Candidate for
Community College Board; County of San Francisco

A native of Texas, Abel Mouton has lived in Northern California since 1981. One could say that he is a born rebel and an activist, always busy on the things that really count. As a teenager on the Mendocino Coast, he became active in the environmental movement, taking part in the (thus far) successful campaign to prevent offshore oil drilling in the Pacific Northwest. That one thing made Mouton a frontrunner in focusing on decisive issues.

In 1986, Mouton co-founded Public Sector, which went on to become one of the Mendocino Coast's premier dance bands. Mouton shares Big Bill Haywood's motto, "Nothing is too good for the working class," and never offers second best to working families, either when raising hell on the political scene or putting quality entertainment on stage. And if democratic self-organizing and fighting the big guys is important to you, then remember that when California Republican Governor George Deukmejian's budget cuts threatened to obliterate the music programs in local schools, Mouton helped organize musicians in his home town to continue to provide musical instruction for students from kindergarten through high school. Mouton taught music and poetry to high school students until he moved to San Francisco in 1994.

Mouton joined the staff of Frontlines newspaper in 1998 as a labor journalist and film reviewer. He was rapidly promoted to its editorial board, and has played an invaluable role in the style and substance of SF's most controversial left paper. Mouton is now the editor of Frontlines' print edition, which has recently expanded its scope to include issues of critical national and international importance.

Mouton worked on the electoral campaigns of the Progressive Left since 1998, including Lucrecia Bermudez for Mayor. Lucrecia did more than any other candidate in the race to expose the undemocratic trappings of local "democracy," tainted by fraud and infected with threats and patronage from the local Democratic Party machine.

Mouton was campaign coordinator for the Bayview Hunters Point Reparations Act in early 2000. The measure was a set of anti-racist, anti-gentrification economic development proposals that included the empowerment of the African American community by putting its implementation in the hands of an elected community council. The Proposition got almost 70,000 votes, and passed overwhelmingly in Hunters Point, Mission District and a number of other Latino and African American neighborhoods. It took an alliance of Democrats, Republicans and the reactionary daily media to defeat it.

Mouton has worked to bring the anti-corporate movement to San Francisco by pushing non-profits and other political organizations to build the movement in working class communities as much as possible. Mouton has consistently promoted the idea of Papers for All in the anti-globalization movement as a way to build the bridge between the young US citizens in the movement and those most affected by globalization: non-citizens and immigrants in the US. This has earned Mouton the support of political organizations in immigrant communities such as the Immigrant Rights Movement (MDI), the Pilipinos for Affirmative Action and Vietnamese Residents' Association and others.

In 2001, Mouton was among the very first to seize the opportunity presented by the power crisis to try to resolve it by taking over PG&E's power lines and using them to make electricity cheap. Mouton was a leader in the radical left wing of the public power campaign, calling for public ownership of all power and telecommunications lines with no compensation to the big corporations in order to guarantee cheap power. In 2001, as a candidate for the Board of Directors for the proposed SF Municipal Utilities District (MUD), Mouton was also very vocal on the need to fight for workers and consumers' control of public power, something that even promoters of public power are willing to concede to the political machine.

Mouton understood that the US government and the right wing's reaction to the heinous terrorist attacks on New York would have even more catastrophic effects than the attacks themselves. He put his electoral bid on the back burner and went all out to fight against the "war on terror," racist attacks on immigrants by the government and civilians alike, and to defend our civil liberties against government attack. He participated in the SF Town Hall Committee to Stop War and Hate, organized a number of actions at City College and other campuses, and has written numerous articles in Frontlines and spoken at public events. This is an ongoing campaign.