Petrelis Files

SF Vision: 350 At Meeting, No Report Back & Banishment

Some things about progressives in San Francisco never change. After suffering losses at the ballot box, the usual Democratic clubs and electeds host town halls about what just happened.

The panelists are never held to account for their lousy organizing and failures with various ballot props and attempts to win seats on the Board of Supervisors or in Sacramento. We also rarely get a report back about what transpired at the town hall. If you weren't there, you're shit outta luck.

The latest installment in this saga was organized by soon-to-be SF Chronicle columnist and writer David Talbot's group/political party known as San Francisco Vision.

Their "What the Hell Just Happened?" meeting took place on Wednesday, November 30 at the Women's Building and about 350 people attendance. A great turnout.

The panelists included Sup. David Campos, former supervisor Christina Olague, Sup. Aaron Peskin's aide Sunny Angulo, political strategist Jim Stearns and Talbot, and comedian Yayne Abeba was the facilitator.

As I expected, neither SF Vision's nor the event's Facebook page has shared a followup report with the community. Just more of the same poor organizing from San Francisco progressives.

This is so in keeping with these folks never stopping to think they may lose elections, preparing for a loss, and after suffering at the ballot box, hosting crisis town halls that lead to not much but the usual political leaders sucking up activist oxygen.

Here's the closest SF Vision came to a report back: "Thank you to everyone who attended Wednesday night's event. We really appreciated every one's feedback and questions. The one thing that we heard over and over was fear. People are afraid. People are also angry. Wednesday night was not a solution it was the beginning. We now have to figure out what is next."

Last night, I posted a request at the SF Vision Facebook page for a report back and shared the full report from Anne-christine d'Adesky, excerpted below, from the Bay Area Queer Anti Fascist Network's meeting on Saturday, December 2 in Oakland.

My note was deleted and I'm now banned from posting at the SF Vision page. So much for diverse voices in that group. Additionally, I tweeted to Yayne Abeba asking why she deleted my post and banned me. Her response was to block me on Twitter. Guess we can't question SF Vision leaders.

I strongly suggest the SF Vision folks look at d'Adesky's report and learn how to inform folks who aren't meetings about what was said and planned:

THANK YOU and Shout Out to the 150+ activists and members of our network who participated in our first Bay Area Queer Town Hall on Strategic Responses to Trump. We had a full house, packed, active, reflective, forward looking, and spirited.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A LONG, DETAILED POST of the HIGHLIGHTS of the TOWN HALL. We will soon make available the Videotape of the main presentations . . . 

We welcomed LGBTQ officials including Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan and our Emeryville City Council representative . . .

We heard from Tara Shannon, just back from Standing Rock, who is the newly designated Two Spirit representative for the camp/ # No DAPL resistance . . .

Thanks to Vicki Castro at La Raza Centro Legal (LRCL), Carolina Morales of Harvey Milk Democratic Club for sharing updates about the attacks on Latinx folks and immigrants.... from them we learned that, even before Trump inauguration, the ICE (Immigration) has NEWLY carried out raids of undocumented students/ immigrant families in several SF schools (concern Oakland is next)... and we MUST STOP THEM . . .

TAKE NOTE: A important action is taking place this TUES at UNION SQUARE at NOON to demand Sanctuary City protection from deportation for DACA cases . . .

An additional note: I shared a message, a plea for help, from Subhi Nahas, representing Syrian queer asylee group SPECTRA -- he is in SF now -- who said, as of Dec. 3, his network learned ISIS was shooting anyone who tested positive for HIV . . .

SMALL GROUP STRATEGY DISCUSSION: We had three (not) very small groups (about 30-50 ppl) strategic discussions on these priority topics:
1) immigration,
2) healthcare/health/disability justice
3) intersectional community organizing/ anti-white supremacy work (covering climate change, covering NO DAPLS, covering police brutality (Black Lives Matter) etc.