That, at least, was the title of the Milk Club forum March 1. Quite a panel, too: Sups. Avalos, Campos, Chiu, Kim and Mar. Tim Paulson from the Labor Council. Former Milk Club Prez Jef Sheehy. Tiny from Poor Magazine. And me.
I told the assembled that it was worth reminding ourselves how far we’ve come — when I started in this business, in 1982, Dianne Feinstein was mayor, there was exactly one reliable progressive on the Board of Supervisors (Harry Britt) and it was impossible for grassroots types without big gobs of money to get elected to high office. I’ve lived through Feinstein, Agnos, Jordan and Brown, all (until the end of the Brown Era) with at-large boards. It was awful trying to get anything good done; all we could do was fight to prevent the truly horrible from happening. Under Brown, as Sheehy noted, San Francisco politics was locked down, tight; the machine ruled, the Democratic Party was not a force for progressive issues and only a few exceptional leaders, like Tom Ammiano, kept the spirit alive.
Today, the very fact that five supervisors showed up at a Milk Club event to talk about progressive politics shows how district elections has transformed the city and how far we’ve come.
That said, we’ve still failed to make much progress on the most important issue of the day — the gap between the rich and the poor, the fact that this city has great povery and great wealth and the utterly unsustainable economic and tax system that has made us the most socially unequal society in the industrialized world.
Sheehy talked about the schools (both he and are are parents of kids in the public schools). Good schools, he said, are one of the most important socialequalizers; with a good education, poor kids have a chance. But while our local billionaires enjoy nice tax breaks, we’re starving the schools.
Kim talked abou the need for summer school and longer school years (I would add longer school days). These are things San Francisco can do — if we’re willing. “We’re talking about taxes,” Sheehy said, and he’s right.
In the past five years, I think we’ve cut about a billion dollars out of the General Fund, labor has given back more than $300 million — and we’ve raised $90 million in new taxes. Not good enough, not even close.
Yes, the bad economy is to blame for our fiscal problems, but so is the fact that we have a tax structure that systematically underfunds the public sector. (And yes, my conservative friends, cops shouldn’t retire with $250,000 a year pensions. Got it.)
Tiny made a strong statement about the essential problem facing the city when she asked, “who isn’t here?” She didn’t just mean that there were too many white people in the room (althought that was true); she meant that there were were too many working-class and poor people who can no longer live in San Francisco.
Sheehy was even more blunt: “In five years,” he said, looking out at the room, “none of us are going to be here.”
And my essential message to the crowd (and the elected officials on the panel) was: We don’t have to accept that. These are problmes we can address, right here in San Francisco. If we want to, we can shift the burden of paying the costs of society at least a little bit off the backs of the poor and middle class and onto the rich.
Nobody directly disagreed with me. In fact, Chiu announced that “income inequality is something all of us care about.”
How agressively he and others try to turn that concern into legislation will tell us something.
Two other interesting moments:
1. Every single person on the panel talked about how important Tom Ammiano was to the modern progressive movement. One by one, every panelists described the 1999 Ammiano for Mayor campaign as a defining moment in their lives and in the emergence of today’s progressive politics. Good to see the guy get the recognition he so richly deserves.
2. Campos, who was sitting next to Chiu, made a point of saying that there’s no longer a progressive majority on the board, and he pointed to the committee assignments that gave conservatives control of some key panels. Chiu responded: “At the end of the day, we have a progressive majority on the board that will serve as a backstop” to anything bad that comes out of committees.
It was curious; it sounded almost as if Chiu was disappointed in his own assignments. Why would you need a “backstop” if the committees were good in the first place?
So I called him the next day and asked him about it. First he said he thought the commitees were balanced and it was all going to be fine. But when I asked him directly — why not appoint progressive majorities on the key committees? — he responded:
“I wish the board presidency vote hadn’t turned out the way it did.”
In other words: If the progressives had all voted for Chiu, he wouldn’t have appointed conservatives to key posts of power. Instead, some progressives voted for Avalos, and Chiu won with the votes of Carmen Chu, Scott Wiener, Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell (along with Kim and Mar). The payback, the deal, the whatever you want to call it, means that bad decisions will be made at Land Use and Rules and maybe in the Budget Committee, and Chiu as much as admitted that the progressive majority will have to go to unusual lengths to undo them.
I know how politics works; I know you have to dance with the ones that brung you and all that. But it would be nice if every now and then someone would do something just because it was the right thing to do, and to hell with the political consequences.
I suppose that’s too much to ask.