In a recent debate with Mayor Brown, Ammiano said he supports the San Francisco Police Department ticketing homeless people for possession of shopping carts. Ammiano supported Proposition E, the "Rescue Muni" initiative that won passage on Nov. 2. It scapegoats Muni employees for the systematic mismanagement by Muni bureaucrats and City Hall. Prop. E will increase workplace surveillance and harassment of Muni workers. It will result in fare hikes, massive wage and benefit concessions from Muni employees and Muni's eventual privatization. Prop. E was also supported by the Committee on Jobs, a downtown lobby of bankers, stockbrokers and real estate speculators, including billionaire GAP CEO Donald Fisher. This is strange company for a supposed "radical."

Regardless of who wins the mayor's race, all of San Francisco's elected officials will ensure that a profitable and well-policed corporate order thrives at the expense of wage workers, tenants and poor people. The right to vote is not a significant mechanism of political power in this society.

Billionaires, millionaires and their servants in the media, legal and academic professions decide what the issues are and frame the terms of discussion. The rich determine the policies of the state.

As mayor, Ammiano would be at the mercy of big-money special interests, like the suits behind the Committee on Jobs, people who were never voted into power and cannot be voted out of power.

No "good intentions" on the part of the most idealistic elected official can change this. You cannot vote your way around it.

No real improvement in the lives of working class and poor people was ever brought about by voting. In the labor movement of the 1930s and the more militant wing of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, large numbers of people shut down whole industries and made major cities ungovernable until the ruling class and their goons backed off.

In France, bosses and corporations haven't been able to reduce the living conditions of working people to an American level of exploitation and impoverishment because wage workers there have staged massive strikes that forced bosses to back down. They play to win when they refuse to play the system's game.

The appalling, market-driven housing crisis in this town won't be affected by a mayoral election - but if San Francisco tenants organize an unlimited citywide rent strike, with a modest goal of reducing all rents to 25 percent of their current rate, we could destroy the gentrification craze.

Only large-scale, collective direct action can keep San Francisco from becoming a sterile, culturally vacuous Disneyland for the rich.

Instead of voting, talk to your fellow tenants and co-workers. Fight for your interests against the interests of landlords, bosses, corporations and the rich.

Liberals and conservatives alike are out to make this city uninhabitable for the wage-earning class. Don't be a chump. Make an intelligent choice; join the two-thirds of eligible voters nationwide who refuse to play the shell game of voting.

Examiner contributor Kevin Keating, an audio technician, is alleged by San Francisco police to be "Nestor Makhno" of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.