Green Party leader takes Supervisors Reins

Wow, I'd heard back in October that this might happen, but I thought there would be more fanfare somehow, or some sort of battle . . .

Congratulations SF and MG!

I'm begining to believe they're may be hope for electoral politics after all!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/01/08/gonzalez.DTL


Gonzalez named new prez of S.F. Board of Supervisors

Wednesday, January 8, 2003

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SAN FRANCISCO -- The City's supervisors took seven rounds of voting to choose their new president today, finally selecting Matt Gonzalez by a narrow 6-5 to replace outgoing two-term leader Tom Ammiano.

On the deciding vote, Gonzalez bested Sophie Maxwell. The two had been locked along with Aaron Peskin in a near three-way tie during six rounds of balloting that never wavered: three for Maxwell and four apiece for Peskin and Gonzalez.

Once two colleagues asked Maxwell to step aside and she refused, Peskin stood and said he wanted to free himself and his three supporters to go with their second choice. The foursome split evenly between the other two candidates, so Gonzalez took the prize.

Peskin himself voted with the majority, voicing a need for unity on the board in times of uncertainty and economic difficulty.

Gonzalez, a Green Party member who sits at the far left of the board's political spectrum, put an unusual coalition together to pull off his historic win. His vocal supporter Tony Hall, who represents the West of Twin Peaks areas and whose vote generally goes along with the 11-member body's conservative wing.

Hall repeatedly called Gonzalez a man of integrity and intelligence who would run the supervisors' meetings and make committee assignments fairly. At one point he noted that Gonzalez had sponsored a successful ballot measure that should lead to a substantial salary hike for supervisors, once the city's Civil Service Commission implements it this year.

The board's incoming president is a lawyer and former city public defender who represents District 5, centered around the Haight-Ashbury District. He said he thought supervisors could tolerate debate and even a little grandstanding. "We are politicians, after all,'' he said.

In thanking outgoing President Tom Ammiano, Gonzalez noted that the job of pulling a widely diverging group of elected officials together is a hard one. "It's a little like herding cats,'' he said.

Ammiano said he was proud of many of the board's accomplishments during the four years he has been at the helm, noting the Hetch Hetchy water system mega-repair that voters just approved and district elections that he said are providing "accessibility and accountability'' to city residents.

For decades before the year 1999, supervisors were elected citywide. Whoever received the greatest number of votes in a particular election cycle automatically became the next board president.

This is great because it talks about people like Burton trying to keep the Greens out.

Fire your democrat today!

Published on Thursday, January 9, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle

Green Party Scores a Win on S.F. Board
Gonzalez's election as president shocks Democratic leaders

by Rachel Gordon

San Francisco, long a stronghold of the Democratic Party, got a jolt Wednesday when Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez made history by landing the powerful post of Board of Supervisors president.

"This sends a very strong message about the ascension of progressives, and particularly the Greens," said Ross Mirkarimi, a San Francisco-based political consultant who was a founding member of the state's Green Party.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0109-06.htm

This is good. So when things go wrong or things get worse, I know who to point
the finger of blame at, the guy at the top ------------->Gonzalez.

Just read it an weep! The democrats are going down and it's only a matter of time before they break ranks and start to flee to the Green Party.

The sooner the better. The people in the Democratic party have been sheltered too long under the cloak of "progressives". Let the Democratic Party fall. When the only thing left is a conservative party and a green party not afraid of embracing the far-out leftist millstones they have tied around their necks, we'll see where the people turn to.

"far-out leftist millstones they have tied around their necks"

Maybe you should clarify about those.

CONGRATULATIONS MATT!
This is a very encouraging development, both for Greens and for San Francisco politics. Matt has demonstrated his ability to build consensus and work with leaders of all stripes, and will make a great board president. Thanks also to Aaron Peskin for helping to make this a reality.

The Greens now have a great opportunity to demonstrate that grassroots, community-based activism has a right and proper place in government. Today is a great day for San Francisco!

The workingclass has won a major victory with the election of Green Party member, Supervisor Matt Gonzalez of District 5, the district that includes the pro-tenant Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore neighborhoods, to be President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on January 8, 2003.

The Board President becomes the temporary mayor when the official mayor is out of town and is first in the line of succession after the mayor. He makes committee appointments and decides what legislation will be heard and when.

Matt is a staunch supporter of the cause most near and dear to the heart of the workingclass of San Francisco, namely rent control. It is rent control that is the litmus test issue in San Francisco for the tenants are 2/3 of the residents and 50% of the voters in a high voter turnout election, and we constitute most of the workingclass.

Matt is not an opportunist; he is always for the workingclass. He spent 10 years working as a public defender before running for office as a progressive candidate for district attorney in 1999, winning a remarkable 20,000 votes. He then ran for supervisor in November 2000 as a Democrat, and after changing to the Green Party when he was disgusted with Democratic Senator Feinstein's refusal to debate senate candidate Medea Benjamin, won the December 2000 runoff against a Willie Brown flunky with even more votes!

Matt's votes for this milestone achievement were primarily from the pro-tenant supervisors who are not running for public office. Tony Hall of District 7 (St. Francis Woods and Outer Sunset) is not pro-tenant and is not a registered Democrat. He likes Matt because Matt lets Tony speak his mind, unlike the Democratic Party machine politicians, who do not believe in political debate, which is what any legislative body should do before voting on a piece of legislation. The details on the votes may be found in the San Francisco Chronicle, 1/9/03 at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/01/09/MN206530.DTL

The sour grapes on the part of the old fuddy-duddy Democratic Party election-frauding machine politician, Senator John Burton, demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of his rotten capitalist party, and like its twin, the Republican Party, should be tossed into the dustbin of history with all deliberate speed.

The election fraud of the Democratic Party that includes John Burton and his organized crime, anti-tenant, anti-labor, election-frauding thug, Willie Brown, may be studied at:
http://www.brasscheck.com/stadium
http://www.brasscheck.com/stadium/ferc.html
and
http://www.brasscheck.com/jonestown/electionfraud.html

The sour grapes was not limited to Matt Gonzalez. John Burton’s daughter, Kim Burton, was defeated for the position of Public Defender by Jeff Adachi and, according to the local legal newspaper, the January 9, 2003 Recorder, in a front page article by Dennis Opatrny, Kim Burton left Adachi with insufficient staff, allowing some of the deputy public defenders to go immediately on a month’s vacation, in a pathetic attempt to make Adachi look bad. What both Burtons are doing is wasting our tax dollars with their nepotism in the case of Kim Burton and machine politics in the case of the Board of Supervisors.

Matt’s election to Board President puts an end to 40 years of a rotten, bankrupt, election-frauding Democratic Party machine. This vote reflects decades of struggle. The Peace & Freedom Party challenged the Democrats in 1968 when it made the California ballot as a party opposing the Democrat-Republican’s war of anti-Communism, the war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants, and a party opposing the Dixiecrats (the name of the Southern Democrats before 1970) and Republican racists, both of whom supported segregation and all the other horrors of racism in the South and most of the rest of the US. It was practically revolutionary to oppose wars of anti-communism in 1968, although Peace & Freedom (P&F) was not originally a socialist party. It became a socialist party in 1974 and remained on the ballot, challenging the death penalty, war-mongering, racist, anti-labor, capitalist Democrat-Republicans until 1998. The Green Party made the California ballot in 1992 and has been growing ever since, as the Democrats increasingly cannot deliver any goods and services as capitalism declines, and do not now even pretend to care about the workingclass. The Green Party is not a socialist party but a significant percentage of its members are staunchly pro-labor, and that certainly includes Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez.

Matt’s election for now is more symbolic than substantive as the current charter does not allow the supervisors to have a major voice in deciding the most urgent issue currently on their agenda, namely the budget. He can and will do a lot to alleviate the misery. Like any elected official, Matt Gonzalez can only act to the extent that he has the active support of his base, namely the workingclass, and thus, the struggle continues.

With a bugle blast from your favorite mariachi band, and a bouquet of roses,
CONGRATULATIONS TO PRESIDENT MATT GONZALEZ!

The green party is not a leftist party.

Our slogan has been:

"Neither left, nor right, but forward Green."

And this informs the "special realtionship" that has developed between Hall and Gonzalez. Now if only Hall would use gender indeterminate pronouns so as not to alienate half of humanity.

The Berlin Wall is over, and what we are seeing with the meteoric growth of the SF Greens is a delayed response by progressives and anticapitalists to this new reality.

Whether or not the end goal is communism or socialism is another question. But using the lowest levels of state apparatus where elections still mean something as a tool against the evaporation of political power from the state to transnationals is a valid radical goal.

A few days before the December runoff, I ran into Peskin and Gonzalez strolling by 15th and Capp, meters from my house. One simply does not see traditional ruling elites (not to mention our own cops) on foot in neighborhoods like this anywhere else.

The Democrats are stewing, but they only have themselves and their school lunchroom style of politics to blame.

Daly and Peskin both come out stronger after this, with Peskin's stock rising 400% on a stand up show of class, while Maxwell's down with UAL in the toilet, adherence to the machine's dicta shining through unlike Daly who stood his progressive ground.

There are many levels of struggle. Forcing the issue on local democracy and citizen (small c, denizens of the City) centered politics against the corporate oligarchy is one of them, and Gonzalez does it as as good as it gets.

Does this preclude other avenues of resistance? Only if you let it.

>>> The workingclass has won a major victory with the election of Green Party member, Supervisor Matt Gonzalez of District 5, the district that includes the pro-tenant Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore neighborhoods, to be President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on January 8, 2003. <<<

The Board of Supervisors cares only about the underclass and ruling class, not the working class.

There are services galore for the truly downtrodden, while working class neighborhoods like the Outer Mission, Crocker Amazon, Excelsior, Ingleside, etc. are falling apart. The City will spend $100 million on the homeless, but in my Excelsior neighborhood we had to cough up $50K of our own money to get a playground so kids would have a decent place to play.

Progressives only care about the "glory" causes, and do not care one iota about the working class. Gonzalez won because he pushed a resolution that lets the Board give themselves pay raises. I'm sure within a couple of years they'll all be paying themselves $100K plus.

“The green party is not a leftist party” that statement is as ridiculous as saying “The American Independent Party is not a rightist party”. I would hardly consider the Green Party a moderate party. But as they say, it’s all a manner of perspective.

"Gonzalez won because"

. . . everyone knows he's excellent. Maxwell or Peskin might have also won, it was close.

But since you think the board members shouldn't have raises, maybe you should also look into the pay for the UC Regents et al, particularly the retired ones who can continue to earn over 100k for playing golf - for the rest of their life.

So...do all you Greenies feel as Anti-Jew as the former "cutest little nutcase in Congress?"

She may be running with Nader in 04, yanno.

Man...that'll be interesting.

green matt gonzalez was democrat jeff adachi's strongest supporter. adachi's campaign was the broadest cross section of san francisco that ever came together without machine coercion. the elites shunned adachi and threw the statewide kitchen sink at him yet he won resoundingly.

if all democrats were like adachi, there would be no reason for the green party to exist. but that is not the case, and we greens would welcome jeff adachi into our ranks in a heartbeat.

if you all feel comfortable defining yourself as left/right/moderate, relying on the seating arrangements of post revolutionary france for your political moorings 3 centuries later, go for it.

the green party is a radical party that was founded on the basis of neither left nor right but forward green. this is where it is poised to succeed in the us when compared to the dismal failures of the left heretofore.

sfer is correct. the democrat progressives have declared class war on the working class by forging alliances between the ruling class and the underclass that screw the rest of us who work hard and pay for this whole mess.

its time to declare class war on the elites by uniting underclass and working class, the whole working class.

I don't agree with this it all. One only needs to look at Europe to see what an entrenched Green Party apparatus does. And the European Greens are way further to the left than the US Green Party -- even before the inevitable moderation that will occur if and when it gains more popular support.

The litmus test is not "rent control." A political party would nearly have to operate openly illegal in order to achieve any kind of radical goal. Will there be legalized community squatting or building takeovers? Will there be a strong use of the existing police oversight in order to reduce policing to almost zero? etc etc

Meanwhile, the hopes of radical change "through the system" will divert much needed funds, labor power, and resources to the bureaucracy of municipal management. Instead of creating situations which would continually test the limits of the deranged economic system we live in, your plan for a slow party takeover of the city will suck the life out of any exciting projects.

What needs to happen is that we need to set a goal of radical transformation within our lifetimes. And then plan accordingly. I dont think more effort on party bureaucracy is the plan. Think of all the money wasted on Green Party campaigns. And then think how far that money would go supporting working and under class people who want to radically change the world around them.

Doesn't this just prove that the Green Party is not a threat to the status quo that the Democrats are willing to permit the Greens to "rule".

Yes . . . just think of it all! ALL that money.

Do you even have any idea of what you're talking about?

A lot of people put in their own sweat and there are no corporate donations, so it comes down to individuals.

"working and under class people" ARE the Greens. They're putting in their own time and effort and money. Peter Camejo marched in Santa Rosa for drivers licenses for undocumented workers and we helped organize a rally there.

Istead of criticizing the Greens and all their money, go create what it is you want to create.

It would be great if far more radical things happen. Until then, there's the Greens. The Greens aren't all radical, but they're not dems and repubs. Greens get arrested in public, and banned from debates. They're doing what they can while trying not to get destroyed by corporate media.

Personally, I think all Greens should get arrested all across the country during the debates and not just arrested, but disrupt things related to the debates, like pour paint in the doorways, drop banners, cause a power failure, or release an intolerable odor in the audience . . . anything.

Otherwise, it'll be centuries before anything changes.

I've got one thing to say to this man. Wash your hair!