EDITORIAL Local food is all the rage in San Francisco these days. The locavores and the slow-food people held a conference at Fort Mason a couple of weeks ago that drew huge crowds. Mayor Gavin Newsom is on board, and he loves to talk about creating a sustainable San Francisco. There are people in town who talk about energy independence, who talk about shopping locally, about building a city where people can live and work without using private cars.
We're all for it — but in the wake of the wrenching meltdown in the financial markets, San Francisco needs to take a broad approach to the city economy. It's time to develop a comprehensive plan to turn San Franciscans (and their government, businesses, and institutions) into economic locavores.
There are three basic reasons why the housing, credit, and financial markets are in the worst crisis since the Great Depression. The first two are related: The complexity of the financial instruments and securities being traded has increased so dramatically that even the heads of big investment banks didn't know exactly what they were buying and selling. And the regulatory system under the George W.
Bush administration has been unable and unwilling to keep up.
There's not a lot San Franciscans can do locally to fix either of those problems (other than work to elect Barack Obama in November).
But the third factor in the current crisis is the globalization of money — and that's something San Francisco can address.
For years, most famously in Seattle in 1999, protesters in this country have clashed with major institutions like the World Trade Organization over globalization issues. For the most part, they've focused on trade — on America losing jobs to low-wage companies, on big American chain stores selling goods made in third-world sweatshops, and on American money going to multinational corporations that prey on impoverished people and foul the environment. All of those are crucial issues — but so is the globalization of finance, which has received less attention.
And we're not just talking about the stock market. The money San Franciscans deposit every day in local banks, the payments on mortgages and credit cards, the insurance premiums ... all that cash goes into a financial system that instead of reinvesting in communities is buying and selling complex international securities like credit default swaps and derivatives. The traders and top executives who make these markets get colossal paychecks and bonuses — and most of us get nothing. Now that the whole house of cards is starting to topple, the small businesses and the people who need credit to buy cars or washing machines or bicycles or a house — the ordinary residents of cities like San Francisco — are the biggest losers.
The plan the White House has put forward is one of the grossest examples of corporate welfare in a generation — and even the Democrats in Congress are hesitant to oppose it.
But if San Francisco is serious about building a sustainable city, the mayor and the supervisors ought to start working, now, to create a citywide policy for economic localism. Among the elements:
•Banks that do business with the city should be required to set aside a significant amount of their loan portfolio for local small-business and housing loans. (The Treasurer's Office can start with Bank of ...
The notion that we can all be homeowners, that it is desirable in the long term to turn us all into homeowners in this, the most expensive urban real estate market outside of Manhattan, must be demolished now.
The Eastern Neighborhoods and Market Octavia plans all call for catering to the kind of speculative real estate casino economics that have buried the economy under the rubble of the Reagan devolution.
A few more thoughts on community based economics:
How does the City form a Bank of San Francisco to keep productive capital circulating in the San Francisco economy? Even Quentin Kopp had indicated this was not a non-starter.
How does the City use Redevelopment to capitalize cooperative businesses similar to the way that the City capitalized Rainbow Grocery a generation ago? The more that we keep taxes, wages and profits all local, the stronger our local economy is as a result.
How does the City, SFUSD, Community College, Redevelopment and Housing Authority promote employees spending its massive payroll in the City? This is not popular with the nonprofit housing types, but even though cops make $80K, it is in the public safety and economic interest to have cops living and spending in the City if we have to have cops at all. The City can require time proximity of residency for public safety employees, but does not. San Francisco residency for San Francisco employees should be highly incentivized.
Until the City replaces the payroll tax with a broader-based non-labor tax, can the City offer discounts or rebates of the payroll tax for firms that employ San Franciscans?
Accepting Ben Rosenfield's appointment as Controller was a mistake made by the Supervisors. His ballot statements have been fraudulent and favored big businesses, notably in Prop F/G from June and Prop H on the current ballot. I would not count on Willie Brown's crony doing anything but carrying water for the kinds of big business that we're trying to marginalize.
Newsom issues press releases that assert that he favors all sorts of Green initiatives, but like SPUR, all of the reasonable green talk evaporates once a business needs to spend a dollar.
I think that we've learned from the current economic collapse that the laws of thermodynamics apply to economics in that there is no free lunch.
As Obama is reshaping the Democratic Party into an entity with grassroots that replace those to which the DLC applied RoundUP(TM) back around the time that this mutant economic system was being imposed on us by Reagan and a compliant Democrat Congress, our local Democrat power brokers, Harris excepted, appear to wallow in Clintonian triangulation, paternalism and authoritarianism.
They've hitched their wagon to a dying horse, the love of the moderate Democrats and real life Republicans for free market speculative economics is identical, as is the desire for subsidy and welfare to promote it.
Given the instability in the economic basis for their position, they stand exposed. The question is can we organize a local, progressive economic alternative while the economic system is suspect?
-marc
Inflation in the US is due to rising debt and war expenses, not to mention over inflated housing prices and increasingly scarce petroleum.
Whenever corporations are made to pay their fair share, conservatives always, and I mean always, whine that the world will come to an end.
Well corporations were given free reign over the past 25 years and have made quite a mess of things left to their own devices.
The extra load put on the economy by populist economic policies are imperceptible when compared to the load put on the economy by outsourcing real jobs and establishing as economic policy the seeking of refuge from every preceding bubble in every next bubble.
-marc
As a simple example have you ever bought a children’s toy, there are 4 local toy shops that I know, all are expensive and cater to the tastes of wealthier customers.
If you are living in the Mission and don't have a large income to buy a new toy for your child, you have to drive out of town to go to a Toys R Us, or Target. This is just one example of inflationary results that the above ideas will exacerbate.
This is the reality of many people trying to get by in San Francisco, but if you want to create a less diverse city continue to throw around terms like "discredited neoliberal economics" rather than look for the unintended consequences of knee jerk reactions.
Globalization is over, petroleum is too expensive, and we know that we need to run the City like a business.
Note that businesses come to San Francisco's public trough only to feed, not to pay back, yet once the City decides to leverage its position for the benefit of its residents, all of a sudden the free marketeers wail that the sky is going to fall.
Well the sky IS falling and it is due to a religious attachment to a failed economic theory. We intend to use the ashes of the economic and ecological collapses to create something viable, sustainable and Green.
-marc
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