Despite campaign spending by Amazon.com, Seattle voters have kept progressive politicians in control of the city council, reviving chances for a tax on big businesses that the tech giant helped fend off last year.
Amazon poured US$1.5 million into a political group run by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce to back a slate of candidates in the council elections, held on Tuesday last week, viewed as pro-business, or at least more corporate friendly than the incumbent council majority.
Amazon, the world’s leading online retailer whose chief executive is entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, accounted for more than half of nearly US$2.7 million raised by the Super PAC, a group allowed to accept unlimited sums from wealthy donors in support of candidates. Four years ago, Amazon donated US$25,000.
By comparison, labor unions spent more than US$1 million on the council race.
The unprecedented level of spending in a Seattle municipal race drew national attention, with Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders accusing Amazon of trying to buy the council.
The outcome for most of the seven council seats at stake last week was too close to call until Friday night, when a tally of 97 percent of votes cast showed that progressive candidates had won five of the seats, including two incumbents.
One of them was Kshama Sawant, a self-described socialist and Amazon’s fiercest critic on the council, whose re-election bid was seen as the bellwether contest.
Just two of the seven candidates endorsed by Amazon and other companies through the Super PAC emerged winners, one of them an incumbent.
The overall progressive balance of the nine-seat council was little changed. Two other seats are up for re-election in 2021.
“The election results are a repudiation of the billionaire class, corporate real estate and the establishment,” Sawant said at a news conference on Saturday, flanked by supporters holding a “Tax Amazon” banner.
Sawant led the council in May last year in approving a new per-employee “head tax” on 500 of the city’s largest companies, aimed at combating a housing crisis.
The tax was designed to raise at least US$45 million a year to build more affordable housing and help support a homeless population that is the third-largest of any US metropolitan area.
The measure passed the council, but the council repealed the tax altogether in the face of a campaign by businesses to mount a referendum drive against it.
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