Tonight I will be participating in the Minneapolis Business Global Community discussion ( https://rmbgc.org/events-archive/minneapolis-mayoral-candidates-speak ).
This is the story I’d like to tell
Hello, my name is Troy Benjegerdes, my principal is Farmer-Labor, and I’m running for Mayor of Minneapolis, and I’d like to tell you how I got here.
Sometime in the 18th or 19th century, my ancestors immigrated to this country, with the promise of a new life. They were given stolen land, and we proceeded to divide up the prairies in Iowa and turn them into the largest geo-engineered regions in the world, and use that land to produce food for half a billion people.
10 years ago I came to Minneapolis to start a new job, and around that time, I recall sitting in St. Paul and downloading a new software that very few people understood because I saw a farmer had starting selling Alpaca socks for Bitcoin, a new entirely electronic digital currency.
Then 8 years ago, I became involved in the Minneapolis Energy Options project. The residents and city council had all said we want more renewable energy. In Ames, Iowa, where I lived before, when the city council voted to do the same thing, the city Municipal Electric director said Yes, Sir, we’ll do that, and proceeded to make a long-term commitment to buy half the power generated from a nearby wind farm. In Minneapolis, the investor owned utilities sent out some scary letters, calling into question whether a city could ever run something as complicated as an electric utility.
It’s quite obvious from utility bills that cities like Ames Iowa, Los Angeles California, Austin, Texas, or Rochester Minnesota are quite capable of running complicated things like utility operations at a lower total cost of ownership for rate-payers due to the lower lending costs for municipal bonds.
Thanks to the amazing power of ranked choice voting, I decided to run for mayor then, because if the city council was not going to put local energy on the ballot, then I could run for mayor and make sure at least one candidate was talking about it
Since then, I ran for mayor again in 2017 since it seemed like a better investment for me to make in participatory direct democracy to pay the City of Minneapolis $500 to be the farmer-labor candidate than it would be to give anyone else money.
And here we are again. Had I kept those bitcoin I mined 10 years ago, instead of buying the mayortroy.com domain for 1 bitcoin 8 years ago, I might have been able to leverage that investment in new money into a competitive campaign this year. As such, it is not to be, as even the 5 bitcoin I once filed as a loan to my campaign is no match for the millions of dollars that have flowed into campaign coffers for the leading candidates for this election.
So here I am again, reminding you that you only get to vote for MayorTroy once every four years, but you can vote with your money, with every dollar you spend on food, every day.
That’s how I got here. Now what I want to do is talk about what I’d like to do for the city of Minneapolis.
First, I want everyone here who’s run for mayor to join me on a consensus-driven Mayoral council. There are more issue we have to deal with, more viewpoints, more critical changs that must be made that none of us can do it alone. I will need all of your help in creating a monetary policy for a Minneapolis Digital Electronic Currency, and we will start with a basic income pilot program so every one of us up here tonight can get paid a basic income in the new currency we’ve just created so we can spend full time working for our residents.
If we do our job well, the rest of the world will see the value in well-run municipal digital electronic currency, and the market capitalization of our currency, and our city will rise.
If we do not do our job, we have no others to blame, and we will have wasted no taxpayer money on political promises we can never deliver.
The next thing I want to do with our new municipal currency is double the Minneapolis Public Safety Department budget to keep every police officer on the force, and pair every one of them with a social services and mental health response department. Anyone without a home will be offered a safe, supervised place to live, as this costs less over time than paying higher health care costs when homeless residents seek treatment in our hospital emergency rooms. We need to be recruiting public safety officers who work in the communities in which they live, and pay them a living wage sufficient to buy a home and build and ADU, or purchase a downtown condo from the wages they get working with a good work-life balance.
The most critical long-term aspect of the Minneapolis Municipal Currency plan is provide a basic income for all residents, indexed to the price of housing, where we regulate the supply of money based on the cost of living, rather than trying to add more onerous regulations for small landlords to comply with that only benefit big corporations with full time public and government relations staff.
We need to make it so use of the Minneapolis Municipal Currency also allows automatic creation and filing of all relevant tax returns using open-source software developed in the public interest. Private accountants and companies can and should leverage this public good to build value-added services, and we should always have the freely available public option that anyone can use and inspect the code for.
Thank you for listening, and vote Yes on question to, and rank Mayor Troy the farmer-labor candidate.
Mayor Troy 