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Record Low Voter Turnout, but Chron, SFBG and Bay Citizen Report Right-Wing Shift

11 Friday Nov 2011

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Evidence of the claims I have been making that the Bay-Guardian, The Chron and The Bay Citizen are not only out of touch, but the worst sort of insider-journalists can be found in their ratification of the results of Tuesday’s election over the reality: only a handful of people decided the political fate of the City.

By contrast, in the blogosphere, The League of Pissed off Voters (via tweet), SF Appeal, and SFist all noted the pathetic voter turnout in Tuesday’s election – which is the story of the election of 2011.

Chris Roberts at SFAppeal notes: “In other words, 112,275 voters — or less than 25 percent of the electorate — decided who became mayor of San Francisco. And of them, 68,721 — or about 14 percent of the electorate, and about eight percent of the citizenry — actually voted for Mayor Ed Lee.”

The absence of coverage of this single most important issue of the election by The Chronicle, The SF Bay Guardian and the newly minted Bay Citizen are exactly what I have been talking about this year. The reporters and editors of these papers are participating in a cliquish civic theater instead of reporting on the needs, thoughts and desires of residents of our City.

They are engaged in stroking a few candidates and ridiculing anyone who thinks outside the box. They lack courage, conviction and objectivity and cover elections so they can be near the winners and get invited to the  party.

The Chron and Bay Citizen and SFBG not only avoided discussing the absurdly low numbers of voters who decided matters, they are even now proceeding to define them as an aggregate image of the “voters of San Francisco” and to attribute this ridiculously small number of citizens in our town with the general opinion of San Franciscans.

In the Bay Guardian, Steven T. Jones spends a long column discussing the makeup of “SF voters” – with no mention of the fact that they were not even a third of those eligible to vote! He dares to title the piece San Francisco’s Political Spectrum: a primer – What balls!

The Bay Citizen, however, is the worst and with the furthest reach. The Bay Citizen made an arrangement whereby select pieces appear in print in the New York Times’ Bay Area editions. So readers of the NYT here in the Bay thus becomes informed by a blog started less than a year ago with $5million from the Hellmans (hover over the link to the bay citizen at right).

And the Hellman family’s editors chose to publish a piece by two of their writers that claim that this election “Signals Shift to the Right” in San Francisco! With no mention of the lowest turnout ever! Again, what balls!

These aren’t journalists, they’re mediators.

This was a horrible election because wealthy vested interests manipulated millions of dollars to ensure a handful of viable choices would appear to wrestle for power, while Ed Lee was basically ratified in a confirmation election.

The Chron and The Bay Citizen and The SF Bay Guardian show their true colors even as the Occupy Movement tells the real story of the disenfranchised.

Blame the media – do it. We’d never have such pathetic candidates if instead of gravy-training reporters at the Chron, SFBG and Bay Citizen, we had real reporters and caring journalists.

Lee Wins, Avalos Gets SFBG Clip-n-Voters and We Lose (Again)

09 Wednesday Nov 2011

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Hardly anyone has voted.

That remains the story. Can a city official even be considered elected if a minority of the voting age population participates in the election? How is this democracy? We should pass a mandatory voting law for the City.

We must also protect Instant Runoff Voting, which did in fact force greater coalition building and less rancor amongst candidates. It did.

The need to be chosen as someone’s Number Two or Three kept these candidates honest and the results reflect it. Ed Lee’s silent treatment worked beautifully, and everybody who didn’t have a second or third choice in mind selected the Interim Mayor by default.

What a way to back into the job. Sound familiar? It’s what they accused Jean Quan of in Oakland. But guess what? it isn’t RCV, it’s voter turnout that’s the problem.

I am most disappointed in Melissa Griffin and her unfounded assault on Instant Runoff Voting or Ranked Choice Voting. This new system is good for democracy and proves useful at the aforementioned coalition-building and in encouraging more candidates (like myself, Joanna Rees, Green Terry Baum and many others) to participate. Ed Lee supporters should vociferously defend Instant Runoff, or Ranked Choice Voting.

Here’s a repost of my IRV PSA from several months back.

That said, everything has happened exactly as I expected since the Ethics Commission agreed Ed Lee could run – the main reason I dropped out.

This was a statistical inevitability. It’s a confirmation election – made from negotiations between Gavin Newsom’s crowd, Willie Brown’s and Rose Pak’s – to ensure that Ed Lee, the beloved Chief Administrator and Interim Mayor has no blemish on his record on the road to being the first Asian-American Mayor of San Francisco.

I am very happy for both the Chinese-American community and the Asian-American community at large, for the “breakthrough” that will be attributed here. But, the decision-making was done far away from most regular people, again, by power brokers who know we won’t bother to turnout, to look things up, to seek better representation.

I hope that instead of being threatened by what I am saying, Ed Lee supporters and the Mayor himself understand that my issue is with the Ethics Commission’s decision to allow Mr. Lee to run, not with him as a Mayor. He was a competent Chief Administrator and will be capable.

My issues on policy with Ed Lee are opposition to his Twitter Giveaway, the Treasure Island Boondoggle, the Park Merced “housing scheme that divides,” and his absurd idea for five-year budgets – given the huge number of interests to which he seems beholden. He lacks a progressiveness that I associate with our city. You can read specifics throughout this blog. I would have had him be allowed to run in 2015, against a real coalition-built Mayor.

I wish I could have been more active in this year’s election, but expected everything we are seeing today, months ago.

The promising numbers for John Avalos are a pleasant surprise from the standpoint of measuring the election against the power of the media to motivate. He was a non-entity before it began, Chris Daly stayed out of the way, and his absence helped Tim Redmond make Avalos run.

So Redmond pushed with his staid, old method and the numbers today are bigger. Pointless, but bigger. Redmond created the candidate and got him votes. Then had the SFBG report on the pretense of a Progressive Movement. Wow.

John Avalos’ numbers are largely due to the clip-and-vote effect observed for decades now, a method by which the Bay Guardian has become a shepherd for apathetic progressives-in-name, many very recent transplants here, who can’t be bothered to look into it, haven’t better resources or a competitive view of scale. These voters consider matters only in the last week of the cycle and do as Tim Redmond and the Bay Guardian tell them to do on election day by ripping out the page and following through.

This has been sustained because of a lack of competition for the Bay Guardian. But I restate my problem with Tim Redmond in this election: he wakes up everyday with all that power, and in recent years has seriously decayed in terms of courage or creativity. More often than not, he whines, laments and defines progressive space with his opinion of what is progressive. There is little or no collectivity and Redmond takes the centrist road nowadays leaving him as cliquish as the mainstream candidates.

That‘s the problem: the cliques at the Chron, SFBG and City Hall are the problem. That, and money … oh and the fact that nobody even cares to vote … (sigh)

The system needs a severe overhaul and I’d like to be a candidate again, but only if called upon. It isn’t real democracy – these aren’t real elections. It’s a sad decaying of SF political history.

The rulers are really stooges for the 1%, and the 1% themselves. They are out of touch and callous as so many of us suffer this terrible economy. They lack creative solutions, fear socialist ones and govern to protect themselves, their property and their right to party hard in our beautiful city.

Please stay in touch with comments. Hoping for a Sheriff Mirkarimi, I will be writing up an analysis of this election after the fact and posting it here. Thanks for your support and kind words.

Karthik

IRV PSA Repost

15 Wednesday Jun 2011

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Give Instant Runoff Voting a chance by educating yourself about how to vote for three distinct candidates on your absentee ballot or in the booth election day. Help others to become clearer on the process. Demand any candidate you support explain their IRV strategy and ask them to produce a simple PSA explaining IRV, such as this:

IRV is an excellent tool because

1. it makes candidates seek alliance and coalition-building tactics

2. it makes voters learn more about more candidates and take greater responsibility for their vote.

3. it aids candidates interested in civic leadership but without finances by giving them a means to recognition

4. it eliminates the need for expensive runoff campaigns

5. the process reveals which candidate works best with others at large.

SF Pissing Contests and Austerity Measures

14 Tuesday Jun 2011

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Dear San Francisco,

I want to be the Mayor for four years to reform the Office and civic sector in the face of deficit economy and then turn the office over to an elected Ed Lee, in 2015.

If elected I refuse to serve a second term and promise to hand the next Mayor, whomever it is, $500,000 and an SF Giveback Fund to supplement the General Fund in times of financial crisis (details in campaign promises).

This was been a depressing week in our once fair town: macho firefighters in mourning push the public defender around, crafty planning commissioners push to illegally draft Interim Mayor Lee onto the ballot via campaigning, and strike-threatening MUNI operators reject a contract for no good reason but a pissing contest about respect.

(sigh)

What happened to you San Francisco? There’s more information than ever. But the more information there is, the less caring and more conniving our politicians and newspaper editors seem.

A stageplay of theatrical poses substitutes for governance and media. A goofy, smiling happy face hangs like a thin curtain over a City with $850 million in debt and ballooning pensions and benefits schemes that are unsustainable.

The new politicians are like models – empty and to be filled by waiting interests. They have no guts.

People are suffering job loss and insecurity and snarky in-crowd attitude has replaced public service.

Parrots, who possess more than most of us, and can thus afford to produce new media, line up in factionalized flocks spitting insults and snide comments at one another as our town loses its grace. New blogs emerge and our San Francisco values are smoothed into the nothingness of pluralized media. The Bay Citizen launches an all out “NY1” or KRON4 style attack on the blogging media consciousness with $5million in startup money from Hellman, and now the new SF residents mistake it for media that has existed forever, a trusted SF news source, overnight. Not that it hasn’t been effective at coverage,but  it imposes itself upon us, by its posture.

There are many new residents who’ve moved into overpriced SF housing built in the last decade at rates few of us can afford. More condos go up weekly to rent to imaginary future residents from elsewhere, with no one questioning why we “have to grow bigger and more dense” as a City before bridging deficits or working on infrastructure.

Some of these new residents are easily manipulated because they do not have history or context and can be herded like sheep through big money being spent to ensure the view of developers are perpetuated.

Twitter Giveaways and Treasure Island Boondoggles face no resistance because of an apathy by the populace, not because they are good ideas. The unenforcable and idiotic Sit/Lie Law is allowed to be tried because some of these new residents don’t make eye contact with anyone in the street, walk fast with headphones and diddling cel phones to avoid it.

When I arrived in this town decades ago, I tried hard to learn how to be a San Franciscan and was taught by this City. Can we not, as a City, ask these new residents to respect our famed tolerance and compassion? No? Why not?

Interim Mayor Lee and Supervisor Chiu would have us believe we cannot say anything to them for fear we might offend them and they would leave?

These newcomers are being used by interests and held ignorant of what has been lost, is being taken daily from us.

(cf. the Twitter Giveaway, these people just gave away $47million to Twitter that should have been in the General Fund. They did it smiling and crowing about jobs and one dared to call himself progressive!?)

Austerity Measures and Real Talk

The global economic reality is that we are in a serious downturn that shows no real signs of rapid recovery. We must change the attitude of state to one of concern, analysis, efficiency and solvency.

Interim Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed 5-year budgets (for the first time ever) are being sold by many interests as popular opinion, but in fact they represent the latest version of SF corruption: vested interests lining their pockets with long-term public funding.

Ed Lee is wrong on this one and we are in an economic situation that demands flexibility. I want to slow down development, compose flexible one-year budgets and make rapid changes to policies that don’t work in favor of those that do.

I propose a public and transparent method of austerity measures that gives respect where it is due and expects contributions from civic and private sectors in accordance with what it takes to right the ship of state, which lists, with no real captain since Mr. Newsom left.

Austerity measures are inevitable, but here in San Francisco we could do it completely differently from anywhere else in the world because of our culture and history as the most progressive major City in the U.S. We could generate income in totally new ways and respect our Labor by creating new schemes of reinvestment to curtail ballooning pensions and benefits schemes of the past which have incrementally become unsustainable.

All of this creativity and new methodology is only possible with new energy, and fortunately we have an instrument for the first time to allow that new energy to ascend to office: Instant Runoff Voting. IRV is a tool that could be used these next 4 months to create coalition government, but so far no one understands how to use it.

Instead of educating us about how to use Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) to help our candidates create coalitions and alliances, to seek out the best ideas of all candidates, The Chronicle and Guardian and Weekly and the blogs have done almost nothing to reduce confusion about Instant Runoff Voting. They and their “legitimate” candidates see it as a threat.

Hey, we voted for it – used properly it’s a good thing. It could force our politicians to be more collaborative if you in the media would just do your job. Compare its use elsewhere: Minneapolis voters seemed to understand it, while Oakland voters found it confusing.

What do you think the four months before election day were like in terms of explaining IRV in Minneapolis in comparison to Oakland? What kind of coverage and explanation have we been seeing so far? Our media and the City and the other candidates are failing us.

It feels like they want Instant Runoff Voting to fail so they can all clamor together about what a bad thing IRV is. I don’t believe they even understand it, but, visualizing it as threat from the get-go, have just turned full blast against.

C’mon SF, we’re better than this.

Instant Runoff Voting is Better Democracy

26 Thursday May 2011

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IRV is an excellent tool because

1. it makes candidates seek alliance and coalition-building tactics

2. it makes voters learn more about more candidates and take greater responsibility for their vote.

3. it aids candidates interested in civic leadership but without finances by giving them a means to recognition

4. it eliminates the need for expensive runoff campaigns

5. the process reveals which candidate works best with others at large.

The Best Ticket for Mayor Emerges!

22 Sunday May 2011

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Terry Baum will be the Green Party candidate for Mayor of SF, and with John Avalos in as a progressive Democrat, I am excited to say that I will, from today, be endorsing the following ticket as the best, really the only three choices for Mayor of SF, and in this order, guaranteed to turn this town around:

1. Karthik Rajan, first – the Independent outsider with super strong analytical and communications skills (read the site for details)

2. Terry Baum, second –  a Green playwright who  in 2004 ran for the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Green Party.

3. John Avalos, third – the Democrat, a progressive and insider

Keep Ed Lee as Chief Administrator – since he knows best where all the money has been going these last eight years – and we have the best administration for SF in 2012.

Neither John nor Terry can win outright. In Terry’s case, the Greens have been marginalized since Gavin Newsom outspent Matt Gonzales 23 to 1 and in John’s case, as a Democrat, within his party he won’t get the support – unless of course he compromises his vision to please the Party higher ups, which he won’t – and so he cannot win without a coalition.

But with your help – Democrats, Progressives, Greens, Libertarians and others  – I can win. As an outsider with a clear message we can bring more groups of interests together. Read the site to see why – check out the FAQs and Campaign Promises. Mine is a different philosophy, exciting.

I am flexible, lucid, self-financed and unknown – unassailable. As an intelligent outsider, I can put all of the people our coalition wants into positions of power and only I can protect us from attacks, be strong in the face of the wealthy special interests and the cliquish cabals who have run our town into the mouth of the corporate sector.

I can analyze and document the system, do it transparently and scale back our economy. I have the ability and the agility and I have no interest in being a politician for life.

One year budgets for four years that are flexible, slashing the Mayor’s salary, taxing the right people at the right time, putting the resources toward sustainable growth and a healthy, solvent SF for years to come led by the knowledge of the Greens, the infrastructure of the Progressive Democrats and the personal and creative strength of an artist who cares not for money nor power, but for the betterment of our society.

Wow, sounds almost too good to be true – but it isn’t!

Just vote Karthik Rajan, Terry Baum and John Avalos first, second and third on your ballot for Mayor of SF on November 8, 2011.

This is going to be fun!

Coalition Building for Mayor of SF

20 Friday May 2011

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I arrived at the monthly meeting of the San Francisco County Central Committee of the Peace and Freedom Party and found Tom Lacey, the chapter Chair, alone in the SF Main Library’s Stong Room. That’s not a typo – the room’s named for Mary Louise Stong, who was an avid library supporter and former President of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. But it does give the conference room a name that’s desperately one letter shy of being a great place to start anything.

Tom Lacey, a teacher, has been a committed socialist and Peace and Freedom Party member and a candidate for office in SF. He even garnered the coveted endorsement of the SF Bay Guardian. His knowledge of the San Francisco political environment is excellent, and more, he has been through a lot of the changes, sitting in opposition. Smart, savvy and lucid, Lacey is nothing like the stereotype projected against the Peace and Freedom Party: that of crazy wingnut hippies.

Tom Lacey has great ideas, knowledge about the system, remarkable commitment and a will to implement. He puts a generation half his age to shame. In fact, first I want to support his efforts to get the Oil Extraction Tax on the ballot – an effort that makes complete sense. It’s very easy to get behind.

Every State in the country that lets private companies take oil out of its ground or from under its sea charges an Oil Extraction Tax and uses the money for social welfare … um, except one … California!

In Texas they have diverted these funds successfully to the education system and greatly improved Texas schools. This is an overdue effort in California that has been squelched by powerful oil companies in our state and the politicians they pay for. It’s so simple to understand:

Tax the extraction of oil and use it to pay for schools.

Tom Lacey informed us that the college professor behind the movement, Peter Mathews, who has struggled for this in California, finally got approval for the wording to let us get signatures to put it on the ballot. This happened just a week ago. Now we have a very short time to get the required signatures to put the Oil Extraction Tax to Pay For Education on the ballot. A 2/3 majority of Californians will definitely support this one and we can more than make up for the $1.4 billion in cuts to education that Governor Brown was forced to make this year.

Lacey had copies of the petitions that he had meticulously printed on oversized paper from the .pdf – I am adding it to my platform and collecting signatures myself voluntarily and informing everyone I know about it. check out rescueeducationcalifornia.org and facebook.com/rescueeducationcalifornia and twitter.com/rescueeducation

This is exactly the kind of revenue generation my campaign is about.

Shortly after I arrived and introduced myself to Tom Lacey, Ron Holladay, who is, I believe, the Treasurer of the Peace and Freedom SF CCC, appeared. The two men have considerable history in this town and it was great to meet them. We waited for others.

(cricket sounds) and that was it … (sigh) C’mon people, Prop 14 is going to make third parties disappear unless you show up!

I was fourth on the agenda, but since there wasn’t quorum, Ron Holladay asked whether or not I’d rather skip my presentation and perhaps come to another meeting. I promised I would be at the next meeting, but said I would like to present myself as a candidate to those present. One of my supporters arrived – a surprise! – a little late.

Oh, but wait, then someone else did appear.

An Asian-American man arrived and claimed to have just joined the Peace and Freedom Party. The two long-standing officers had never heard of him, but were relieved that there was at least one other present – I mean, there wasn’t even quorum.

But within minutes I began to suspect that the Asian-American Newly Joined Peace and Freedomer was there to observe and report to someone else. He fell asleep late in the meeting from sheer boredom – or feigned it.

One funny, tiny part of me wondered if another candidate or interest had sent the young man to see what this was all about. Silly probably, but it sure felt like this young man was way more interested in questioning my candidacy and ideas than asking about the party he had just joined.

Of course, it doesn’t matter who comes to observe and report upon me anywhere, anytime, because I am clean, clear and direct and my intentions are pure: I want change, reform, an end to corruption and special interest politics and a return to certain values that made our city the best in the world. I want to lead SF forward to smarter more transparent governance – and I know how.

And so I spoke to four people about why I wanted their vote for Mayor in a small room in the Main Library. We had a great talk for about an hour and I want to thank Tom, Ron and the Peace and Freedom Party for their invitation and informative knowledge.

I then went to see the Fiery Furnaces at Café Du Nord. Single piano and voice, a brother and sister duo, their work is poetic, maudlin and narrative. It was a great show, with songs that told stories with vernacular aptitude, capturing phrases of the contemporary era between married couples, street folk and working class families and others. Very nice.

I was lucky enough to meet the band afterward and to meet and chat with long time San Franciscans Michelle and Matt and others. It was a lovely night.

More soon. Support the Oil Extraction Tax.

My IRV Strategy

16 Monday May 2011

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Last year, I observed the Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] election for Mayor of Oakland closely. I studied the tactics of the candidates and the results. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan achieved something slow, steady and simple.

In addition to seeking supporters for her campaign outright, Mayor Quan created a coalition of interests for whom another primary candidate was their first choice. Through sound campaigning she convinced this coalition of disparate interests to select her second on their ballots.

Because of a lack of effort by the media and the City to properly explain IRV in advance of the election, many people ignorant of the math or the method never understood it and felt cheated. For these, and others, the idea that “everybody’s number two” won the election persisted. It is imperative we explain what IRV is and why it’s better democracy.

In fact, if traditional voting had occurred and a runoff had been held between Jean Quan and her nearest opponent Don Perata, it would have been a six-week long, expensive affair. Likely, Perata would have outspent Quan even as the supporters of Rebecca Kaplan, Joe Tuman and other candidates tilted to Mayor Quan. That is what IRV showed us: it used basic, smart, weighted statistics to allow the right decision to happen on election day, preventing the expense to the City of a second election and preventing the purchasing of such a runoff by monied interests.

Mayor Quan won because she covered more ground and was more present to more people than any of the other candidates and it paid off in a statistical advantage. That’s good democracy.

The opponents of IRV struggle to rename it Ranked Choice Voting because it implies something that smells bad.

The loudest in opposition to IRV are:

1. people who think the voters are too stupid to know how to use it and

2. those whose interest it threatens, namely big parties, monied candidates and

3. those who use the traditional way of doing things: buying the election.

In fact, IRV is an excellent tool because

1. it makes candidates seek alliance and coalition-building tactics

2. it makes voters learn more about more candidates and take greater responsibility for their vote.

3. it aids candidates interested in civic leadership but without the finances to use media by giving them a means to recognition

4. it eliminates the need for expensive runoff campaigns

5. the nature of the process reveals which candidate works best with others at large.

Instant Runoff Voting is complicated and somewhat hard to explain. What our politicians ought to be doing is explaining it in clear terms and helping voters use it to elect our leadership. Instead we see them resisting what threatens them.

My strategy is somewhat different. I believe I’m the best candidate to run the City. I hope you will gather this to be true by election day and vote for me first, but if you don’t, I hope you will see that it only makes sense to include me as a reformist, by voting for me second or third on your ballot. You can trust my promises, which are unique among legitimate candidates.

I will slash the Mayor’s salary first and then ask City employees to help me to do the same before making cuts. I will create a Giveback Fund to encourage the San Francisco value of sharing and community. I will audit and evaluate every department before raising any new revenue from taxation and eliminate waste that has run rampant. I will make the hard calls on pensions and benefits and help come up with creative means to generate revenue to avoid harsh austerity measures.

It’s in our best interest to elect me because I am not a politician. Rather, I’m a regular citizen concerned about waste, solvency and rampant and unchecked growth. I will function transparently and without attachment to special interests.

I can creatively cut costs, reduce waste and lead us to a more efficient San Francisco in which we pay less for a better quality of life. You can trust me to analyze and reform our City’s broken and corrupt system transparently, to save the City money doing it, and to create solvency and a surplus economy from the myriad wonderfulness of our City’s inherently talented and multilingual community.

As a one-time, reform candidate, Karthik Rajan is a smart second or third choice for voters and a great first choice to be the next Mayor of San Francisco.