San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom
Photo by Luke Thomas
By Marc Salomon
October 29, 2008
While the Democratic Party has followed Barack Obama and embarked in an historic shift away from DLC Clintonism, San Francisco’s local franchise, retrograde as always, seems determined to carry Hillary’s triangulation torch while throwing in a dash of McCain/Palin economics for good measure.
While Obama proposes that we remedy economic disparity by “spreading the wealth around,” Mayor Gavin Newsom proposes a Reaganesque trickle-down stimulus plan which seems to bolster San Francisco’s export and bubble economies while offering nothing to protect San Franciscans who are being battered by harsh economic forces over which we have no control, and for which we hold no responsibility.
Barack Obama is promising to attack the federal budget with a scalpel, deriding McCain’s call for across the board cuts. Newsom, on the right hand is proposing an across the board hiring freeze, irrespective of the need for any given position.
Next, Newsom proposes across the board cuts to all programs not politically important to him, just as McCain is calling for across the board cuts in everything but the military and veterans benefits.
As McCain supports outsourcing American jobs, Newsom proposes fast tracking capital projects even though there is no guarantee that any of the workers on these projects will be San Franciscans. Does San Francisco win economically or environmentally if we fast track wages to workers who drive in from Tracy?
Gavin Newsom, if readers were caught unawares, is DLC Democrat who would be a Republican in any other town. Can anyone imagine DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Supervisors like Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier and Carmen Chu following the leader of their party and uttering the phrase “spreading the wealth around,” in response to the current economic crisis? Of course not, they are too busy placating their corporate sponsors.
Can we now expect for Newsom to urge us to float bonds in order to bail out San Francisco businesses that contributed to our mess, while residents are exposed, unprotected, to the vicissitudes of economic chaos?
A progressive response to the economic crisis would entail the following elements, and given that our member of Congress is Speaker, surely a few tens of billions of dollars could be rustled up for San Francisco as Pelosi lavished largesse on Wall Street’s economic criminals:
Transportation is critical in a time of volatile fuel prices and growing congestion:
* The Transportation Authority should declare an emergency and allocate Prop K capital funds to operations and make MUNI fare free.
* Pelosi should identify funding for a subway network and construction should begin on MUNI 2.0.
Decoupling housing from speculation is critical, as it represents the nexus between pay-to-play planning and development and the financial crisis which has had its ground zero in San Francisco’s eastern neighborhoods:
* The City should identify homeowners who bought at a price congruent with their means and intervene to prevent forclosures and displacement.
* The City should impose an immediate ban on evictions due to foreclosures of rental properties.
As we confront an economic crisis, we can also begin to tackle the environmental crisis:
* The City should invest in subsidizing rooftop solar for all income levels and school and college districts using local labor.
* The School and Community College districts to foster the development of skilled green collar workers.
And we need to build a sustainable local economy that puts San Franciscans first:
* Create a City of San Francisco Bank or Credit Union which takes retail deposits from San Franciscans, pays a modest interest rate, and then lends to support a sustainable housing policy for San Franciscans as well as to the City to lower the cost of bond issues.
* Use the Redevelopment Agency and Office of Workforce and Economic Development to capitalize retail cooperatives. Imagine the former Goodman’s site with a number of home improvement cooperatives, lumber, plumbing, electrical, tools, flooring, garden and delivery. Bernal and Bayview would unite in pursuit of similar uses but at an appropriate scale that would employ San Franciscans, keeping wages, taxes and dividends local.
* Reconfigure economic policy to avoid falling into the bubble of the month club. For too long, San Francisco’s economic policymakers have been chasing the Next Big Thing, whether multimedia, dot.coms, biotech, stem cell research or, most recently, the housing bubble.
We find ourselves at a moment of crisis, defined as not knowing what will happen next, and the National Democratic Party has reinvented itself as a result.
Yet watching Gavin Newsom writing a Republican economic prescription and playing petty personal politics in his attack ads on Eric Mar, John Avalos and David Chiu via Chris Daly as if Newsom were John McCain and Daly William Ayres, you would not know from this retrograde approach that we are poised for a fundamental political realignment or that Newsom had a substantive, proactive, problem solving policy agenda.
The future is up for grabs like we’ve never seen. Gavin Newsom is looking to the past, to government as a game of keep away from the people. While Obama is calling for unity and finding common ground, Newsom is still pimping for the corporate class which has ground our economy to a halt. Our city is demeaned by such a cavalier, opportunist and parochial approach to a moment in which our finest common aspirations can arise out of the ashes of greed, speculation and the economic and environmental threats that they engendered.
Either San Franciscans take control of our city from the corporate interests represented by the conservative Democrat and Republican alliance , or we just might see a gentrified San Francisco as a Reaganist conservative bastion in a national post-Reaganist liberal resurgence.
The Hunger Site
November 1, 2008 at 7:14 pm
“Gavin Newsom is looking to the past, to government as a game of keep away from the people.” Absolutely.
“Decoupling housing from speculation is critical.” Let’s stop calling it “housing”– these new buildings are investment commodities.
Let’s demand social ecology from the Green Mayor, any new construction tied to need/benefit of the diversity of middle-class San Franciscan households. Period. And not through some trickle-down voodoo.
Let’s take the Green or Transit-Oriented-Development costumes off developments which are just more of the speculation same–demand to know exactly who will live and work in these buildings.
The City needs to run itself on something other than the Real Estate transfer tax, the Planning Department on permit fees, —- speculation crack.
I’m not worried about David Chiu, I’m worried about sibling Supervisors to go along with the Mayor’s economic snakeoil. Good parallels in your piece: Indeed, greed is still good in San Francisco.
October 31, 2008 at 7:16 am
Howard, just look at Arnold Schwarzenegger and George W. Bush for insight as far as how to tame a budget.
You Republicans are not conservative, are not free marketeers, rather do what is needed to do to further enrich the already rich. This includes spreading the wealth around, as Republicans were the authors of the recent bailout bill which subsidizes reckless billionaires to our mutual moral and economic hazard.
What the GOP and DLC Democrats share are that you are all socialists of a sort, only applying socialist subsidy to the wealthy by spreading our wealth around while leaving the bulk of us to fend for ourselves in the free market.
If Newsom has his way, he will coddle the housing construction industry which was the gaping maw of the monster that is crapping all over Wall Street, to the extent that the well heeled new comers will displace those who would avail themselves of Healthy San Francisco to the extent that the program will be negligible.
Of course, Epstien is a free marketeer when it comes to health care, preferring to risk illness by eating at restaurants where employees have no health care just as he’s supported a go-go casino capitalism which has allowed the pathogens of greed to infect and debilitate the global economy.
Fortunately, America is innoculating itself from further pursuing this political and economic tragedy, except for the DLC outpost in San Francisco where corporate dominance and greed still reign.
-marc
October 30, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Lord help us all. Gavin a Republican in any other city? Carmen Chu our Sarah Palin? Marc, you’re delusional. I won’t repeat dalysux’s list of Gavin’s policies but will add Healthy San Francisco and a $6.5 Billion budget, among other things.
I am a Republican and know hundreds of Republicans. None of the people you labeled Dinos are anywhere near Republicans. In any other city in the U.S. they would be the extreme left. Here they’re considered “moderates”.
October 29, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Don’t forget Gavin’s Sunset pawn Carmen Chu whom I am calling our Sarah Palin because she has not a clue what a San Francisco Supervisor is. She told my neighbor that she would personally see that her child got into the neighborhood school rather than the one assigned (as if). When I ran into Chu campaigning at Pollyanna’s Ice Cream she was telling folks about her plans to renovate Ocean Beach. Now in my 67 years in the Sunset there has been millions of dollars put into the renovation of Ocean Beach only to have nature prevail. Dare we mention to Ms. Chu Playland at the Beach of Fleishaker Pool? Not being a San Franciscan she would of course have no idea. Chu has only lived in SF 2 years. She was appointed by Gavin to support all of his and his corporate sponsors (such as PG&E) ideas and projects. He had to pick her as no San Franciscan would have voted time and again as Chu as since Gavin appointed her.
October 29, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Golly gee willickers, I sure hope that Fog City Journal gets into tonight’s Coalition for Responsible Growth event and can get some photos of Gavvy with his well-financed “do-not-spread-the-wealth” Republican chums who are trying to buy the local election and install their own triplet puppets (Sue Lee, Joe Alioto, Jr., and Ahsha Safai) on the Board of Supervisors.
October 29, 2008 at 10:23 am
DLC Democrats can be all too liberal on social issues, but once it comes time to cost business a single dollar for any program, they all turn Republican.
Contrast this to a nationwide yearning for a more populist, just economic approach to replace the failed Reaganism that still finds succor in Room 200 of San Francisco’s city hall and on Newsom’s commissions.
What’s more important to most folks, social issues or economic issues? On economic issues, the DLC Democrats have been displaced by Obamans who want to “spread the wealth around.” Further, they think we all deserve pie.
As far as the Democrat Party goes, the you can stick a fork in the DLC, because they’re done, except in San Francisco for now, and you can keep your fork because at least from Washington, there’s pie.
-marc
October 29, 2008 at 10:05 am
Not so fast,
New San Franciscans with money have always surprised me with their voting patterns. There’s no trend to the right here. The only time Downtown gets an issue or candidate through they spend scads on it and as Heather Hiles can tell you, outspending Mark Sanchez 15 to 1 won’t beat him with an intelligent and well informed electorate. I doubt anyone in SF history has had as much money spent smearing him as Chris Daly but he regularly trounces stooges at the polls.
So, I’m not worried about Tuesday except in the instances (Chiu and Campos) where Republicans have been accepted into the herd of sheep with their poorly fitting Progressive costumes. It is both ironic and proper that our votes come right after Halloween when everyone does their best to pretend to be what they are not.
h.
October 29, 2008 at 9:22 am
Good job, Marc, but I do have a quibble with one point:
“The City should impose an immediate ban on evictions due to foreclosures of rental properties.”
Fortunately, San Francisco’s Just Cause Ordinance already prevents such evictions. Tenants can still get evicted, but change of ownership (e.g. foreclosure) is not a legal reason.
Sadly, that’s not the case in other cities that lack just cause.
October 29, 2008 at 8:54 am
This is a joke.
Gavin Newsom supported gay marriage licenses, gay marriage, letting illegal aliens who commit felonies get away with it and hid them from the feds, and supports all kinds of solar panels and so on.
THIS makes him a “DLC Clinton Centrist.”
Get a grip. The moment you walk out of this city, reality bites you in the ass and you realise no one cares about these things.