If we are lucky, it will give us the first Green Party mayor of San Francisco: Terry Joan Baum.
Terry Baum actually believes in taxing the rich (DUH!!), and is not shy in saying so. She thinks we have enough billionaires in SF, that they should pay a fair share of taxes, that we should stop pumping money up to the rich in this country & send some back down to the folks who can't afford fresh produce, let alone college, the rent, or the mortgage. In fact, we should put a moratorium on building housing for the wealthy in SF, she declares in her statement to the League of Women Voters.
Terry stood alone in organizing a protest against PG&E on the one-year anniversary of the San Bruno gas line explosion which killed 8 people, traumatized the community, and destroyed 38 homes. An explosion which was preventable, except that PG&E decided to spike the pressure on gas lines that were predictably a disaster waiting to happen.
If you think I'm being harsh, check out the Huff-Post on the 5-0 vote of the National Transportation Safety Board: "actions by Pacific Gas & Electric were the probable causes of the explosion." Note: not just negligence (of which there is plenty of evidence), but actions -- specifically spiking the pressure to avoid safety regulations via some Orwellian 1984-style logic.
“We need to put these executives in prison because that’s the kind of wake-up call corporate America will respond to,” Baum said.
Just in case you've been drinking the GOP too-much-regulation-is-killing-us kool-aid, Huff-Post notes that the NTSB also found "lax regulations at the state and federal level also contributed to the accident."
But, again I wander.
Where is the money going to come from to make MUNI run every 10 minutes like the Toon-Town Trolley? Terry proposes a Municipal Bank of San Francisco, so the city can keep the interest on the pension funds, instead of the Bank of America.
(After losing 22% of value in the 2008 market crash, the SF Pension Fund was at $12 billion in Feb. 2009, $13.5 billion one year later, $16.5 billion as of June 2011). Even at 1% interest, that's well over a hundred million dollars per year -- and 5-yr jumbo CD's are now running at 2.2%).
Next, dump PG&E for a city-run power company that collects the revenue ($13 billion in 2009 from Northern & Central California).
Terry also points out that instead of dipping into city revenue to bribe Twitter et al to relocate to the blighted mid-Market Street edge of the Tenderloin, we should use that money ($22 million) to remodel empty store fronts into affordable housing & workspace for artists. I mean, the whole point of the $$ give-away in tax breaks to Twitter is to make mid-Market Street attractive and safe. What is more attractive than an artist colony?
How beautiful is it to walk the Mission district in SF these days to see all those fantastic murals? How great would this city be if the blues and jazz spots came back: so many that you could bank on a great evening just wandering the streets, like North Beach and the Fillmore used to be not so long ago?
Terry is right: we need to support the folks that are the backbone and soul of the city. Let's hope San Franciscans have not become so "gentrified" that they are afraid of her common sense ideas (DUH!). If we can't put a Green Party candidate on the map in San Francisco, what hope will there be for the rest of us?
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