I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.
I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.
Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, “trickle down economics” that has allowed a few people and corporations to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying back into the system that helped them get there.
Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for federal/state programs.
Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up the rates. Minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009.
What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it’s reinvested into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor holds the bag.
Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won’t end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.