Demo Sale

Matt Smith is correct in pointing out that politics has ceased to resemble governing in favor of the systematic offloading of public benefits onto the politically connected for political advantage and that the Democrats are as dirty as the Republicans. Hopefully if we Greens can capitalize on disgust with that in San Francisco, it might serve as an example at the state and national levels.

But for Smith to assert that because some progressives have relationships with pot club impresarios, all progressives are as dirty as the "moderate" SF Democrats who give away public entitlements like hits off a crack pipe are is the stuff of pure fantasy.

San Franciscans have voted time and again in support of cannabis, both medicinal and recreational. Pot clubs are private institutions that serve clientele, not public entities dependent on public dollars. The industry might operate at an order of magnitude in the seven figures.

Contrast this to the myriad web of development schemes that SF-rooted Democrat pols from local to fed enable and direct to their favored patrons, think Bayview, Transbay and Treasure Island Redevelopment, Rincon, Octavia/Market, the high rise condo glut in Eastern SOMA and the rapidly ripening Eastern Neighborhoods plans. Hundreds of billions of dollars in value are locked in San Francisco real estate, and San Francisco liberal/moderate Democrats are climbing all over themselves to unlock instant profit for the annointed. Consider people like Darius Anderson, Doug Boxer and the bevel of development attorneys and builders who shake the public money tree and are rewarded.

The ousting of Susan Leal was an effort on the part of the local Democrat clique to check the accumulation of a non-Newsomie power base at the PUC by an experienced political hack. The profits from the billions of dollars in Hetch Hetchy retrofit and rebuilding couldn't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands; those dollars are needed to build political machines that are controlled by the right people. Leal was building a coterie of hackdom at the PUC that was independent of Newsom and that is why she was axed. Leal is as loyal a Newsomite as the fired US Attorneys were loyal Bushies. Newsom also wants to get his own political incompetents paid at the PUC to replace Leal's political incompetents. The moderates whine about labor when labor is only being directed by a management layer of hack fat that is hardly the highest qualified to manage.

As far as using the public till to grease the political skids, how large were the "loss leader" raises for the cops and Fire Department? Does anyone wonder how many homicide cases POA presidential candidate Lea Miltello has helped solve? If it takes the Fire Department more than half a day to extinguish a blaze in a low-slung SOMA building, what's gonna happen when the 38th floor of Rincon Tower is ablaze? They're all gonna still get paid no matter whether they do their job, that's what's gonna happen. And this to ensure that Newsom hit no bumps on his road to reelection.

Yeah, the progs have our nonprofit clique and when you combine all of that with the pot impresarios it doesn't even amount to rounding error when compared to what passes for entitlements as usual in Gavin Newsom's San Francisco.

At least San Franciscans have voted on medicinal cannabis, progs who take their money are in sync with their neighbors. But we are all being saddled with luxury condos, more and more proposed in each new plan, and many in the form of towers that reach to the sky. This transformation of San Francisco's skyline along with the creation of high density sterile new drive up neighborhoods with too much parking and not enough transit in the SOMA and east side has never been approved by the voters, yet it is the stuff that fuels political ambitions when there's nothing else behind the press releases.

-marc