SF Bay View’s 2024 presidential and mayoral endorsements – No to Farrell!

by Bay View Editorial Board

The only thing the Bay View feels strongly about this mayoral election is DO NOT VOTE FOR MARK FARRELL! Only four years after George Floyd, his answer to every question from public safety to education to the neighborhoods is more cops, more cops and more cops. That’s not entirely fair. He also wants to literally sweep people off the streets, give more tax breaks to big corporations, and screen Disney movies in every neighborhood once a month like he did when he was District 2 supervisor. 

We remember those days well because it was Mark Farrell who, as District 2 supervisor, tried to kill the Booker T. Washington center. Today, the new center, opened in 2017, stands as a monument to what successful community development looks like. In addition to a state-of-the-art gym, childcare facility and youth radio studios, it houses transition-age foster youth, the vast majority of whom in the state of California are African American. 

None of it would exist if Mark Farrell had gotten his way. In an extremely rare case, the Board of Supervisors approved the center over the strenuous objections and “no” vote from this district supervisor. If you are wealthy and your biggest concern in the world is sweeping everyone else out of your way, Farrell is your man. If he wins, San Francisco will be screening the LEGO movie at City Hall every day because the sad truth is he’s Lord Business. He’s rich, he’s anti-Black and politically, he is San Francisco’s version of Donald Trump.

We realize that keeping Mark Farrell off your ranked choice ballot most likely means filling it with other names. As a Black newspaper, we wish we could recommend our incumbent Black mayor. What follows is not a ringing endorsement. Hell, it’s not even an endorsement. It’s a suggestion, in alphabetical order, for how to fill out your ballot with names other than Mark Farrell’s. If you are voting for mayor in San Francisco this election cycle, a safe bet is to box him out with the following candidates: London Breed, Daniel Lurie and Aaron Peskin. If enough San Francisco voters vote for this trio in their own order of preference, one of them, and not Mark Farrell, will be in the mayor’s office next year.

Yes to Kamala Harris if you’re voting in a battleground state

There are many things to like and many things not to like about Kamala Harris’s record as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator and vice president of the United States. But this conditional endorsement of her candidacy for president of the United States is based neither on the balance of those pros and cons nor on the so-called “identity politics” that rules so much contemporary discourse about candidates of color. It’s based on what the Bay View considers to be some of the exceptional acts of her political career – acts undertaken as a prosecutor that few would expect a prosecutor to undertake – the kinds of things we wish others in her position had the character and courage to do but which all too often are judged too risky or inexpedient to support.

Within the first year of her first term as San Francisco district attorney, Harris refused to seek the death penalty for David Hill, the killer of San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza. Like many in this country, the Bay View believes that the death penalty runs counter to a morally principled understanding of the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against “cruel and unusual” punishment. No one can deny that life in prison without parole, Hill’s ultimate punishment, is severe. But many harshly criticized Harris’s handling of the case, including then Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who stated publicly at Espinoza’s funeral that it should have merited the death penalty. Harris stood up on principle to Feinstein, the police chief, the police union and a legion of rank-and-file police officers, and her character and courage in this matter should not be forgotten.

During her time as San Francisco D.A., Harris’s office also supported a bill, which became state law, by then Assemblyman Mark Leno that removed a ban on state funded funeral and burial expenses to assist the families of deceased felons. The widely utilized California program had previously been unavailable to grieving mothers and family members who had lost their sons and loved ones to the epidemic of gun violence if they happened to have a felony record. Of all the things that one may expect of a prosecutor both inside and outside the courtroom, support for this kind of legislation is not generally among them, and her support for the bill was undoubtedly one of the key endorsements that led to its passage and implementation. It is also one of Kamala Harris’s political acts that the Bay View remembers and admires. 

Moreover, in 2007, Harris supported a campaign to free a young independent journalist from prison confinement. Josh Wolf was a video blogger caught up in a Bush era drag net. He was being held in coercive confinement in Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury about his coverage of the aftermath of a 2005 Iraq War protest in San Francisco. After the otherwise peaceful protest, the taillight of an SFPD police cruiser was vandalized by anarchists. Federal jurisdiction in the case was questionable at best and by all reasonable accounts an unjustifiable fishing expedition to identify and persecute detractors of the Bush-Cheney war machine. Nevertheless, the federal judge in the case, William Alsup, ordered Wolf’s continued confinement unless he identified his sources, a blatant attack on the all-important fourth estate, the free press. Alsup only backed down after seven months when a broad coalition of progressives, professional journalist organizations, labor unions and politicians, including San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris, called for Wolf’s unconditional release. This is the kind of leadership one can only vaguely dream for in an eventual president who is also currently the only person standing between the institution of liberal democracy and the advent of American fascism.

As we mentioned, there are many ordinary things to like and dislike about Kamala Harris’s record. Like many local democrats, she was negligent on environmental justice issues in the Southeast of San Francisco and deplorably defended the continued exploitation of prison labor to fight California wildfires as attorney general. But she also showed up in the Bayview to march with families of victims of gun violence, supported gun buy backs, and worked as A.G. to ban gun shows in black and brown neighborhoods throughout California. Our conditional endorsement is not based on these ordinary pros and cons, nor the prosaic incantations in support of a Black woman for president, but rather on some of the extraordinary aspects of Harris’s career that prove she has the character the Bay View would truly appreciate in a president.

Finally, we want to state what longtime readers know: Our mission and values most align with Jill Stein and Butch Ware, the Green Party’s candidates for president and vice-president. If you live in California or another state in which voting your conscience does not threaten the election of Donald Trump, we encourage you to vote for them. We are especially impressed with Butch Ware, whose scholarship on imperialism, colonialism, genocide and revolution expresses the heart and soul of the Bay View’s vision of justice. 

And if Cornel West were on the ballot in California, we would be encouraging our local and state constituencies to vote for him as well. The fact of the matter is that we have far too much to lose in this election not to encourage a vote for Harris-Walz in every state that matters to the outcome. It certainly helps that there are sufficient and principled reasons to support Harris’s bid.

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Source: https://sfbayview.com/2024/10/sf-bay-views-2024-presidential-and-mayoral-endorsements-no-to-farrell/