Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco has some advice for the #Occupy movement. Check out his column he posted after the jump.
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Shotta Dru on Google+
If the Occupy people really want to make a point about the 1 percent, then lay off Oakland and go for the real money down in Silicon Valley.
The folks who work on the docks in Oakland or drive the trucks in and out of the port are all part of the 99 percent. They take our goods from all over the state and export them.
The only thing those cats down at Apple are exporting are our jobs. Then they have the nerve to ask for tax breaks, and Washington obliges.
Shutting down the port may look good on TV, but you are hurting the very people Occupy is supposed to be fighting for: the hourly worker trying to make his mortgage, the independent trucker trying to create his own business.
About the only people making money off this whole scene are the cops, who wind up being paid overtime to babysit the party.
If Occupy wants to make a real statement, it ought to pick on a real target.
But then, it might prove a bit embarrassing. From what I’ve seen, half those Occu-cats have iPhones and iPads.
It’s time for the annual cleaning out of the closets. Anything not worn in the past year goes in the bag.
And when all the bags are full, it’s off to Mother Brown’s soup kitchen and thrift store out at Hunters Point for my annual donation.
It must have been 15 or 20 years ago that I came across Mother Brown. I was in the Tenderloin when I spied this big gold Cadillac, parked, with food all over on top of it. She was feeding all these folks off the top of her car.
I went over and asked how I could help.
“You give your clothes to a charity, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, give them to me. I’ll open a shop. You know people have a lot more pride if they come in and they shop like they’re buying rather than being handed something.”
And I’ve been doing it every year, ever since.
Of course, every year I go looking through my closet a week later, looking for something I just gave away.
I was in Sacramento the other day and dropped by a fundraiser being tossed by Gov. Jerry Brown. Apparently he is already out raising money for that tax measure he has headed for the ballot.
If you control a political action committee, you usually try to clean it out by the end of the year. From the size and makeup of the crowd, I’d say the governor was getting a very nice cut of the holiday PAC pie.
His tax campaign must have taken in a million bucks, mostly from the businesses whose taxes he’s decided not to raise.
There’s a lot of talk about the other tax measures that various groups may want to put on the same ballot. And there’s a lot of talk about how Brown needs to use his muscle to clear the field or risk having all of them go down to defeat, including his own.
But it’s not his style, ever, to suggest anybody should back off.
Jerry Brown really is a dramatically different breed of a politician.
He will simply say: This makes sense and if you don’t do it, this will be the result. And his predictions aren’t wrong very often.
Brown is not into worrying about his popularity. He’s going to do what he thinks is the proper thing to do. The practicality of whether or not it’s a good thing, popularity-wise, is simply not a part of his political equation.
One of the best pizza places in this town is Cupola in the Westfield Centre, right next door to the Lark Creek Steak Restaurant.
For $30 flat you get salad, pizza, wine, dessert and coffee.
And the place is packed.
Quite a turnout the other night at John Burton’s 79th birthday bash at Tommy Toy’s.
Burton, of course, had the best line of the night: “I don’t want to thank you too much, so there.”
I was at a holiday party Friday night and this guy says to me: “My wife came back from the doctor this week and told me she’s never been in better shape.
” ‘My cholesterol is down. My blood pressure is fine and my heartbeat is perfect.’
“So I say to her, ‘Yeah, but what did he say about that big fat ass of yours?’
” ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘your name never came up.’ ”
