How did the human race ever get along without advocates. Thank god we have "advocates" for every cause in our city - because "workers" and those needing housing can't be their own "advocates." They clearly need people to do that for them.

Yet another example of Non-Profit Inc and the hundreds of millions it sucks out of the city's budget on a consistent basis to provide for the salaries of these types of "advocates." Who mainly exist because they view those they "advocate" for as too dumb to advocate for themselves.

These individuals have held control over the progressive movement for the past ten years as it moved from organizing nonprofits and some community members to take the Board of Supervisors from Brown to its current position of utter powerless right now.

Instead of organizing communities to support the Board of Supervisors slicing the Willie Brown's former "special assistants," now the hundred thousand dollar club from the city payroll, the nonprofiteers dutifully allow themselves to be led by the nose to play the add back game.

The nonprofits have been corrupted by city contracts to the extent that they have failed to leverage the power we've won to stop accelerated damage to our city, especially on the east side.

After blowing Prop B, perhaps the lowest hanging most progressive fruit every put on the ballot, Calvin Welch should have been given a vote of "no confidence" and shown the door. That he is still getting paid to do this indicates that there is no seriousness to this proposal.

Nonprofit services only help a slim fraction of San Franciscans. Any progressive coalition centered around nonprofits is destined to fail because of lack of political reach. We cannot afford to allow ten more years to go by with these individuals getting paid to not deliver the goods for us.

What needs to happen here is that the paid activists need to sit down and shut up, to LISTEN to what the community wants instead of TELLING us what we need and excoriating anyone for deviating from their script.

It is bad enough that we see progressives like Adachi and Gonzalez teaming up with billionaires to screw labor, we don't need to see the nonprofiteers who have remained employed as their base has been eviscerated dictating strategy and tactics.

The truth is, and Adachi is proving this by relying on billionaire venture capitalists to finance his attacks, that WE ARE ALL LOW INCOME COMPARED TO THE FINANCE SECTOR WHICH IS DECIMATING OUR COMMUNITIES.

So long as the progressive political coalition is defined by the nonprofits as anyone eligible to receive their services, and the nonprofiteers have lost almost every battle they've engaged in over the past ten years, we are doomed.

Under this scenario, there is only one measure of political success: public dollars going into their private nonprofits. We've learned that such an approach does not work. Why should we continue to allow upper middle class heterosexual white male boomers such as Randy Shaw and Calvin Welch, people who are comfortably housed elsewhere, to dictate progressive housing policy for District Six, contesting that seat to occupy it for their own benefit, leaving we residents out in the cold?

Marti and Welch in particular, acceded to the disastrous Eastern Neighborhood and Market Octavia plans, which snarl Muni to subsidize developer profit and affordable housing crumbs, and were rewarded with primo seats on the EN CAC which is designed as a funnel to ensure that the politically connected nonprofits get our money, the only measure of progressive success in their eyes.

Calvin, Fernando, read some Saul Allinsky and sit down, shut up and listen to what the people you would "organize" want and take steps to empower those communities to be productive politically. This paternalism of the nonprofiteers must stop now because literally it is killing progressivism in San Francisco.

-marc

These are the people who had such little confidence that progressives would prevail in 2008 that they rushed through the half baked Eastern Neighborhoods plan for fear of it getting worse (!) from a Board of Supervisors that never came to be.

Their go at economic development, MEDA, the Mission Economic Development Association has utterly failed at its goal of whatever they are. How many new coops are there in the Mission, owned and run by and for Mission residents? How many businesses have been stabilized?

Allowing those who have crashed the progressive movement in San Francisco to take the lead in fixing it is equivalent to allowing Wall Street free reign to fix the economy they've trashed.

Now they expect to present draft proposals to members of the community, proposals they control, and to cut off anyone who deviates from the script. Do not participate in this and lend it legitimacy until the community is democratically in the drivers seat as to formulating the agenda and controlling what comes next.

They don't trust you, so that will never happen.

-marc

Come down and help us save our advocacy and community activist jobs?

Just wondering here, who hires or appoints advocates of the working class or balanced growth? Do you take some college classes where the only wrong answer is not agreeing with the teacher, some English classes where you learn to use the same buzz words over and over again, you people need some "diversity" in your agitprop.

Does the actual working class get a say in these people who supposedly advocate for them? I know some actual working class types and I don't think they have ever heard of these three. I don't think I have ever had need for a balanced growth advocate whatever that is.

Can I just string some words together and make myself a title? I want my title to be like one of those wacky Japanese shirts. Mr Matlock is a; Team, college #1, sports tiger, community advocate, and a worker football sour fruit.

Christopher Cook: The issue is the unaccountability of the nonprofit political complex, of private corporations operating in and dominating the progressive political context, and has nothing to do with me. My record of progressive accomplishment speaks for itself.

But one issue is worth singling out. Would "tired apologists for inequality" figure out Prop B of 2008 with Chris Daly late one night during his campaign in 2006 that would have GIVEN Calvin Welch $30,000,000 per year for affordable housing, that only required 50%+1 of the vote? Why did Calvin Welch not return my email offering free campaign consulting services to pass the measure? It lost by a slim margin, FAIL.

You'd better be queer, because if a straight man accused me of opposing "equality" he's going to have to go back to homophobia school. Sorry, I live in the Mission and I am gay and white, so I must be a conservative, anti-tenant, displacing Newsomite.

There is a different between working hard and accomplishment. On the nonprofits' watch, displacement has continued apace throughout the decade we've been in power. FAIL.

I have been told what to think by nonprofits now for a decade, and with them leading the progressive movement, we have begun to fall back further and faster each year.

You can set your clock by when the nonprofiteers hold "congresses" and "symposia" based on budget season or an upcoming election. Once they get funded, its back to work, not accomplishing much.

Nonprofits are actually less democratic and accountable than BP. At least BP has shareholders who get to vote on their boards of directors. Nonprofits are self perpetuating boards that don't have to have any connection to community and largely don't and are of the authoritarian, nondemocratic corporate form.

There is no democratic legitimacy here in the community either. The fact that I have to demand accountability and face challenge from people like you for so doing, that nonprofits fear the people who live in the communities in which they operate because they might differ on policy, scared that the cards might fall where they may, indicates that there is nothing emancipatory or progressive going on here, its just a poverty maintenance cartel for an increasing trophy population of clients, er, consumers, er poor.

Take your liberal white guilt trip elsewhere, because its meeting with diminishing returns in San Francisco. San Franciscans want to be meaningfully involved in participatory government but the people holding this event want to be sure that never happens on the progressive side.

-marc

Tom Wolfe, not P.J. O'Rourke.

I thought the Green Party was "left". The more I listen to Marc, Bruce, and Sue, the less it looks left and the more it looks self-absorbed and moderate.