Go out and grab this week’s SF Weekly and check-out Joe Kukura’s exposé about those scary Monster in the Mission BART ads.

Joe’s sharp reporting connects the dots between the Monster in the Mission’s massively expensive “grassroots effort” and powerful Big Soda and Big Tobacco lobbyists  “The ads say supporters of the project ‘not a Monster,’ but you might as well call them Monsters, Inc., because they’re many of the same corporate lobbying interests who recently fought for the tobacco industry and the soda industry… Further, Mission For All’s listed mailing address is that of a San Rafael corporate law firm called Nielsen Merksamer, which is also leading the lobbying effort against the flavored tobacco ban the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed in June.”

Big Soda and Big Tobacco have long histories of exploiting working class communities of color, these developers pretend to have the Mission community in mind but we know this crew of monsters has no place in our neighborhood. Chirag Bhakta, Plaza 16 coalition member, says of the ads “Exploitation of people of color in an ad campaign to convince a mainly Latino, immigrant, low-income neighborhood that this gentrifying project is actually going to help the neighborhood comes out of Rapacious Marketing 101,” Bhakta says. “Most of the people who are showcased in these ads most likely are not going to be able to afford these units being built.”

This Halloween, stand with Plaza 16 and make sure the monsters don’t win!