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Indybay Feature

Matt Gonzalez Goes Over to the Dark Side

by RWF (restes1960 [at] yahoo.com)
Matt Gonzalez turns to the right, to neoliberalism, after a praiseworthy record as one of the most respected progressive politicians in the US.
As someone who has abandoned the electoral process, I always respected Matt Gonzalez, the former chair of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A Democrat who turned Green, he almost became the mayor, narrowly losing an election to Gavin Newsom in 2003 after the intervention of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. He was a rarity in American politics, someone who could translate global and national trends down to the community level, with an admirable record of progressive achievement. With the exception of the late Peter Camejo, no one had more integrity as a progressive political figure in California in the last 10 to 15 years.

In 2008, Gonzalez ran for Vice President on a ticket lead by (who else?) Ralph Nader. At the time, I told friends that I would have considered breaking my pledge of electoral non-participation if the ticket had been the other way round, with Gonzalez as the presidential candidate. But times have changed. With the collapse of the global economy, and the exposure of the speculative financial practices that caused it, Gonzalez has decided to go in a different direction. After maligning Wall Street for the excesses that generated the housing bubble, and the bailout that followed, he has acquiesced to the merciless process of sub-proletarianization under way around the world. Like the Marxist-Leninists of the global South in the 1990s that made their accomodation with IMF structural adjustment plans and the diversion of domestic resources for export lead economic development, Gonzalez has decided to participate in the impoverishment of American workers so as to increase the rate of primitive accumulation for transnational finance capitalists.

What, pray tell, has Gonzalez done to provoke such harsh criticism? He has decided to sponsor a measure for the San Francisco ballot, along with public defender Jeff Adachi, to require the public employees of the city and county of San Francisco to pay substantial increases in the amount that they pay towards their pensions and health benefits. It is, essentially, the same position that Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken in negotiations with state employee unions, with the back stage assistance of the Democratic majority in the legislature. Both Gonzalez and Adachi defend the measure as necessary to preserve public services provided by the city and county. Over the years, progressives have pushed several measures to require the financial district and its predominately commuter workforce to pay more towards covering the cost of local services. Now, Gonzalez has moved hard to the right, deciding that the burden should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the public sector employees, many of whom make far less than most San Franciscans. In other words, much as the American working class is supposed to subsidize finance capital, San Francisco public sector workers are supposed to subsidize the populace of one of the most affluent cities in the world.

Gonzalez has, after years of incisive criticism of neoliberalism, adopted one of its core principles, that global economic growth has stagnated because workers in the developed world make too much, not too little. Of course, besides being regressive, the measure is also bad economic policy because the removal of more money from the paychecks of these middle income and lower middle income workers will invariably be deflationary, putting more downward pressure on the city's budget deficit. Ironically, Gonzalez and Adachi find themselves looking to the city's downtown business interests, the ones that have opposed progressive policy measures for decades, to obtain the money necessary to qualify the measure for the ballot. One suspects that Gonzalez already has plans to exploit these new political relationships in the future.

Faced with a situation in which working class politics in the US is moribund, Gonzalez finally decided to throw in the towel, and seek to create a new, populist politics in support of public services at the expense of those who provide them. It is a sort of perverse left stance within an overall rightward movement towards the radical curtailment, if not elimination, of the public sector through financial starvation and privatization. One sees the same phenomenon in the California legislature, where Democratic leadership figures like Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg are attempting to lead the state employee unions, like lambs to the slaughter, into new adverse collective bargaining agreements on terms imposed by the Governor. Unlike Steinberg, Gonzalez sees a political benefit to personally leading the effort in a highly publicized manner. Last weekend, Gonzalez was scheduled to speak at the West Coast Socialism 2010 conference in honor of Camejo, who was apparently a close friend. Quite reasonably, the sponsors of the conference, the International Socialist Organization, disinvited him after he announced support for the Adachi measure. To have done anything otherwise would have been an insult to our memories of Peter Camejo.

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Currently, roughly half of all San Francisco City and County Employees do NOT contribute to their pension funds, basically a perk.
Adachi's initiative would end this freebie and require EVERYBODY to contribute 9-10% of their City paycheck to their pension.

With the City half billion $ in the red, this measure sounds like good fiscal management, comrade.
After all, you do want to keep public services flowing to We, The People, right?

This reform is NOT about Left vs. Right, but rather Right vs. Wrong.
In this case, you're correct - Matt Gonzalez is on "The Right Side".
What's wrong with that?




by thesubjective
I appreciate your passion but you diminish your position by relying on so much preface and hyperbole. Gonzalez is mirroring the direction of most progressives, taking back america one city at a time through economic reform. Most San Franciscans have NO pension...and to hear city employees, in a city who pays it's public servants more than any other in the nation rattle the saber because they too have to take a small hit economically is absurdist.

Re-focus and keep things in perspective. Tearing down a great leader of the left over a position of little importance to the general populace is shameful.

by RWF
about Gonzalez is doing, just aligning himself with a more wealthy, more conservative San Francisco at the expense of the workforce

perhaps, it is good for his political future, but there is nothing progressive about taking away benefits that the workforce has received through collective bargaining over many decades

if this is future of "the left", then, a lot of us are going to have go elsewhere, as for Gonzalez, he is going to land on his feet, probably after winning a race for mayor or the assembly, with the support of his new found downtown allies

and, it will be interesting to see if this is end of Gonzalez's turn to the right, I suspect that, as with Obama, it is just the first of many such moves, all of which will be to the detriment of the workers and his long time progressive allies
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