DeMaio: "Sarah Palin in Drag"

DeMaio: “Sarah Palin in Drag;” Renters Union Contends

By Dustin D. Delon

San Diego: December 6, 2010

“Carl DeMaio would have us believe that greedy public employees have bankrupted our city,” Rocky Neptun, director the San Diego Renters Union, will tell the San Diego City Council at their Tuesday December 7th meeting.

“He has tried to drum beat into the public consciousness the notion that the gardener who tends our magnificent Balboa Park, the gal who picks up our trash and the superb receptionist who answers our inquiries are the bad guys in this budget crisis,” he will tell Council members.

Suggesting that Councilman DeMaio and his policies are “simply, Sarah Palin in drag,” Neptun, said in a San Diego Renters Union statement released Monday morning at their El Cajon Blvd. meeting hall, “he, she and others, particularly in the Tea Party, would destroy community government, sell the public commons to the highest bidder and return us to the old days of low-wages and poverty.”

The Renters Union director will suggest to the Council that their discussion of the budget crisis has been an example of “one-dimensional thinking.” He charges that the budget crisis argument is controlled by a small number of people “who would do away with local government and drag down wages everywhere.”

Relating to a conversation he once had with UCSD’s famous Professor Herbert Marcuse, Neptun noted in the statement that “one-dimensional dialogue, as Marcuse pointed out, is the inability to talk about perspectives and alternatives because those in positions of authority, whether politicians or the media, limit the parameters of the discussion.”

Rather than “demonize the wonderful people who toil day-in and day-out to make this America’s finest city,” said in the press release, “we need to look at the culture of corporate welfare which permeates the affairs of this city.”

Neptun conjured up the Renters Union’s alternative reflection on the city’s budget deficit by saying “rather than paying into the retirement fund for which employees worked in good faith, the city in the last few decades has diverted the funds to cover the costs of corporate welfare, including convention goers, ballparks, hotels, golf courses, obscenely paid, non-union, corporate lobbyists on the mayor’s staff and infrastructure projects which subsidize wealthy developers.”

The San Diego Renters Union, he suggests, is calling for a populist movement in San Diego to counter the Tea Party’s attempt to create a “corporate-dominated” city. “For far too long,” he said, in an interview at the Renters Union’s hall, “the citizens of San Diego have subsidized wealthy corporations, particularly in the tourist areas.” He cited “wealthy families of sports teams, hotel moguls and market manipulators who don’t pay their fair share of city costs,” as one of the fundamental causes of the budget deficit.

“We must look at the ridiculously low corporate services fees and shutting down the Center City Development Corporation (CCDC) which will strengthen the city’s financial health rather than give public handouts to downtown opportunists.”

The press release notes that “San Diego’s independent budget analysis reported a $300 million loss to the general fund because CCDC’s industry paid lobbyists got a cap removed on downtown corporate handouts through Sacramento’s corrupt legislative process.”

The Renters Union reportedly also takes a dim view of Mayor Jerry Sanders’ proposal to eliminate the city’s defined benefit pension program in favor of a privatized plan like a 401c. “This proposal throws the city employee to the wolves,” its director said, “those on the right-wing, in their ideological cocoons, never talk about casino-like Wall Street gambling and how our over-reliance on the stock market got us in this financial pickle in the first place.”

“Just this year alone the retirement fund has lost millions as stocks plunged,” Neptun said in the released statement. “To force city employees into the very broken system for which they are scapegoated seems the height of hypocrisy.”

“What we have here is a model of the scene from the movie ‘Casablanca’ where the corrupt Vichy Captain played by Claude Rains closes down Rick’s Bar saying he is shocked that gambling is going on, while pocketing his winnings for the evening,” Neptun told several journalists. “If you factor out the shocking pensions paid to past lobbyists and political cronies on the Council and Mayor’s staffs, the average former city employee makes about $37,000 in retirement, hardly a money-spinning bonanza in San Diego’s expensive living environment.” He continued that while elected officials, like DeMaio, get 3.5 percent of their base salary immediately after leaving office, the average city worker garners only 2.5 percent and must wait until they are 55 years old.

On DeMaio’s privatization proposals Neptun reported “our members have no objection to the competitive bidding process, as long as a priority option is given to local businesses and all bidders meet the wages and benefits of the public employees they are bidding against.” He suggested to allow private service providers “who exploit cheap labor from Tijuana” or “outsource components to foreign countries” to bid on city contracts “is a farce, which stacks the deck in favor of the political hacks and personal cronies of the many public officials who are spending so much effort and money to get this concept implemented.”

“As professor Marcuse counseled so many years ago,” Neptun ended his statement, “to be fair and honest to everyone in the community, not just those in power and their manipulated consent, we must widen the parameters of the deficit discussion and look at the alternatives amid far greater community involvement.”

Dustin D. Delon, Communications Director, San Diego Renters Union