Full Funding for Comprehensive Disaster Relief for All Working People Affected by Washington State Floods — Tax the Billionaires and Multimillionaires!
December 15th, 2025 by Kshama Sawant
Western Washington state has been hit by catastrophic floods stemming from swollen rivers due to back-to-back atmospheric river events. Multiple cities and counties, including the cities of Tukwila, Renton, and Kent in King County in the Ninth Congressional District, have been affected.
My campaign for the U.S. Congress is demanding FULL FUNDING for comprehensive disaster relief for all working people affected by the flooding, paid for by taxing the wealthy in Washington state.
Over 100,000 residents have been forced to evacuate. Though the storm has eased somewhat over the last couple of days, more heavy rains are predicted for Sunday and Monday. More than 46,000 residents in Tukwila along the Green River levee have been urged to immediately evacuate due to a threat of “life-threatening flash flooding.”
This is an absolute disaster for working people, who will bear the brunt of the costs associated with the flooding, as is the case in every crisis caused by capitalism, a system based on billionaire greed and completely incompatible with a sustainable world. Even for the small minority of people who could afford and were able to get flood insurance coverage, insurance companies will deny as many claims as they can. History shows they will also likely dramatically increase premiums for everyone needing flood insurance. All of this comes on top of the years-long financial and affordability crises working families have been facing, including the skyrocketing costs of groceries and healthcare.
There are 12 billionaires in the state, including Bill Gates and former Starbucks CEO and well-known union-buster Howard Schulz. Washington is also home to 17,000 people who have over $15 million in wealth, as well as 130 “centi-millionaires,” who own wealth of at least $100 million. There was also an explosive increase of 68 percent in what are called “high net worth individuals” (people with over a million dollars in investable assets) in Seattle alone between 2012 and 2022.
It is stunning that Washington state has long had the most regressive tax system, and since just recently, the second-most regressive after Florida. This means the tax burden for decades has overwhelmingly fallen on ordinary working people while the billionaires and mega corporations pay little to no taxes. This is despite the Democratic Party having had the trifecta in the state government (Governor’s mansion and a majority in both the State House and Senate) for 15 of the last 30 years, including at this very moment. Rather than announce that they will tax the rich to support working people who face financial devastation from the floods and to address the needs of working and poor people, Governor Ferguson and the state Democrats have instead shamefully just promised a brutal cuts-only budget.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, including my opponent Democrat Adam Smith, proudly proclaimed their bipartisan unity in passing a grotesque $900-plus billion authorization for weapons, war, genocide, and for Trump’s border militarization.
Just like the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the capitalist class. Working people desperately need a new party. We need leaders who are willing to fight unambiguously for our interests. We need candidates and elected representatives who use their office, as I did for a decade on the Seattle City Council, to go to war against the elite and their political servants by building mass movements.
This is exactly how working people and I won historic victories — by forcing big business and the Democratic Party to concede. We won the Amazon Tax that taxes wealthy corporations like Amazon and raises hundreds of millions of dollars annually for affordable housing and Green New Deal programs. We also won the nation’s highest minimum wage. Seattle’s minimum wage is going up from $9.19/hour in January 2015 to $21.30/hour in January of next year, in just two weeks, an increase of over 131 percent! Across the nation, tens of millions of workers have won historic wage increases over the last decade BECAUSE of our victory in Seattle.
My organization, Workers Strike Back, and I support the $2 billion/year tax on wealthy corporations that was recently announced by Democratic State Representative Shaun Scott, to help fund healthcare, housing, and human services in response to the brutal cuts announced by the Trump administration. However, I strongly disagree with Scott’s proposal to exempt the corporations paying the Amazon Tax won by my City Council office. These are some of the world’s wealthiest corporations that need to be paying far more in taxes. The $2 billion that this tax would raise, if passed, is a drop in the bucket of what working and poor people in Washington state need urgently to fund food assistance, healthcare, housing, public education, and jobs. Just maintaining the current level of services will likely require $4 billion/year. In reality, we need to drastically expand these services by funding free healthcare for all and a massive expansion of quality affordable housing. The top 20 for-profit companies in Washington state made $385 billion in profit in 2024 alone.
Most crucially, there is no prospect of this tax passing without an organized mass movement. This is exactly why we're building Workers Strike Back as an independent fighting organization. This past summer, Ferguson and the State Democrats were getting ready to pass a shocking $7 billion in cuts to social programs. Unfortunately, the leadership of the labor movement is tied at the hip to the Democratic Party, and refused to mount any fightback. In stark contrast, Workers Strike Back members who are in the public-sector unions fought back against the budget cuts, organized with other union members to call for mass rallies and strike action, and forced the union leaders to act. This in turn forced the Democratic Party politicians to reduce the budget cuts from $7 to $2.7 billion. This shows both that workers and young people can get organized and win, but also that we need even more powerful movements to win big victories like a wealth tax to fully fund the needs of working and poor people. So if you've not joined Workers Strike Back yet, do it now.
The catastrophic flooding of the past few days comes on the heels of historic droughts, heat waves, storms, and wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, in California, and North Carolina and other states. Globally, climate incidents are more frequent and more severe due to the climate crisis caused by the capitalist class and their bankrupt system. In Washington state, at least 1,233 people have died in such disasters since 2020. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world die every year in climate-crisis disasters, while untold more are forced into extreme poverty and mass displacement.
According to climate scientists, the state’s extreme flooding is yet another example of the dire environmental crises caused or exacerbated by fossil fuel linked climate change.
The climate crisis directly stems from billionaires and their system. In addition to spewing pollution with their private jets and superyachts, billionaires invest heavily in high-carbon sectors like oil, mining, and shipping. Each billionaire’s investment emissions are equivalent to almost 400,000 years of consumption emissions by the average person, or 2.6 million years of consumption emissions by someone in the poorest 50 percent of the world, according to a 2024 Oxfam report.
Billionaires continue to enrich themselves by maximum extraction of natural resources, exploiting billions of workers, with the Democrats and Republicans and other pro-capitalist parties globally enabling them to do so. As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are projected to rise by at least 1.1 percent this year, reaching a new, dangerous record high.
The world’s biggest banks have financed fossil fuels by a shocking $7.9 trillion since the 2015 Paris Agreement. There is absolutely no way out for the planet, for human society, and for other living species, on the basis of capitalism. We need to take big energy corporations and the big banks that finance them into public ownership of workers in order to end fossil fuel use and carry out a lightning-fast transition to 100 percent clean and renewable energy. Doing so would create millions of living-wage unionized jobs, and must include re-training and full employment for all fossil fuel workers.
The Democrats and Republicans are parties of the oil corporations and Wall Street. If we want to avoid an all-out climate catastrophe, working people urgently need to break from these political servants of the billionaire class, and throw politicians like Adam Smith out of office. It’s no accident that Smith has taken donations in past campaigns from BP, Occidental Petroleum, and Koch Industries Inc., or that he has been bankrolled for 29 years by a weapons industry that is a central contributor to the climate crisis.
We need a new party for working people and an end to the system of capitalism. Unless we replace capitalism with a global socialist economy, taking all the major corporations into democratic public ownership of workers, capitalism will push us over the cliff of climate catastrophe. We can’t let that happen.
We need fighters with a proven track record of taking on class war against the billionaires. That’s why our independent socialist campaign for the U.S. Congress is so crucial. Get involved and help us win a breakthrough to build militant mass movements nationally for working people and the environment.