Why I hate my city council.

[dreamshark]

Specifically the DSA wing. For fuck's sake, people, GET A GRIP!! 

The Minneapolis City Council devolved into chaos Thursday during a debate over whether it should spend time weighing in on global politics, like the U.S. blockade of Cuba.

 

 

Comments

[redbird]

We used to laugh about the New York City Council's tendency to weigh in on international issues, but that was back when the city council had almost no power, so renaming streets to try to make a point to foreign governments wasn't getting in the way of real business. It's also easier to poke at a foreign government when the street you're renaming is the block their UN embassy is on: the Soviet ambassador to the UN might not have cared that the street sign outside his office had Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner's names on it, but he definitely knew about it.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yeah, that's dumb. People who want to deal with those issues should go into national politics, not local politics. Local is for folks who want to focus on their town and maybe county. An exception is when global politics impact local functionality, like the federal government sending gestapo to kidnap people from Minneapolis.

Re: Thoughts

[dreamshark]

It's more than just dumb - it actively impedes them from doing the work they were elected to do. Note that according to the reporter for the local paper, the session "devolved into chaos." And what they were arguing about was not the Federal assault on Minneapolis - it was Federal policy on CUBA. Not your job guys.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Disappointing but hardly a surprise. Few politicians seem to want to do their jobs.

*ponder* But people are told to start local, move to state, move to federal. This is a problem if the only reason they run for local is so they can get to federal -- it leads to exactly that problem of ignoring local to yak about things that aren't their job.