his profession when he ran for Congress a few years ago.

So what gives? How can a politically active man who has worked for the Seattle School District for over a decade be ignorant of the enormous problems facing public education? Or is it just that he doesn’t care?

Second, check out Szwaja’s endorsements. They include all the usual corporate operatives posing as leftist freedom fighters...The Stranger, Eat the State, the Seattle Rainforest Action Group, the Green Party of Seattle, etc. They also include the Seattle Green Party’s Brita Butler-Wall, who I ran against four years ago. (Brita was similarly endorsed by Seattle’s corporate leftist brigade, and it almost sounded like she an Eat The State’s Geov Parrish were engaged in some sort of sexual relationship, the way he slobbered over her.)

In fact, Szwaja’s endorsements also include two former school board members, the famously derelict Michael Preston and perennial campaign groupie Amy Hagopian.

So these corrupt endorsements take us right back to the first point: The Education Mafia obviously loves Joe Szwaja, yet Joe has nothing to say about education.

Which isn’t to say I’m endorsing Szwaja’s opponent; former Seattle Times gossip queen Jean Godden is simply an asshole. But then, so is Joe Szwaja. Godden’s list of corporate endorsements may look more frightening, but I suspect she and Szwaja are about as different as Republicans and King County Democrats.

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