I’ll be speaking for about 5 minutes today at the Nicollet Open Streets (3637 Nicollet) event between 3:30-4 today, and this is a rough draft of what I’d like to say.
Hello residents of Minneapolis, on this warm day that feels more like August after what seems like September in August. Now I don’t know if that’s because of climate change, or because we have volatile weather, but I do know we need more discussion about this and some of the other important issues I’m going to bring up, and that’s why I chose Farmer Labor as my principle and registered to run for Mayor of Minneapolis.
Every one of the 16 candidates who either paid $500 or took the time to get 500 signatures is a serious candidate, and has something important to say. You may think it’s crazy, unreasonable, unethical, or immoral, and I’d say you have every reason to think so.
What I ask you is please take the issues we raise seriously. Sometimes the only way we can address a serious issue is with a joke candidate, as your media tends to judge the credibility of a candidate by how much money they have to spend on advertising.
Now to go back a little, 4 years ago I thought it was important to have a candidate talking about local control of municipal utilities, local food production, and financing it with local currencies that include a basic income distribution. At that time, no politician was willing to make a statement like “100% renewables in 10 years”, so with my farm energy and engineering experience, I had to become that politician. Today this is not so much a loft grand greenie leftist vision, and more economically inevitable, as the cost of building new wind and solar power is lower than any other source of electric power generation. The only missing piece is storage, and before I moved here I spent 2 years researching a solution to that problem that’s been deployed by our very own University of Minnesota since 2008.
I want to ask you to read what I’ve been writing at Mayortroy.com for the past 4 years, and give me your first choice vote, your second choice to one of the issue candidates like Captain Jack Sparrow for Basic Income and vote for your favorite media candidate for number 3.
But most importantly, remember our system only counts votes every 4 years, and counts the money every day, it matters more how you vote with your money than how you rank the choices for mayor. Get together with your neighbors and start talking about what you want a local neighborhood currency to do, and start paying each other with it.
Mayor Troy 