Denver is a city of culture. A place where there’s always something to do or see.
But beyond being home to amazing sights and a mediocre football team, Denver has an interesting and spirited political scene, one which has recently come under scrutiny by conservative media.
The chief focus of said scrutiny is Candi CdeBaca, a woman who earlier this month won a seat on Denver’s city council in an upset election. CdeBaca is a “social worker, youth educator, policy expert and fifth-generation native of northeast Denver.”
Oh, and there’s one other minor detail, she’s a Commun— I mean, Democratic Socialist.
During a candidate forum in March, Cdebaca said, “I don’t believe that our current economic system actually works. Capitalism, by design, is extractive, and in order to generate profit in a capitalist system, something has to be exploited.”
“I believe in community ownership of land, labor, resources, and distribution of those resources,” Cdebaca went on to say. “And so, whatever that morphs into, I think is what will serve community the best, and I’m excited to usher it in by any means necessary.”
“By any means necessary” sounds pretty... ominous. Though, it is unclear exactly what she meant by that.
According to The New Yorker, “The Democratic Socialists of America…define democratic socialism as an economic system in which workers directly control most of the firms in the economy.”
Which actually sounds like a less extreme version of what CdeBaca is proposing when she broadly advocates for community ownership of land, labor, and resources.
Just to randomly throw this in, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines Communism as a “political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society…”
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.