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San Francisco Has Been Complacent About Corruption for Too Long

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We’ve gotten complacent in San Francisco. Sure we’ve got the nation’s highest minimum wage. Sure we fought for marriage equality and won. Sure we had universal healthcare before nearly every other city in the US. But the same way the Bush administration used social issues to justify turning the country into a corporate welfare state, San Francisco’s politicians have been pacifying us with progressive measures while lining their own pockets.

And the thing is, we’ve pretty much known this all along. But that’s where the complacency comes in; we’ve accepted this corruption as part of our system. We’ve chalked it up as the cost of doing business in San Francisco. And then this week, the curtain was suddenly pulled back and for the first time, we are seeing that the things we assumed were happening all along, actually were.

It’s kinda like gravity: we always knew the world was run by inexplicably powerful forces, but it took Isaac Newton putting a name to it for us to truly realize it was there. And that’s what happened this week with Mayor Ed Lee. From the tax breaks for tech giants to the carte blanche given to greedy developers, most San Franciscans just assumed there was a powerful crookedness behind the things happening at City Hall. But it took this week’s reports from Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow’s court filings to fully expose the alleged corruption that’s been redefining our city. This has been our Theory of Gravity moment, and Shrimp Boy our unlikely Isaac Newton.

So now that we know, now that it’s out in the open and in the papers and in our newsfeeds, we can no longer be complacent. We can no longer just chalk things up to “Oh that’s just San Francisco politics.” This is our moment to finally and inexorably reclaim our city from decades of a political machine that has always lined their own pockets at the literal and metaphorical expense of our wonderful city. Over the last few years we’ve seen our city sold out from under us and this, this is the moment when we can finally say “enough!”

Do you want to take your city back? Do you want to once again make San Francisco a home for all people? Do you want a city where our teachers and builders and small business owners can actually afford to live? Then let’s throw Ed Lee and the rest of his crooked cronies out of office and let’s put someone in who cares about ALL the people of San Francisco, not just the profits of a select few.

This is your moment San Francisco. Let’s take our town back from the greed monsters who could give a shit about you. Please join me in setting things right in our fair city.

Let’s use ranked choice voting to vote for Stuart Schuffman (me),  as well as Francisco Herrera, and Amy Farah Weiss.

PLEASE DONATE TO MY CAMPAIGN and Sign Up to Volunteer at BrokeAssMayor.com. I NEED YOUR HELP!

Stuart Schuffman for Mayor 2015,FPPC ID #1377997

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Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Stuart Schuffman, aka Broke-Ass Stuart, is a travel writer, poet, TV host, activist, and general shit-stirrer. His website BrokeAssStuart.com is one of the most influential arts & culture sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and his freelance writing has been featured in Lonely Planet, Conde Nast Traveler, The Bold Italic, Geek.com and too many other outlets to remember. His weekly column, Broke-Ass City, appears every other Thursday in the San Francisco Examiner. Stuart’s writing has been translated into four languages. In 2011 Stuart created and hosted the travel show Young, Broke, and Beautiful on IFC and in 2015 he ran for Mayor of San Francisco and got nearly 20k votes.

He's been called "an Underground legend": SF Chronicle, "an SF cult hero":SF Bay Guardian, and "the chief of cheap": Time Out New York.