Corruption

41st Anniversary Special: The perils of privatization

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Click here for Amanda Witherell’s exclusive interview with Columbia professor Elliott Sclar

› amanda@sfbg.com

Over the past few weeks almost every major news outlet in the country has reported on Blackwater, a private company the US government hired to do work in Iraq that was once the exclusive province of soldiers.

The deal hasn’t gone so well: on Sept. 16, Blackwater guards opened fire and, according to the Iraqi government, shot 25 civilians. The incident set off an international furor and has brought into focus the breadth of the company’s work for the US government. It’s prompted an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which showed that since 2001, Blackwater’s federal contracts have increased 80,000 percent. It’s revealed the massive pay inequalities between private security guards and US soldiers — the cost of one private guard could pay the salaries of six soldiers.

And it’s raised a question that’s critical to understanding how government increasingly works in the United States: should a private company be doing the work of the military?

Privatization of public services is all the rage in this country now, at all levels of government, from Washington DC to San Francisco. Supporters say the private sector can often work better and more efficiently than the old, bureaucratic, much-maligned government.

But Blackwater is a great example of the perils of privatization. And there are many more.

STARVE THE BEAST


Over the past few decades governments at all levels in this country have been in a near-perpetual state of deficit. Taxes are way down from their historic post–World War II levels, and except for a brief period during the tech boom, there is rarely enough money for even basic social services.

"It’s been a strategy since the ’70s to, as Grover Norquist calls it, ‘starve the beast,’<0x2009>" Robert Haaland, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, told us.

And because politicians, even Democrats, are terrified of tax hikes, they’ve been looking for more efficient ways to use the money they have. The magic bullet goes by many names — privatization, public-private partnerships, competitive outsourcing, creative financing solutions — but the basic idea is to allow the power of competition, set free in an unregulated market, to provide the public with the best services at the lowest cost.

"To do or to buy is the question that all governments face," says Ken Jacobs, director of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.

We’ve been buying. Since 2000, outsourcing of federal dollars has increased 100 percent, to $422 billion in taxpayer funds in 2006, according to a September study by the Washington DC US Public Interest Research Group. The US government is now the private sector’s largest customer.

San Francisco may be known as one of the most progressive cities in the country, but this town has also been wooed by public-private partnerships with promises of improvements to the golf courses, construction of a new power plant, and funding for the many civic needs we have.

PRIVATIZE MUNI?


Cheerleaders for privatization look at someone like Nathaniel Ford, executive director of San Francisco’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, and see everything that’s wrong with the public sector. Ford’s salary is nearly $300,000, plenty high enough to attract a talented leader. But the Muni system he runs keeps the average San Franciscan waiting on the corner in the morning, delivers that person to work at an unpredictable hour, and lurches them homeward every night aboard a standing-room-only bus. Nobody thinks Muni is performing well.

That makes the case for privatization seem almost appealing.

"The public has been schooled to think that government is the problem, not the solution," Elliott Sclar, professor of economics at Columbia University, told us. In his 2000 book on privatization, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell University), he writes, "American folk wisdom holds that, by and large, public service is uncaring, unbending, bureaucratic, and expensive, whereas competitively supplied private services such as FedEx are efficient and responsive."

Competition, the privatizers say, drives innovation. Less red tape means more efficiency. A lack of unions and collective bargaining agreements translates to lower labor costs. Large-scale multinational operations can reduce redundancy and streamline their processes — all of which adds up to a lean-running machine.

But this country has a lot of experience with privatization, and the record isn’t good.

One hundred years ago private companies did a lot of what we now call government work. "Contracting out was the way American cities carried out their governmental business ever since they grew beyond their small village beginnings," writes Moshe Adler, a Columbia professor of economics, in his 1999 paper The Origins of Governmental Production: Cleaning the Streets of New York by Contract During the 19th Century. At one time private companies provided firefighting, trash collection, and water supplies, to name just a few essential services.

But according to Adler, "By the end of the 19th century contracting out was a mature system that was already as good as it could possibly be. And it was precisely then that governmental production came to America. The realization that every possible improvement to contracting out had been tried led city after city to declare its failure."

For example, the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires in San Francisco were what prodded the city to municipalize water service after the company charged with the task, Spring Valley Water, failed to deliver while the fires raged.

In Philadelphia as well as San Francisco, the business of firefighting was once very lucrative — for both the firefighting companies and the arsonists who were paid to set fires for the former to fight. And corruption was rampant. "Large amounts of public contracting out historically created lots of opportunities for fraud and nepotism," Jacobs said.

So public agencies stepped in to provide basic services as cheaply and uniformly as possible. Towns and cities took on the tasks of security with police and firefighting, education with schools and libraries, and sanitation with trash collection and wastewater treatment. Nationally, the federal government improved roads and transit, enacted Social Security benefits, and established a National Park System, among many other things.

And then, about 30 years ago, the pendulum started to swing the other way. Driven by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, enacted in a massive policy shift by Ronald Reagan, proliferated by Grover Norquist and the neocon agenda, and fully appreciated by corporations and private companies, privatization came back.

In Reagan’s first term, he cut taxes 25 percent overall; the rich got a 40 percent cut. Domestic spending fell by half a trillion dollars in the 1980s, although any savings were countered by a rise in the defense budget.

Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, quoted in Looking Back on the Reagan Presidency (Johns Hopkins University), put it this way: "The Reagan budgets will influence the government for the rest of this century. Just as the Great Society left an imprint of Federal commitment to help the indigent and equality of opportunity, the Reagan budget deficits will leave an imprint of non-involvement."

Such a massive realignment of money coupled with tax breaks too politically painful to reinstate led to a boom in the outsourcing of public services. Private companies began doing more municipal work, while nonprofit organizations tried to fill the gaps in funding for social services, welfare, housing, health care, and the environment.

The George W. Bush era has seen even more overt outsourcing. These days no-bid contracts are preferred, and at times government services are completely turned over to the private sector in "direct conversions," and the public agency that once did the job is not allowed to compete to keep it. The Washington Post recently reported that no-bid government contracts have tripled in the past six years.

This doesn’t really sound like the competitive free market espoused by the theory of privatization.

FLUNKING THE TEST


To field-test the primacy of privatization, the Reagan administration sponsored a transportation experiment in the early ’80s: Miami’s Metro-Dade Transit Agency got to compete against Greyhound. The two providers were each given five comparable transit routes to manage over three years, and 80 new buses were bought with a $7.5 million grant from the federal government.

After 18 months 30 of the Greyhound buses were so badly damaged that they had to be permanently pulled from service. Passenger complaints on the Greyhound line were up 100 percent, and ridership was down 31 percent over the course of a year.

Why? There was no incentive in Greyhound’s contract to maintain the equipment or retain riders. The company’s only goal was to deliver the cheapest service possible.

The Miami transit contract could have contained clauses calling for regular inspections or guaranteed ridership, but that would have significantly increased the cost of the work — perhaps to the point where it would have been competitive with what the city provided.

That’s an important lesson in privatization politics: when you add the cost of adequately protecting the public’s interest and monitoring contract compliance, the private sector doesn’t look so efficient.

Which is why many say privatization only succeeds as a theory — and why, for all the problems with Muni, no private company is likely to be able to do a better job.

"Market fundamentalists present an idealized, simpleminded notion of competitive markets in which buyers and sellers have equal knowledge," Sclar told us. "Anyone can be a buyer, anyone can be a seller, everyone can evaluate the quality of the good. In this never-never land, that’s often the way the case is made for privatization by this particular group of economists."

In the real world a number of issues arise when a service goes private. "Accountability gets to be a really big problem," Ellen Dannin, professor of law at Penn State University, said in an interview. "There are predictions about how much money will get saved through privatization, but no one ever goes back to check."

The September study by the US Public Interest Research Group profiled several companies that do government work, including Bank of America, LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown, and Root), General Electric, and Raytheon, and found instances of illegal behavior in all cases. There were often massive errors in the companies’ work.

Bank of America and LexisNexis had security breaches compromising the data of at least 1.5 million customers they were handling for the government. ChoicePoint allowed identity-theft scams amounting to more than $1 million in fraud. KBR overcharged the government millions of dollars for work in Iraq and Kuwait. GE made defective helicopter blades for the US military. Raytheon failed to fully test the systems of new aircraft. These companies are all still employed by the government.

When companies take over services that aren’t typically part of a competitive market, all sorts of unexpected problems occur. Jacobs points to the rash of contracting for busing services in cash-strapped school districts. Not only did costs eventually rise in many places, but when schools tried to go back to providing their own service, the skilled drivers who knew the routes, knew the kids, and were able to do much more than drive a bus were gone.

Sclar and Dannin agree that any service that lacks competition should be public. Sclar presented the example of electricity. "It’s a natural monopoly," he said. "Essentially it’s either going to be a well-regulated industry or it’s got to be done publicly."

Corporations exist to make money. And although graft, mismanagement, and scandal have always been present in City Halls around the country, in the end the legislative, judicial, and executive branches were not designed to generate profits. That alone means contracting out is financially dubious.

Hiring mercenaries is a classic example. "It costs the US government a lot more to hire contract employees as security guards in Iraq than to use American troops," Walter Pincus wrote in an Oct. 1 article in the Washington Post. "It comes down to the simple business equation of every transaction requiring a profit."

As Pincus details one of the many contracts between the security firm and the US, "Blackwater was a subcontractor to Regency, which was a subcontractor to another company, ESS, which was a subcontractor to Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary, the prime contractor for the Pentagon — and each company along the way was in the business to make a profit."

Blackwater charged Regency between $815 and $1,075 per day per security operative. Regency turned around and charged ESS a slightly higher average of $1,100. After that, the costs dissolve into the enormous bill that KBR regularly hands the federal government.

When the US Army is paying the bill the costs are far lower. An unmarried sergeant earns less than $100 a day. If you’re married, it’s less than $200. If you’re Gen. David H. Petraeus, it’s about $500 — less than Blackwater’s lowest-paid workers.

Very little about the Blackwater contracts would be known by anyone outside the company if it weren’t for the federal investigation, since private businesses are not subject to the same public-records laws as the federal government. They don’t have to open their books or publicize the details of their bids and contracts, and they often fiercely lobby against any regulations requiring this, which leaves the door wide open for corruption — which is what brought sunshine laws to government in the first place.

Sclar said that when it’s a good call to contract out, corporations, private companies, and nonprofits should be required to abide by public-records laws in addition to adhering to a five-year wait for employees departing the public sector for the private. "I think transparency should always be the goal," he said. "As much information as possible." If a company doesn’t want to make its records public, he told us, "[it shouldn’t] go after public work."

THE AIDS LESSON


Privatization comes in many forms and emerges for what often seem like good reasons.

In the early 1980s gay men in San Francisco were starting to get sick and die in large numbers — and the federal government didn’t care. There was no government agency addressing the AIDS crisis and almost no government funding. So the community came together and created a network of nonprofits that funded services, education, and research.

"The AIDS Foundation was founded in response to the epidemic at a time when there wasn’t a response from the federal government," Jeff Sheehy of the AIDS Research Center at UC San Francisco told us.

At first, activists all over the country praised the San Francisco model of AIDS services. Over time the nonprofits began to get government grants and contracts. But by the 1990s some realized that the nonprofit network was utterly lacking in public accountability. The same activists who had helped create the network had to struggle to get the organizations to hold public meetings, make records public, and answer community concerns.

That, Sheehy said, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

"There isn’t that same degree of accountability that you would have" with the public sector, he told us. "SF General is not going to turn you away at the emergency room, but nonprofit hospitals are less and less interested in running ERs."

Sheehy said he’s seen cases where difficult clients have been banned from accessing help from nonprofits. Unlike at public institutions, "the burden is not on the agency to provide the service. It is with the client to get along with the agency," he said.

Sheehy outlines other issues: nonprofits run lean and are more apt to make cuts and resist unionization, which means workers are often paid less, there can be higher turnover, and upper management is often tasked with fundraising and grant writing and distanced from the fundamental work of the group. There’s no access to records or board meetings. "If service takes a sudden downward shift, what can you do?" Sheehy asks. "You can’t go to board meetings. You can’t access records. What’s your redress?"

And that perpetuates the problem of government not stepping up to the plate. More than half of the social services in San Francisco are run by nonprofits, a trend that isn’t abating.

"When the services are shifted from the public sector to the nonprofit sector," Sheehy said, "that capacity is lost forever from government."

THE LOTTERY TICKET


When Dannin teaches her students about privatization, she uses the analogy of personal finance. "If I find my income does not meet my expenses, I can cut my expenses, but there are certain things I have to have," she said. To meet those needs a person can get a second job. In the case of the government, it can raise taxes.

But "that is not an option governments see anymore," she told us. "So the third option is to buy a lottery ticket — and that’s what privatization is."

When a publicly owned road is leased for 99 years to a private company, the politician who cut the deal gets a huge chunk of cash up front to balance the local budget or meet another need. When the new owner of the road puts in a tollbooth to recoup costs, that’s the tax the politician, who may be long gone, refused to impose. What option does the voting driver have now?

Public goods, from which everyone presumably benefits, are frequently and easily falling out of the hands of government and into the hands of profit-driven companies. In New Orleans, charter schools have replaced all but four public schools. In about 15 municipalities public libraries are now managed by the privately owned Library Systems and Services. (In Jackson County, Ore., it’s being done for half the cost, but with half the staff and open half the hours.) At least 21 states are considering public-private partnerships to finance massive improvements to aging roads and bridges. User fees have increased in the national parks as rangers have been laid off and some of the work of park interpretation is picked up by private companies, as is the case with Alcatraz Island.

Dannin also asks her students to consider who really owns a job. The easy answer is the employer. "But there is another claimant of ownership of that job," she says. "That is the public. Employers depend on roads for their employees to drive to work, a public education system to train their workers. They depend on housing, police, the court system, the system of laws. That is a huge amount of infrastructure we tend not to think about.

"We live within an ecosystem. We’re having a hard time seeing that ecosystem, that infrastructure that we’re all in. That’s what your taxes pay for."

41st Anniversary Special: The privatization of San Francisco

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

William M. Tweed was one of the greatest crooks in American political history, a notorious Tammany Hall boss in New York who managed in the course of just a few years, starting in 1870, to steal more than $75 million (the equivalent of more than $1 billion today) from the city coffers. The way he did it was simple. As Elliott Sclar, a Columbia economist and expert on privatization, notes, Tweed took advantage of the fact that much of the work of city government was contracted out to private companies. Boss Tweed controlled the contracts; the contractors overcharged the city by vast sums and kicked back the money to Tammany Hall.

This is a rather extreme example, but not, Sclar argues, an atypical one: the worst corruption scandals in American history usually involve private contractors and public money. In fact, he argues, privatization is almost by its nature a recipe for scandal and corruption.

Nothing in the public sector — no incompetence, no waste, no bureaucratic bungling — begins to compare with what happens when private operators get their hands on public money. And the cost of monitoring contracts, making sure contractors don’t cheat or steal, and forcing them to act in ways that reflect the public interest is so high that it dwarfs any savings that privatization seems to offer.

That’s the message of the Guardian‘s 41st anniversary issue.

It’s relatively easy to investigate government malfeasance. The records are public, the players are visible, and the laws are on the side of the citizens.

But when Bruce B. Brugmann started the Guardian in 1966 with his wife, Jean Dibble, he realized that the real scandals often took place outside City Hall. They involved the real powerful interests, the giant corporations and big businesses that were coming to dominate the city’s skyline and its political life. The details were secretive, the money hidden.

One of the first big stories the paper broke, in 1969, involved perhaps the greatest privatization scandal in urban history, the tale of how Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had stolen San Francisco’s municipal power, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The famous Abe Ruef municipal graft scandals of the early 20th century, the Guardian wrote, were "peanuts, birdseed compared to this."

When I first came to work here, in 1982, Brugmann used to tell me that daily papers, which loved to try to expose some poor soul who was collecting two welfare checks or a homeless person who was running a panhandling scam, were missing the point. "If you look hard enough, you can always find a small-time welfare cheat," he’d tell me. "We want to know about corporate welfare, about the big guys who are stealing the millions."

And there were plenty.

In his new book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Knopf), Robert Reich, the economist and former secretary of labor, argues that during the cold war, when American politicians railed against the socialist model of economic planning, this country actually had a carefully planned economy. The planning wasn’t done by elected officials; it was done by a handful of oligarchic corporations and military contractors.

Modern San Francisco was born in that same cauldron. During World War II, captains of industry and military planners took control of the city’s economy, directing resources into the shipyards, collecting labor from around the country to build and repair Navy vessels, and making sure the region was doing its part to defeat the Axis powers. It worked — and when the war ended the generals went away, but the business leaders stayed and quietly, behind closed doors, created a master plan for San Francisco. Downtown would become a new Manhattan, with high-rise office buildings and white-collar jobs. The East Bay and the Peninsula would be suburbs, with a rail line (BART) carrying the workers to their desks. Private developers, working under the redevelopment aegis, demolished low-income neighborhoods to build a new convention center and hotels.

Nobody ever held a public hearing on the master plan. And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that San Franciscans figured out what was going on.

By 1971 the fight against Manhattanization began to dominate the Guardian‘s political coverage. It would play center stage in San Francisco politics for two more decades. The paper ran stories about high-rises and freeways and environmental impact reports, but the real issue was the privatization of the city’s planning process.

Ronald Reagan soared into the White House in 1980, rolling over a collapsing Jimmy Carter and a demoralized, moribund Democratic Party. Reagan and his backers had an agenda: to dismantle American government as we knew it, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society, to get the public sector out of the business of helping people and give the benefits to private business. "Government," Reagan announced, "isn’t the solution. Government is the problem."

The Guardian was firmly planted on the other side. We supported public power, public parks, public services, public accountability. We had no blinders about the flaws of government agencies — I spent much of my time in the early years writing about the mess that was Muni — but in the end we realized that at least the public sector carried the hope of reform. And we saw San Francisco as a beacon for the nation, a place where urban America could resist the Reagan doctrine.

Unfortunately, the mayor of San Francisco in the Reagan years might as well have been a Republican. Dianne Feinstein’s faith in the private sector rivaled that of the new president. She turned the city’s future over to the big real estate developers. She vetoed rent control and gave the landlords everything they wanted. And when the budget was tight, she ignored our demands that downtown pay its fair share and instead raised bus fares and cut library hours.

When gay men started dying of a strange new disease, there was no public money or service program to help them, from Washington DC or San Francisco. So the community was forced to build a private infrastructure to take care of people with AIDS — and years later, as Amanda Witherell notes in this issue, those private foundations became secretive and unaccountable.

In 1994 we got a tip that something funny was going on at the Presidio. The Sixth Army was leaving and turning perhaps the most valuable piece of urban real estate on Earth over to the National Park Service … in theory. In practice, we learned, some of the biggest corporations in town had come together with a different plan — to create a privatized park — and Rep. Nancy Pelosi was carrying their water. Every detail of the Presidio privatization made the front page of the Guardian — and still, the entire Democratic Party power structure (and much of the environmental movement) lined up behind Pelosi. Now we have a corporate park on public land, with that great pauper George Lucas winning a $60 million tax break to build a commercial office building in a national park.

And still, it continues.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a rising star in the Democratic Party, who told us he’s no fan of privatization, demonstrated the opposite in one of his signature political campaigns this year: he tried (and is still trying) to turn over the city’s broadband infrastructure — something that will be as important in this century as highways and bridges were in the last — to a private company. That’s what the whole wi-fi deal (now on the ballot as Proposition J) is about; the city could easily and affordably create its own system to deliver cheap Internet access to every resident and business. Instead, Newsom wants the private sector to do the job.

The Department of Public Health is running public money through a private foundation in a truly shady deal. The mayor’s Connect programs operate as public-private partnerships. Newsom wants to privatize the city’s golf courses, and maybe Camp Mather. He’s prepared to give one of the worst corporations in the country — Clear Channel Communications — the right to build and sell ads on bus shelters (and nobody has ever explained to us why the city can’t do that job and keep all the revenue). Housing policy? That depends entirely on what the private sector wants — and when we challenged Newsom on that in a recent interview, he snidely proclaimed that the city simply has to follow the lead of the developers because "we don’t live in a socialist society."

This is not how the city of San Francisco ought to be behaving. Because when you give public land, public services, public institutions, and public planning initiatives to the private sector, you get high prices, backroom deals, secrecy, corruption — and a community that’s given up on the notion of government as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.

You start acting like the people who have been running Washington DC since 1980 — instead of promoting a city policy and culture that ought to be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America.

Endorsements: Local ballot measures

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Proposition A (transit reform)

YES


This omnibus measure would finally put San Francisco in a position to create the world-class transportation system that the city needs to handle a growing population and to address environmental problems ranging from climate change to air pollution. And in the short term it would help end the Muni meltdown by giving the system a much-needed infusion of cash, about $26 million per year, and more authority to manage its myriad problems.

The measure isn’t perfect. It would give a tremendous amount of power to the unelected Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a semiautonomous agency created in 1999 to reform Muni. But we also understand the arguments of Sup. Aaron Peskin — who wrote the measure in collaboration with labor and other groups — that the MTA is free to make tough decisions that someone facing reelection might avoid. And the measure still would give the Board of Supervisors authority to block the MTA’s budget, fare increases, and route changes with seven votes.

We’re also a little worried about provisions that could place the Taxicab Commission under the MTA’s purview and allow the agency to tinker with the medallion system and undermine Proposition K, the 1978 law that gives operating permits to working drivers, not corporations. Peskin promised us, on tape, that he will ensure, with legislation if necessary, that no such thing happens, and we’ll hold him to it.

Ultimately, the benefits of this measure outweigh our concerns. The fact that the labor movement has signed off on expanded management powers for the MTA shows how important this compromise is. The MTA would have the power to fully implement the impending recommendations in the city’s Transit Improvement Project study and would be held accountable for improvements to Muni’s on-time performance. New bonding authority under the measure would also give the MTA the ability to quickly pursue capital projects that would allow more people to comfortably use public transit.

The measure would also create an integrated transportation system combining everything from parking to cabs to bike lanes under one agency, which would then be mandated to find ways to roll back greenhouse gas emissions from transportation sources to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2012. And to do that, the agency would get to keep all of the revenue generated by its new programs. As a side benefit — and another important reason to vote for Prop. A — approval of this measure would nullify the disastrous Proposition H on the same ballot.

San Francisco faces lots of tough choices if we’re going to minimize climate change and maximize the free flow of people through our landlocked city. Measure A is an important start. Vote yes.

Proposition B (commission holdovers)

YES


Proposition B is a simple good-government measure that ends a practice then-mayor Willie Brown developed into a science — allowing commissioners to continue serving after their terms expire, turning them into at-will appointments and assuring their loyalty.

Members of some of the most powerful commissions in town serve set four-year terms. The idea is to give the members, many appointed by the mayor, some degree of independence: they can’t be fired summarily for voting against the interests (or demands) of the chief executive.

But once their terms expire, the mayor can simply choose not to reappoint or replace them, leaving them in limbo for months, even years — and while they still sit on the commissions and vote, these holdover commissioners can be fired at any time. So their jobs depend, day by day, on the whims of the mayor.

Prop. B, sponsored by the progressives on the Board of Supervisors, simply would limit to 60 days the amount of time a commissioner can serve as a holdover. After that period, the person’s term would end, and he or she would have to step down. That would force the mayor to either reappoint or replace commissioners in a timely manner — and help give these powerful posts at least a chance at independence. Vote yes.

Proposition C (public hearings on proposed measures)

NO


Proposition C sure sounds good: it would mandate that the supervisors hold a hearing 45 days in advance before putting any measure on the ballot. The mayor would have to submit proposed ballot measures for hearings too. That would end the practice of last-minute legislation; since four supervisors can place any ordinance on the ballot (and the mayor can do the same), proposals that have never been vetted by the public and never subjected to any prior discussion often wind up before the voters. Sometimes that means the measures are poorly written and have unintended consequences.

But this really isn’t a good-government measure; it’s a move by the Chamber of Commerce and downtown to reduce the power of the district-elected supervisors.

The 1932 City Charter gave the supervisors the power to place items before the voters as a check on corruption. In San Francisco it’s been used as a check on downtown power. In 1986, for example, activists gathered enough voter signatures to place Proposition M, a landmark measure controlling downtown development, on the ballot. But then–city attorney Louise Renne, acting on behalf of downtown developers, used a ridiculous technicality to invalidate it. At the last minute, the activists were able to get four supervisors to sign on — and Prop. M, one of the most important pieces of progressive planning legislation in the history of San Francisco, ultimately won voter approval. Under Prop. C, that couldn’t have happened.

In theory, most of the time, anything that goes on the ballot should be subject to public hearings. Sometimes, as in the case of Prop. M, that’s not possible.

We recognize the frustration some groups (particularly small businesses) feel when legislation gets passed without any meaningful input from the people directly affected. But it doesn’t require a strict ballot measure like Prop. C to solve the problem. The supervisors should adopt rules mandating public hearings on propositions, but with a more flexible deadline and exemptions for emergencies. Meanwhile, vote no on Prop. C.

Proposition D (library preservation fund)

YES


In the 1980s and early 1990s, San Francisco mayors loved to cut the budget of the public library. Every time money was short — and money was chronically short — the library took a hit. It was an easy target. If you cut other departments (say, police or fire or Muni or public health), people would howl and say lives were in danger. Reducing the hours at a few neighborhood branch libraries didn’t seem nearly as dire.

So activists who argued that libraries were an essential public service put a measure on the ballot in 1994 that guaranteed at least a modest level of library funding. The improvements have been dramatic: branch library hours have increased more than 50 percent, library use is way up, there are more librarians around in the afternoons to help kids with their homework…. In that sense, the Library Preservation Fund has been a great success. The program is scheduled to sunset next year; Proposition D would extend it another 15 years.

If the current management of the public library system were a bit more trustworthy, this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the library commission and staff have been resisting accountability; ironically, the library — a font of public information — makes it difficult to get basic records about library operations. The library is terrible about sunshine; in fact, activists have had to sue this year to get the library to respond to a simple public-records request (for nonconfidential information on repetitive stress injuries among library staff). And we’re not thrilled that a significant part of the library’s operating budget is raised (and controlled) by a private group, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, which decides, with no oversight by an elected official, how as much as 10 percent of library money is spent.

But libraries are too valuable and too easy a budget target to allow the Library Preservation Fund to expire. And the way to fend off creeping privatization is hardly by starving a public institution for funds. So we’ll support Prop. D.

Proposition E (mayoral attendance at Board of Supervisors meetings)

YES, YES, YES


If it feels as though you’ve already voted on this, you have: last November, by a strong majority, San Franciscans approved a policy statement calling on the mayor to attend at least one Board of Supervisors meeting each month to answer questions and discuss policy. It’s a great idea, modeled on the very successful Question Time in the United Kingdom, under which the British prime minister appears before Parliament regularly and submits to questions from all political parties. Proposition E would force the mayor to comply. Newsom, despite his constant statements about respecting the will of the voters, has never once complied with the existing policy statement. Instead, he’s set up a series of phony neighborhood meetings at which he controls the agenda and personally selects which questions he’s going to answer.

We recognize that some supervisors would use the occasion of the mayor’s appearance to grandstand — but the mayor does that almost every day. Appearing before the board once a month isn’t an undue burden; in fact, it would probably help Newsom in the long run. If he’s going to seek higher office, he’s going to have to get used to tough questioning and learn to deal with critics in a forum he doesn’t control.

Beyond all the politics, this idea is good for the city. The mayor claims he already meets regularly with members of the board, but those meetings are private, behind closed doors. Hearing the mayor and the board argue about policy in public would be informative and educational and help frame serious policy debates. Besides, as Sup. Chris Daly says, with Newsom a lock for reelection, this is the only thing on the ballot that would help hold him accountable. Vote yes on Prop. E.

Proposition F (police pensions)

YES


We really didn’t want to endorse this measure. We’re sick and tired of the San Francisco Police Officers Association — which opposed violence-prevention funding, opposed foot patrols, opposes every new revenue measure, and bitterly, often viciously, opposes police accountability — coming around, tin cup in hand, every single election and asking progressives to vote to give the cops more money. San Francisco police officers deserve decent pay — it’s a tough, dangerous job — but the starting salary for a rookie cop in this town exceeds $60,000, the benefits are extraordinarily generous, and the San Francisco Police Department is well on its way to setting a record as the highest-paid police force in the country.

Now it wants more.

But in fact, Proposition F is pretty minor — it would affect only about 60 officers who were airport cops before the airport police were merged into the SFPD in 1997. Those cops have a different retirement system, which isn’t quite as good as what they would get with full SFPD benefits. We’re talking about $30,000 a year; in the end, it’s a simple labor issue, and we hate to blame a small group of officers in one division for the serious sins of their union and its leadership. So we’ll endorse Prop. F. But we have a message for the SFPOA’s president: if you want to beat up the progressives, reject new tax plans, promote secrecy, and fight accountability, don’t come down here again asking for big, expensive benefit improvements.

Proposition G (Golden Gate Park stables)

YES


This is an odd one: Proposition G, sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, would create a special fund for the renovation of the historic (and dilapidated) horse stables in Golden Gate Park. The city would match every $3 in private donations with $1 in public money, up to a total of $750,000. The city would leverage that money with $1.2 million in state funds available for the project and fix up the stables.

Supporters, including most of the progressive supervisors, say that the stables are a historic gem and that horseback riding in the park would provide "after-school, summer and weekend activities for families and youth." That might be a bit of a stretch — keeping horses is expensive, and riding almost certainly won’t be a free activity for anyone. But the stables have been the target of privatization efforts in the past and, under Newsom, almost certainly would be again in the future; this is exactly the sort of operation that the mayor would like to turn over to a private contractor. So for a modest $750,000, Prop. G would keep the stables in public hands. Sounds like a good deal to us. Vote yes.

Proposition H (reguutf8g parking spaces)

NO, NO, NO


It’s hard to overstate just how bad this measure is or to condemn strongly enough the sleazy and deceptive tactics that led Don Fisher, Webcor, and other downtown power brokers to buy the signatures that placed what they call "Parking for the Neighborhoods" on the ballot. That’s why Proposition H has been almost universally condemned, even by downtown’s allies in City Hall, and why Proposition A includes a provision that would negate Proposition H if both are approved.

Basically, this measure would wipe out three decades’ worth of environmentally sound planning policies in favor of giving every developer and homeowner the absolute right to build a parking space for every housing unit (or two spaces for every three units in the downtown core). While that basic idea might have some appeal to drivers with parking frustrations, even they should consider the disastrous implications of this greedy and shortsighted power grab.

The city has very little leverage to force developers to offer community benefits like open space or more affordable housing, or to design buildings that are attractive and environmentally friendly. But parking spots make housing more valuable (and expensive), so developers will help the city meet its needs in order to get them. That would end with this measure, just as the absolute right to parking would eliminate things like Muni stops and street trees while creating more driveways, which are dangerous to bicyclists and pedestrians. It would flip the equation to place developers’ desires over the public interest.

Worst of all, it would reverse the city’s transit-first policies in a way that ultimately would hurt drivers and property owners, the very people it is appealing to. If we don’t limit the number of parking spots that can be built with the 10,000 housing units slated for the downtown core, it will result in traffic gridlock that will lower property values and kill any chance of creating a world-class transit system.

But by then, the developers will be off counting our money, leaving us to clean up their mess. Don’t be fooled. Vote no.

Proposition I (Office of Small Business)

YES


Proposition I got on the ballot after small-business leaders tried unsuccessfully to get the supervisors to fund a modest program to create staff for the Small Business Commission and create a one-stop shop for small-business assistance and permitting. We don’t typically support this sort of after-the-fact ballot-box budgeting request, but we’re making an exception here.

San Francisco demands a lot from small businesses. It’s an expensive place to set up shop, and city taxes discriminate against them. We supported the new rules mandating that even small operations give paid days off and in many cases pay for health insurance, but we recognize that they put a burden on small businesses. And in the end, the little operators don’t get a whole lot back from City Hall.

This is a pretty minor request: it would allocate $750,000 to set up an Office of Small Business under the Small Business Commission. The funding would be for the first year only; after that the advocates would have to convince the supervisors that it was worth continuing. Small businesses are the economic and job-generation engines of San Francisco, and this one-time request for money that amounts to less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the city budget is worthy of support. Vote yes on Prop. I.

Proposition J (wireless Internet network)

NO


It’s going to be hard to convince people to vote against this measure; as one blogger put it, the mayor of San Francisco is offering free ice cream. Anyone want to decline?

Well, yes — decline is exactly what the voters should do. Because Proposition J’s promise of free and universal wireless Internet service is simply a fraud. And the way it’s worded would ensure that our local Internet infrastructure is handed over to a private company — a terrible idea.

For starters, San Francisco has already been down this road. Newsom worked out a deal a year ago with EarthLink and Google to provide free wi-fi. But the contract had all sorts of problems: the free access would have been too slow for a lot of uses, faster access wouldn’t have been free, there weren’t good privacy protections, and the network wouldn’t have been anything close to universal. Wi-fi signals don’t penetrate walls very well, and the signals in this plan wouldn’t have reached much above the second floor of a building — so anyone who lived in an interior space above the second floor (and that’s a lot of people) wouldn’t have gotten access at all.

So the supervisors asked a few questions and slowed things down — and it’s good they did, because EarthLink suddenly had a change in its business strategy and pulled out of citywide wi-fi altogether. That’s one of the problems with using a private partner for this sort of project: the city is subject to the marketing whims of tech companies that are constantly changing their strategies as the economic and technical issues of wi-fi evolve.

San Francisco needs a municipal Internet system; it ought to be part of the city’s public infrastructure, just like the streets, the buses, and the water and sewer lines. It shouldn’t rely just on a fickle technology like wi-fi either; it should be based on fiber-optic cables. Creating that network wouldn’t be all that expensive; EarthLink was going to do it for $10 million.

Prop. J is just a policy statement and would have no immediate impact. Still, it’s annoying and wrongheaded for the mayor to try to get San Franciscans to give a vote of confidence to a project that has already crashed and burned, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, the cosponsor, should never have put his name on it. Vote no.

Proposition K (ads on street furniture)

YES


San Francisco is awash in commercialism. With all of the billboards and ads, the city is starting to feel like a giant NASCAR racer. And a lot of them come from Clear Channel Communications, the giant, monopolistic broadcast outfit that controls radio stations, billboards, and now the contract to build new bus shelters in the city with even more ads on them.

Proposition K is a policy statement, sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, that seeks to bar any further expansion of street-furniture advertising in the city. That would mean no more deals with the likes of Clear Channel to allow more lighted kiosks with ads on them — and no more new bus shelter ads. That’s got Clear Channel agitated — the company just won the 15-year bid to rebuild the city’s existing 1,200 Muni shelters, and now it wants to add 380 more. Clear Channel argues that the city would get badly needed revenue for Muni from the expanded shelters; actually, the contract already guarantees Muni a large chunk of additional funding. And nothing in Prop. K would block Clear Channel from upgrading the existing shelters and plastering ads all over them.

On a basic philosophical level, we don’t support the idea of funding Muni by selling ads on the street, any more than we would support the idea of funding the Recreation and Park Department by selling the naming rights to the Hall of Flowers or the Japanese Tea Garden or the golf courses. On a practical level, the Clear Channel deal is dubious anyway: the company, which runs 10 mostly lousy radio stations in town and gives almost nothing of value to the community, refuses to provide the public with any information on its projected profits and losses, so there’s no way to tell if the income the city would get from the expanded shelters would be a fair share of the overall revenue.

Vote yes on K.

Censored!

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>>Project Censored’s 15 missed-story runners up

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

>>The story behind a censored story that was killed by The Nation

amanda@sfbg.com

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS


The Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.

The law allows the president to designate any person an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.

Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."

The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, "this law does not apply to American citizens."

Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific "alien unlawful enemy combatant" to the vague "any person subject to this chapter."

"Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?" Parry wrote. "Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?"

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the "any person" terminology is troubling. "It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted," Parry said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU


The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.

Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.

The Warner act defines a public emergency as a "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States" and extends its provisions to any place where "the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to "suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."

So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006

3. AFRICOM


President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent "vital interest" in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick "vital interest."

The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.

Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. "A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it," Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."

Source: "Understanding AFRICOM," parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, Feb. 21, 2007

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTS


As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.

At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.

In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.

Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements "competitive liberalization," and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.

But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. "The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets," states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.

Sources: "Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries" Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; "Signing Away the Future" Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQ


Part of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.

Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, "No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site."

Source: "A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy," David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006

6. FALCON’S TALONS


Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."

However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.

What about the other 7,481 people? "Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?" Whitney asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.

Sources: "Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State," Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006

7. BLACKWATER


The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.

Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.

"It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror," author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.

Source: "Our Mercenaries in Iraq," Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA: THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA


A March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.

The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.

Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.

Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.

Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: "Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India," Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; "Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto," Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE


In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.

Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.

But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.

As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, "the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected."

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.

Sources: "The Highwaymen" Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway," Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE


Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.

Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that "the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington."

With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.

Source: "Vulture Fund Threat to Third World," Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

Chronicle hits Burning Man…badly

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By Steven T. Jones
The San Francisco Chronicle leads the Sunday paper with a hit piece on Burning Man, wrapping several disparate points under the implied thesis that there is financial corruption in the organization. But the journalism and logic employed by writer Justin Berton and his editor is so bad and misleading that it says more about the Chronicle than Burning Man.
The most egregious example is the pull quote that leads the full-page jump: “This is not a financially healthy organization. If I were a donor, I’d think long and hard before I sent money their way,” Sandra Muniutti, Charity Navigator analyst.
It sounds as if she’s talking about Black Rock City LLC, which stages the event, rather than the event’s nonprofit wing, Black Rock Arts Foundation, which she analyzed. (Full disclosure: my girlfriend Alix Rosenthal is on the BRAF advisory board, although most of my knowledge on this issue comes from years of reporting work I did for the Guardian and my own attendance at Burning Man).
It’s classic bait-and-switch journalism, conflating two organizations to make a point. It’s also bad journalism because it lacks context on why BRAF gave just 27 percent of their revenue to artists. Here’s the context: most of BRAF’s work has been to place artwork that already been built — in most cases with art grants from BRC — around San Francisco, a task at which BRAF has been more successful in recent years than any group in town.
But the Chronicle, by dishonest implication, would have you believe just the opposite is true.

Charity or political corruption?

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By Steven T. Jones
PG&E just put out a press release patting themselves on the back for placing sixth on the San Francisco Business Times’ annual list of the top 70 corporate donors to charity, thanks to the $14.7 million in donations the company made last year, it’s biggest year ever. And this year, they pledge to increase that to $18.3 million, just as the city is getting ready to start competing for customers directly with them.
Wow, we certainly are blessed to have such a benevolent corporation in our midst, right? As the press release quoted a top company official as saying, “As a company passionate about meeting the needs of the diverse communities we serve, corporate philanthropy and community service are natural extensions of who we are.”
But there’s probably a better way of looking at these donations and what they say about who PG&E is. After all, this is your money that they’re giving away, coming from customers paying some of the higher rates in the country. And much of that “charitable” giving is meant to buy friends and allies to defend against both public power initiatives and the efforts of city officials to hold this malevolent company responsible for its many misdeeds.
So even though its your money, the company takes credit (on signs, press releases, newspapers ads, etc.) for giving it away and reaps the rewards (from goodwill and influence peddling to tax deductions) that keep you and elected officials under its thumb. And it hits record amounts for giving just as the pressure is increasing to create more public interest and environmentally sustainable ways of generating megawatts. That doesn’t sound like very charitable behavior to me.

Problems with Peskin’s Muni plan

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OPINION Last week the Board of Supervisors received a proposed charter amendment that takes a misguided stab at the much-needed reform of the Municipal Transit Agency, which oversees Muni. In undertaking reforms we all agree are needed for the MTA to better serve our city, the supervisors should consider the Hippocratic oath required of doctors: “First, do no harm.”

Our union, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents almost a thousand MTA workers, has enormous respect for the bill’s sponsor, board president Aaron Peskin. We know that Peskin strongly supports workers’ rights and has always stood for openness, transparency, and accountability in government. This initiative, however, undermines everything that he and his board colleagues stand for, and we urge progressives to oppose it.

Most important, the initiative is profoundly undemocratic and would transfer oversight from an elected body to an appointed one. An MTA that no longer had to answer to our elected representatives would be a less accountable and less transparent board.

Downgrading elected oversight into appointive power resting in the hands of one person — the mayor — is not reform but a political power grab. Commissioners would be well aware that they might not be reappointed if they voted too independently of the mayor’s preferences.

The initiative would present additional risks for the abuse of power in local government by allowing MTA to approve its own contracts. This is a dangerous conflict of interest that would create more opportunities for problems, not reform.

The amendment furthermore would undermine workplace protections by increasing the number of nonunion workers from the current 1.5 percent to a whopping 10 percent. Working people would serve at the pleasure of an unelected board and lose their right to collective bargaining. Seven years ago many members of the Board of Supervisors and progressives strongly opposed a nonunion special assistant position in Mayor Willie Brown’s office. The board converted this position to a civil service job because of the perception of patronage and corruption. The current charter amendment exhumes that political cadaver while hiding behind the fig leaf of flexibility — which in this case is a code word for the power to fire people without just cause or due process, or for political expediency.

On one point we agree with this charter amendment: it’s true that the MTA needs more money to serve our residents the way it should, and this amendment would take $26 million from the General Fund and transfer it to the MTA budget. But we do not believe we should be raiding the General Fund without carefully considering the possible impact.

This is a charter amendment and cannot be easily undone. If it turns out to be a disaster, as we believe it will, San Francisco will find itself in a very dire situation without a timely remedy.

SEIU Local 1021 strongly opposes this charter amendment unless it undergoes major revisions. Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s competing initiative, by contrast, offers us a path that is much more democratic, promotes accountability and transparency in government, and protects the rights of working families. We agree that reform is needed, but if passed, Peskin’s initiative will create many more problems than it purports to solve. *

Damita Davis-Howard and Robert Haaland

Damita Davis-Howard is president of SEIU Local 1021; Robert Haaland is San Francisco political coordinator for the union.

 

Reform the recall

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EDITORIAL The Board of Supervisors — and the very notion of representative democracy — is under attack in San Francisco.

As city editor Steven T. Jones reported in last week’s paper ("Hazy Recall") and on our Politics blog ("Connect the Recall Dots"), a recall campaign has targeted Sup. Jake McGoldrick, citing his advocacy of car-free spaces in Golden Gate Park and a bus rapid-transit initiative that recall advocates believe district residents oppose.

Behind its claims of being a grassroots effort with legitimate concerns about McGoldrick’s leadership are some troubling indicators that there’s a lot more to this than potential petition signers might realize. The campaign’s biggest financial contributions come from the Residential Builders Association (which has long battled McGoldrick over conditions and restrictions he’s tried to place on developers) and the conservative property rights group Small Property Owners of San Francisco.

The lion’s share of the $24,000 raised so far has gone to Johnny K. Wang’s JKW Political Consulting. Among JKW’s other clients are the reelection campaign of Mayor Gavin Newsom (who would get to appoint McGoldrick’s successor, and whom the supervisor publicly criticized over Newsom’s sex scandal), Google and Earthlink (which Newsom wants to build a wireless Internet system for the city, a deal McGoldrick has taken the lead in scrutinizing), and malevolent downtown player Citizens for Reform Leadership (an attack group created by Newsom treasurer Jim Sutton).

It’s no surprise that Newsom and his downtown allies would want to knock off McGoldrick or any of the progressive supervisors who have been effectively setting the city’s agenda for at least the past two years. In fact, critics of the board have now launched another recall campaign, against board president Aaron Peskin, as well as a lower-level effort against Sup. Chris Daly. And this follows an unsuccessful 2004 effort to recall Sup. Sophie Maxwell, which had some behind-the-scenes support from downtown attack dog Wade Randlett.

None of these four supervisors have committed the acts of corruption, incompetence, or gross malfeasance for which the tool of the recall was created. Instead, people are trying to recall McGoldrick, Peskin, and Daly simply for being effective legislators with whom some of their more conservative constituents disagree.

This is an outrageous and dishonest abuse of the recall. Newsom should immediately and publicly express his opposition to the recall campaigns, and citizens of the district should refuse to sign the petitions. But that’s not enough. It’s time for the Board of Supervisors to consider placing a charter amendment on the ballot that would reform the way recalls are handled in the city, which is far more lenient than under state law.

The San Francisco signature threshold of 10 percent of registered voters is ridiculously low, particularly for district-elected supervisors, for whom only about 3,500 signatures are needed. Statewide, the standard is 20 percent of registered voters, and that should be our standard as well.

Raising the signature threshold is particularly important given the advantage that downtown interests have in recalling supervisors. The City Charter treats recall campaigns like ballot measures, allowing for huge political contributions rather than the $500 limits applied to candidates. This is grossly unfair to truly grassroots groups and should also be changed to cap contributions at $500.

Finally, we should remove the temptation for allies of the mayor to use the recall as a way of undoing popular elections and giving more power to the mayor. Most recall elections in California entail the replacement of a successfully recalled official by a vote of the people (as we saw when Gov. Gray Davis was recalled), but in San Francisco, the mayor chooses the successor. That needs to change.

Too often these days, the recall is a weapon wielded recklessly by wealthy special interests to subvert the true will of the people. By setting reasonable financial contribution limits, creating a high but still attainable signature threshold, and making the recall more democratic, San Francisco can once again make the recall an honorable — and seldom used — tool of the people. *

Arrrooo! ‘Oceans Thirteen’ vs. cougars

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OK, someone has to voice it: was I the only one who detected a whiff of misogyny in the latest three-quel to shamble lazily into our movie theaters, Oceans Thirteen?

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Ellen Barkin’s ruthless manager Abigale Sponder inflicts her rigid beauty standards on a would-be casino cocktail waitress.

Ladies note: all that self-tanner use is admirable ‘n’ all – kudos especially for the job around the wrinkly peepers of Al Pacino – but what’s with Steven Soderbergh and company’s conflicted treatment of the bad girl of the piece: Pacino’s assistant Abigale Sponder, played by Ellen Barkin who’s sexed up in a tight hot-pink sheath, boobage jacked up to bubble-like Wonderbra proportions. Her chest literally steals the second half of the show: it’s impossible to look at anything else when she’s or they’re on screen. Is overt retro-sexism acceptable when it’s swathed in Rat Pack-style nostalgia and quasi-pro-sexy feminism? Yet the fact that the Matt Damon character – of all of the crew and in a faux honker to boot – can swoop the “cougar” as he calls her, is insulting. There’s no need to roll out the “real” weaponry like Brad Pitt.

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Older women are ripe prey for any ole member of Danny Ocean’s crew?

On the surface, one might posit that Barkin’s lusty portrayal is empowering for older gals, but you can’t hide the contempt in the filmmaker’s gaze – never mind that she’s a bad guy’s moll in the style of Natasha and Boris. The fact she’s served up – the sole female “name” among the many Hollywood hotties – like a aging flesh sandwich as some sort of signifier of corruption in Ocean‘s glam universe, reeks of not-so-covert crone-bashing.

I’m all for juicier parts for older actresses, but do worthy players like Barkin need to stoop to this?

Web Site of the Week

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www.home.ourfuture.org

The Campaign for America’s Future has launched a project called the Big Con, which argues that conservatism — not just the Bush administration’s corruption and incompetence — is causing this country’s most serious problems.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

San Francisco district attorneys have never been known for fighting political corruption. You don’t see politicians or corporate CEOs doing the perp walk around here — and trust me, it’s not because there’s a lack of criminal activity. Over the past 20 years, I’ve personally written or edited at least two dozen stories that involved clear evidence of lawbreaking by prominent San Francisco citizens, and not one of them has ever been held to account in a court of law.

(OK, I’ll give Terence Hallinan credit for Fajitagate; at least he tried. But it turned out to be an embarrassment when the highest-ranking cops walked away free and clear. And even Hallinan couldn’t — or wouldn’t — lay a glove on Willie Brown.)

Kamala Harris, who will be up for reelection next year, clearly has higher political ambitions. When I saw her take the stage with Sen. Barack Obama at the state Democratic convention in San Diego and he introduced her as one of his most prominent supporters, I could almost see the wheels turning: Federal Judge Kamala Harris. White House counsel Kamala Harris. Even Attorney General Kamala Harris. If Obama doesn’t win, she’s still on a lot of short lists for higher office.

But if she wants to be another Eliot Spitzer, she’s got to, well, be Eliot Spitzer. She’s got to be willing to take a firm hand on political crimes, pursuing and investigating violations of public trust as if that were the most important part of her job.

And she can start right now with the San Francisco Community College District.

It’s been more than a month since the news broke that an associate vice chancellor at City College diverted $10,000 in public money to a private campaign fund set up to pass a college bond act. Nobody’s been charged with any crime, but it seems to me there are some real questions not just about propriety but about legality here. And it seems to me, as someone who has watched that snake pit over there for a long time now, that it’s highly — highly — unlikely that a junior-level college official acting entirely on his own would have shifted 10 grand into a campaign committee that had close ties to elected members of the community college board.

Nobody in the DA’s Office will confirm or deny any investigation, which is standard practice. But I bet an aggressive district attorney who started digging out there on Phelan Avenue might shovel up some serious dirt. Just a thought, Kamala.

I’m beginning to think that our candidate for mayor ought to be Sup. Ross Mirkarimi.

Part of that is, frankly, political reality: Matt Gonzalez shows no sign of wanting to run at this point, and it’s getting late. Sup. Aaron Peskin doesn’t want to do it. There’s talk about former mayor Art Agnos, but I don’t buy it: Agnos would have a lot of fences to mend from his administration, and he’s not the type to apologize.

I hate to say that "leaves" Mirkarimi, because he’s actually a good candidate. He’s smart and full of energy and can take on the mayor on street crime: Newsom is going after panhandlers while Mirkarimi is trying to do something about the appalling murder rate. He’s only been in elected office a couple years, but then, Obama (who is Mirkarimi’s age, to the day) has been in the US Senate a couple years, and he could be the next president. Worth thinking about.

MCMAF: Collective hip noises

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Should you take this life seriously enough to listen to it, I would suggest you head to local electro-organic thinkers I Am Spoonbender’s Web site right now, before you read this story, and download the trailer for their latest self-released album, Buy Hidden Persuaders (IAS, 2006), another three-sided disc (their gorgeous Teletwin 12-inch had concurrent grooves on one side, allowing for a randomly asserted listening experience) from the wizards of esoteric musical realism. Sure, the aesthetically thorough trailer’s bricolage of images and texts deals with everything from hypnosis to Illuminati-style dollar-bill machinations and just happens to act as a manifesto, art show, music preview, and persuasive cinematic display all at once.

But don’t fret. Dutifully check the "I Agree" button when the site lets you know that "IASBHP [I Am Spoonbender’s Buy Hidden Persuaders] is a subliminal advertisement for itself … produced by control, and is an album of ‘engineered outcomes.’ " Grin and download, watch and get ready to strangely rock, because you will surely make use of the free album download in WAV format and proceed to share these pulsing soundscapes with everyone you encounter, whether you intend to or not. William S. Burroughs’s notion that language is a virus was tied to his ideas about time as a sort of viral petri dish, and that makes sense here, in reverse. Persuaders is a soundtrack to its own propagation.

"I firmly believe that after spending three and a half years working on this album, there’s no way to hear it all in less than that time," Dustin Donaldson said recently on the phone from his San Francisco home. The mastermind behind IAS’s infectious, rhythmic stylings knows sound inside and out. "It’s designed to be encountered repeatedly and to reveal itself over time," he continued. "The longer you listen to it, the more you’re going to hear recurring musical themes, say, in different registers on different sounds, lyrical themes reflecting on themselves."

The entire Persuaders project – which includes the album, their first performance in three years, the succulent Web site, the Shown Actual Size EP (Gold Standard Laboratories), the book that will soon accompany the new album, and even the band’s dreams as they go to bed at dawn in San Francisco after nights of channeling and creating – is aimed at balancing out and exposing as a fraud the harm done by advertising and the like to our very beings. If we envision corruption and mind control as diseases, then Persuaders is an equally potent and uniquely celebratory vaccine – a careful dosage bordering the illuminating and the lethal. It’s celebratory because it co-opts subliminal and similar techniques in order to start a conversation, rather than to sell or speak about any one thing in particular. It’s potent because it refuses to double back on itself without adding more meaning. The three sides, or collages – "You Have Been Suggested," "Penetrate to Deeper Levels," and "Slowly Replaced in Mirrors" – seldom ring the same bells twice. And yes, there are hidden messages: don’t be afraid to slow things down, speed them up, listen from afar …

The thing is, you’ve already heard Persuaders, sizzling through your mind just before or after media stimulation. When Cup, the other core half of IAS, sings, "We all need mirrors to know / Who we are now," over surprisingly guttural organ sounds, her expressive vocals and multi-instrumental prowess, here as throughout, lend a sense of flight to Donaldson’s Middle Earthy rhythms and organic mechanics. Imagine Laurie Anderson playing tag with Robert Ashley.

The material for Persuaders came from everywhere and nowhere. After years watching "thousands of films" but no television, Donaldson was shocked when a friend moved in and they got cable. "I just was absolutely unprepared for … the aggression in marketing tactics," he said. "Drug company television ads became a big source of, well, I guess it’s inspiration in some sense, something to create a mirror-state protest record around. We attempt, through this record, to send the same amount of energy back toward these sources. For every action there’s a reaction, and at some level there’s a neutralization, hopefully – in audio terms, phase cancellation.

"For me, specifically, there was about a year of experiments in sensory deprivation," Donaldson continued. "Sleep deprivation … also, going into the studio often late at night and turning off all the lights and turning on huge, 750-watt strobes … setting them at different tempos and playing drums to that and just getting out – open to receive." There was even a resulting side project, yet to be released, where nothing could be recorded until the entire group had been up for 30 hours. Of course, the results were carefully edited for clarity.

Excited, you should now flock to the Mezzanine prepared to buy whatever IAS chooses to sell. If you print your own money, make sure the paper sparkles, and don’t forget to record the sounds the bills make when they leap, calmly, into flames. *

I AM SPOONBENDER

With Steven Stapleton, Ariel Pink, and Phase Chancellor

May 11, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

Up against the police secrecy lobby

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EDITORIAL On April 17 the full weight of the state’s secrecy lobby and police unions descended on Sacramento to prevent the public from having any access to the records of peace officers who have faced disciplinary charges. The tactics were brutal: Everett Bobbitt, a police lawyer, testified to the Assembly Public Safety Committee that allowing any sunshine whatsoever would instantly threaten the lives of hardworking cops and their families.

His argument was bizarre, reminiscent of some of the tortured claims that the Bush administration made in seeking support for the war in Iraq and the civil liberties fiasco called the USA PATRIOT Act. He suggested that criminal gangs might find out something that would allow them to threaten police officers (despite the fact that until a recent court decision these records had been open for more than 20 years in San Francisco and 30 in Berkeley, and not a single cop had been in any way physically harmed by the information). He claimed that peace officers have an extraordinary right to privacy (despite the fact that as public employees who are given guns and badges and extraordinary powers, they need at least some degree of public accountability).

And the committee, despite being dominated by Democrats, was utterly cowed. It was a disgrace, and public officials and law enforcement leaders in San Francisco and the East Bay need to make a point of joining the fight to ensure that police secrecy doesn’t continue to carry the day.

At issue was a bill by Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) that would overturn an odious 2006 court decision known as Copley. In that ruling, the California Supreme Court concluded that all files and hearings reutf8g to police discipline must be kept entirely secret. The ruling "has effectively shut down virtually every forum in which the public previously had access to the police discipline process," Tom Newton, general counsel to the California Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote in a letter supporting Leno’s bill, AB 1648.

Newton added, "Copley represents nothing less than complete and total victory for the secrecy lobby in this state. In the ultimate perversion of legislative intent, the most powerful forces in government and their exceptionally creative and effective lobbyists have achieved a perfect storm of official secrecy – making it illegal to inform the public about official corruption…. These aren’t just any public employees that have achieved the holy grail of KGB-like official secrecy – they are the only public officials given the right by the public to affect the personal liberty of citizens and even take life, if necessary to protect the public peace."

Leno’s bill – which would simply restore the law to what it was for decades – had the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and a long list of grassroots organizations, including the Asian Law Caucus, Chinese for Affirmative Action, La Raza Centro Legal, the NAACP, and the National Black Police Association.

And yet Leno didn’t have the votes in the committee to even move the bill to the floor. Not one of his four Democratic colleagues (Jose Solorio of Anaheim, Hector de la Torre of South Gate, Anthony J. Portantino of Pasadena, and San Francisco’s Fiona Ma) was willing to move the bill forward. Ma, apparently, was among those who bought the police line: she told the Guardian she was "not prepared to vote for Leno’s bill as it was" but would be willing to accept a compromise that "also protects the rights of family members." Remember, nothing in Leno’s bill in any way endangers or provides any information on any member of a police officer’s family.

The only good news is that a similar, slightly weaker bill, SB 1019, by state senator Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), has cleared the Senate’s Public Safety Committee and will go to the Senate floor – and if it passes, it will come before the Assembly. So there’s still a chance to pass some version of a police accountability and sunshine bill this year.

It’s crucial that public officials and particularly law enforcement leaders speak out in favor of this legislation. The city of Berkeley has formally endorsed the bill, but Mayor Gavin Newsom and Oakland mayor Ron Dellums have been silent and need to speak up. So should San Francisco sheriff Mike Hennessey (who told us he supports the idea in principle but thinks Leno’s proposal goes too far) and District Attorney Kamala Harris.

And Fiona Ma needs to hear, loudly, from her constituents: police accountability is a priority, and she can’t get away with ducking it. *

CALIFORNIA’S COLLEGIATE FUNNY MONEY CONTINUES: How City College simply flipped your cash bills for a ballot-measure jackpot

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By G.W. Schulz

It must suck to be a celebrity reporter for the Chronicle and have your stories buried on page B9. The Chron’s BALCO star Lance Williams has quietly moved into new territory, most recently with a pretty good little scoop on campaign-corruption problems at San Francisco’s City College.

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Williams reported first on April 6 that a top official at the school had diverted a $10,000 lease payment belonging to City College (taxpayers, in other words) to the campaign coffers of a committee formed in 2005 to convince voters they should authorize a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in bonds for the school so it could build some new stuff. Follow-ups in the Chron haven’t been immediately easy to find, but they’re nonetheless interesting.

City College has been building new stuff since 1997, and 2005 was the third time they returned to you asking for more money. Spending money on community colleges is good. Spending your money to bankroll a campaign committee formed solely to convince you to spend more money on community colleges is probably illegal.

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The first story noted that administrators had also directed a $20,000 lease payment made by a contractor doing very recent business with City College into the same committee’s bank account, but that money was returned several months later. The businesses making the payments were told to just fill their checks out to the campaign fund and bypass the school entirely, even though the school was where the money was supposed to go. When Williams started making calls to City College administrators asking about the remaining $10,000, that money was returned, too.

Williams also identified several businesses that made contributions of $10,000 or more to the campaign committee “within days of negotiating contracts with the community college.”

FIREWORKS, TEENAGE GIRLS AND AN SFPD PATROL CAR: Former cop caught in alleged corruption snafu

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By G.W. Schulz

Chronicle gossip sluts Matier & Ross caught up with an interesting scoop today involving a guy who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. His name is Arkady Zlobinsky. That’s him below in a photo the Chron ran, which kinda looks more like a Glamour Shot stolen from a bargain-bin picture frame than a staff-produced image.

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Former SFPD cop Arkady Zlobinsky from, uh,
a series of Glamour Shots the Chronicle lined up?

Anyway, a while back, we reminded you of a short-lived feature we’d launched last year called “Cops Behaving Badly,” which was supposed to be a regular summary of the more disturbing and/or hilarious police disciplinary cases arriving at the San Francisco Police Commission for review, details of which we could obtain as public records from the commission’s secretary, a nice guy named Sgt. Joe Reilly.

Well, the series started off as loads of fun. There was the cop who got busted with pot in Lake Tahoe. There was the domestic-violence investigator who drunkenly crashed into a parked SUV in Marin County while off the clock. There was the lieutenant who was allegedly pulled over at different spots throughout the city three times while off duty in a string of civilian automobiles, twice with a golf towel curiously wrapped over his license plate.

He claimed to sometimes play golf late at night in the park, and the towel must have miraculously got caught in his trunk. All a big misunderstanding, but after apparently letting him go a few times, officers finally reported the incidents and the chief was forced to charge him with being uncooperative by refusing to turn over his license and trying to intimidate the officers who’d pulled him over. That was the same lieutenant who was arrested in 1983 for soliciting an act of prostitution.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I get just as crabby and cynical as any other political reporter, but the truth is, on the index of basic competence and lack of corruption, San Francisco city government is doing way better than it was a decade ago.

We’re far from perfect: the Raker Act scandal still sours everything at City Hall, and the mayor hasn’t done much of anything in the past three years. I could go on.

But the reformers have made some tremendous inroads. I don’t know of anyone running a critical department at City Hall who is too drunk to make it back from lunch on a regular basis. Most of the senior staff actually shows up to work instead of spending the day at Nordstrom. The school district has gotten back to educating students, and the public schools improve each year. The supervisors are overall a remarkably smart, progressive bunch. I haven’t seen the FBI raid a local government office in a couple years.

And then there’s the community college district.

The board and the administration that run City College are, I think, one of the last bastions of the kind of inbred, secretive, corrupt rotten boroughs that used to dominate our dear city. Take Lance Williams’s fascinating City College story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 6.

Williams showed how a college official, assistant vice chancellor James Blomquist, allegedly steered $10,000 in rent money owed to the school into a campaign fund for a 2005 community college bond act. If that’s true — and nobody’s denying it — the deal was not only inappropriate but blatantly illegal. There should have been outrage all around — but so far only the three dissident members of the community college board have said a word. "Nobody else has said anything," said board member John Rizzo, who with Julio Ramos and Milton Marks III has called for a special meeting on this.

Perhaps that’s because what Blomquist allegedly did isn’t all that unusual at City College, where bond money is moved around and treated like personal scrip by the administration and some of the board members. Remember, these are the folks who promised the voters that they’d build a performing arts center, then turned around and spent the money on a gym — and later agreed to rent out the new pool to a private school across the street (see "Field of Schemes," 9/22/04).

This is the crew that has resisted sunshine, that has run roughshod over neighborhoods and pissed off thousands of people — for absolutely no good reason.

The district attorney needs to investigate this latest scam and ask, among other things, which board members knew about it — because I suspect this wasn’t just a junior official operating unilaterally.

This shit has got to end, folks. The chancellor, Philip Day, needs to go. The board members who have been involved in these past shenanigans (Natalie Berg, Rodel Rodis, and Lawrence Wong) all need to go. The progressives have to make this a priority; City College is a civic gem and a crucial part of the city’s future. It’s infuriating to see it run by political hacks.

And as long as this crew is still in charge, I hope they know better than to come around with their hands out, asking for more of the taxpayers’ money. *

The Inter American Press Association calls for the immediate release of Josh Wolf from prison

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Cartagena, Colombia March l9–The Inter American Press Association has condemned the U.S. government for jailing Josh Wolf and called for his immediate release from federal prison.

IAPA, at its annual mid-year meeting in Cartagena, noted that Wolf “remains in jail for refusing to turn over his videos and has now been in jail for refusing to comply with a subpoena for longer than any journalist in U.S. history.”

IAPA said that “numerous journalists in the United States have been subpoenaed by prosecutors and required to testify in state and federal court, including the requirement that they name their confidential sources.”
It noted that San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams faced l8 months in prison until their confidential source recently came forward.”

IAPA relied on principle 4 of the Declaration of Chapultepec, the organization’s version of the First Amendment,
that states, “Freedom of expression and of the press are severely limited by murder, terrorism, kidnapping, intimidation, the unjust imprisonment of journalists, the destruction of facilities, violence of any kind and impunity for perpetrators. Such acts must be investigated promptly and punished harshly.”

IAPA is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending freedom of expression and of the press throughout the Americas. It has a membership of more than l,300 representing newspapers and magazines, with a combined circulation of 43,353,762, from Patagonia to Alaska.

In other action, IAPA found that six journalists were killed and one disappeared in the last six months in Mexico, and another was killed in Haiti. “The assassinated journalists were all victims of drug and gang wars, reflecting how throughout the region organized crime was a bigger physical threat to journalists than old-fashioned political differences,” IAPA said. “There were nearly two dozen more cases of reported death threats, in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Paraguay, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Peru,Venezuela, and Brazil, some related to the reporting of corruption.”

IAPA said that Cuba and Venezuela were the worst countries in terms of government pressure on the press.
President Hugo Chavez threatens to shut down the country’s leading television network, Radio CaracasTelevision, by not renewing its license. And in Cuba, after Fidel Castro replaced himself with his brother Raul as the president, repression has escalated against independent journalists and foreign correspondents.

IAPA reported 47 acts of harassment of journalists (police threats, interrogations, ‘acts of repudiation’ organized by the government, public beatings, temporary arrests, fines for disobedience, raids of people’s homes, evictions, seizures of money and personal items, firings, and restrictions on travel within Cuba). Three foreign correspondents were expelled from Cuba on the grounds that “their approach to the situation in Cuba is not in the best interests of the Cuban government.” In an attack on news sources, four people are being prosecuted for manufacturing or repairing satellite television equipment and may go to prison for three years. Meanwhile, IAPA said, 28 journalists remain behind bars, serving sentences of up to 27 years.

Cuba is now extending its repression to internet users. No Cuban may access the internet freely. Ramiro Valdes, the minister of computers and communications, ahs announced the government’s intention to tame the “wild horse” of new technologies, which it describes as “one of the most horrible means of global extermination ever invented.”

Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia had “lesser but still worrying” tensions between their governments and the media. In Argentina, the government continued to “arbitrarily classify journalists and media outlets as friends and enemies, and use the placing of official advertising to support the one and punish the other. B3

http://www.sipiapa.com/pulications/informe_usa2007ca.cfm

A scary school poll

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By Tim Redmond

Kim Knox at leftinsf has posted the minutes of the Community Advisory Committee looking for a new SF school superintendent. Mostly pretty predictable stuff — except for a poll commissioned by a business group that has some really scary results:

To the question, is SF Unified School District going in the right direction or the wrong track:
Right Direction-22%
Wrong Track-54%

To the question, how would you rate the quality of the education provided by SFUSD:
Good to Excellent-28%
Not So Good to Poor-54%

To the question, how well do you think SFUSD manage its funds:
Excellent 20%
Not So Good to Poor 53%

One leftinsf commenter, Nakayama, concluded:

What ignorance. Anybody keeping a close eye on our public schools in SF –whether parent, student or administrator–can readily see that the schools are much better now than they were five or 10 years ago.

Why the misconception?

Because very few San Franciscans have children, and they have no idea what is happening in our schools.

I agree with the first part — I have a kid in the public schools, I’m really happy about his school (McKinley) and I think the public schools have improved dramatically in the past few years. But I don’t think the misconception is entirely due to the fact that most people in SF don’t have kids.

Let’s remember: Of the two superintendents who have been in charge since the 1990s, one ran an administration riddled with corruption; the other, while a talented educator, was arrogant, vindictive and disdainful of the community. That sort of thing doesn’t help with the perception of the district.

The second problem is that the district has spent a lot of money on a public-relations office whose chief job in the past has been to protect and promote the superintendent — so not a lot of effort has gone into promoting the schools in general. That’s changing now, under Acting Superintendent Gwen Chan, who seems to be doing a great job so far — and with a little effort, SFUSD could (and should) organize a major advertising and public-relations campaign to promote the quality and importance of public education in the city. That would help a lot.

Because those numbers really suck. And we all have to work to change them.

“Rust” never sleeps

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Between Kirsten Greenidge’s rumbling and ambitious Rust and Chantal Bilodeau’s titilutf8g if more staid Pleasure and Pain, a metatheme is already emerging from the Magic Theatre’s annual three-play Hot House festival. Both Greenidge and Bilodeau merge a contemporary identity-focused story line and a fractured mise-en-scène to explore the porous border between mundane reality and individual and collective fictions.

Rust centers on a troubled patch in the high-flying career of football star Randall Mifflin (Mikaal Sulaiman). The Mighty Miff, to his fans, has temporarily retired for vague reasons having to do with the corruption of the game’s ideals, setting off a controversy embodied by two comically artificial-looking TV sportscasters (Eric Fraisher Hayes and Lance Gardner) complete with navy blue blazers, puffy microphones, plastic hairdos, and even banks of stadium floodlights strapped to their backs. Miff, meanwhile, stays home in edgy seclusion playing video games and collecting antique mammy-shaped cookie jars (and other fixtures of a commercial culture once saturated with antebellum black caricatures). To the growing concern of his wife (April Matthis) and friends (Nicole C. Julien and Donald Lett), it becomes clear Randall is being haunted over the phone by the ghosts of product icons Aunt Jemima, here known as Ella Mae Walker (Cathleen Riddley), and Uncle Ben, or Mr. Peale (L. Peter Callender), who plead with him to deliver the race.

A subplot features a yuppie brother (Gardner) and sister (Matthis) in the process of selling their late parents’ old house. Out of one wall steps a life-size version of Mary-Mary-Anne (Julien), a pickaninny the brother instantly recognizes from childhood as Farina, the cereal icon, one of many racist commercial images their mother bitterly pasted behind the wallpaper in a kind of symbolic burial. Mary-Mary-Anne leads the siblings on a hunt for the cookie jar now in Randall’s possession, as the two plot strands come together — along with an eerie set of lantern-wielding Gold Dust Washing Powder twins, Omas (Lett) and Snipe (Hayes) — in an antique shop operated by a drunken dealer named Gin George (Callender).

Setting these grotesque caricatures in motion among flesh-and-blood moderns is just one of the ways Greenidge’s uneven but vital, imaginative, and ambitious comedy theatrically realizes the uneasy blending of stereotypes and real life. It does so in a way particularly reminiscent of Suzan-Lori Parks’s work. As the enduring force of blackface caricature, and the white supremacist ideology behind it, threads its way into the present day, it becomes clear that the subtle negotiations and compromises attendant on personal and collective identity in 21st-century American culture stand in need of a little schooling, if not an exorcism.

The protagonist in Bilodeau’s Pleasure and Pain has her own problem with private demons bearing down on her social world. Peggy (Jennifer Clare) is an attractive, perky, semiawkward, almost unbelievably sheltered 21st-century young woman groping toward a more or less ’50s-style sexual awakening with an overactive fantasy life she half worries, half hopes will leave her "out of control." Needless to say, she gets her ambivalent wish. Her daydreams — ruled by a strapping dominator (Andrew Utter) dressed in casual S-M gear — soon spill out into her workaday world, which is split between secretarial duties alongside former babysitter and comically unguarded confidant Ruth (a sharp and amusing Catherine Smitko) and a prematurely settled home life with her schluby fiancé (Max Moore).

Not exactly new territory. Pleasure and Pain lacks anything like the imagination — let alone psychological or social import — of Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour or even a film by Catherine Breillat. Its limited journey is fairly dull. All the passing allure of bare midriff and lash could have come out of a Good Vibrations catalog circa 1978. *

PLEASURE AND PAIN RUST

Through April 1

See Web site for schedule, $20–$45

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, bldg D, third floor

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

>

James Madison Freedom of Information Award Winners

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The Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California Chapter has been handing awards for 22 years to journalists, educators, public officials, and citizens who best exemplify the importance of open and accountable government and a free and diligent press. And every year the Guardian recognizes the winners and helps highlight the important issues that they raise for the Bay Area and beyond. Here are this year’s winners:

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

ROWLAND "REB" REBELE


Three few years ago the Oakland Unified School District announced that, due to budget constraints, it was shutting down all the student-run newspapers in the district. Rowland "Reb" Rebele lives in Aptos, but he read about the shutdown in a San Francisco Chronicle column.

He picked up the phone, made some calls, and found out the situation was desperate and how much money was needed. He then wrote a check sufficient to resurrect the student newspapers for a year. Then he kept on writing checks to keep the papers going last year and again this year. This was typical of Rebele. No one asked him for help. He received virtually no acknowledgment for his gift. But his timely action turned the lights back on for fledgling newspapers that were out of money and, it seemed, out of luck.

Rebele is a First Amendment mensch (a description that James Madison, had he any familiarity with Yiddish, would have approved of). In his half century of publishing community newspapers that he owned and operated in Coalinga, Chula Vista, and Paradise in California and across the country, he was energetic, inspiring, and devoted to his readers and his communities, and a demon in pushing for open government and accountability. He pursued the same policies as a stalwart for half a century in the California Newspaper Publishers Association and as an activist president who brought key reforms and exceptional leaders to the organization.

Rebele has been a director of the California First Amendment Coalition for a decade. He quickly became the one truly indispensable member of the organization, pushing it, pulling it, holding it together, and cajoling it to broaden its activities because he felt the organization and its mission were vital.

He has also launched an innovative internship program at Stanford University. Rather than just give money to the school, he and his wife, Pat, created a program that has enabled dozens of students to get hands-on experience writing for real newspapers in California. Quietly and selflessly, Rebele has spent his newspaper career fighting the good fight for First Amendment and public interest principles. (Bruce B. Brugmann)

Beverly Kees Educator Award

ROBERT OVETZ


Art Institute of San Francisco instructor Robert Ovetz was fired after he criticized the administration for confiscating a magazine his students produced for his class last December.

Ovetz, who had taught at the institute for three years, told his students to create a "culturally critical" magazine as their final project for a cultural studies class he taught last fall. They produced a 36-page zine called Mute/Off.

Less than 24 hours after he and students distributed 500 copies of the magazine, which Ovetz printed with the institute’s copy machine, most were gone. Ovetz initially attributed their disappearance to popularity, but he soon learned from students that the administration of the school, which was purchased by Goldman Sachs and General Electric last year, had removed them from its campuses and even literally pulled them out of students’ hands.

"This is an example of how a corporation is not held accountable for upholding basic constitutional rights [to] free speech. This is a private company that’s operating as an institution of higher learning," Ovetz told the Guardian. "Its only interest is its bottom line, and its bottom line is profit."

Ovetz complained to the administration about vioutf8g the students’ freedom of speech and received his pink slip Dec. 20, 2006. Dean of Academic Affairs Caren Meghreblian told Ovetz the magazine possibly violated copyright law by reproducing corporate logos without permission and had grammatical errors. She also said a story in the magazine called "Homicide," about three white kids playing a video game as black gangsters, might be racist.

After Ovetz and students complained and the media reported the story, the administration allowed students to redistribute the magazines, but it still refuses to give Ovetz his job back. (Chris Albon)

To size up the magazine yourself, visit www.brandedmonkey.com/muteOffLowRes.pdf.

Citizen

RYAN MCKEE


The object of the California Public Records Act is to ensure the people’s right to know how their state and local governments are functioning. Newspapers are often the entities that test the limits and loopholes of the law. But in January 2006 an 18-year-old college student, Ryan McKee, undertook an audit of each of the 31 California state agencies that was the first of its kind. McKee tested how these agencies, which he personally visited, responded to simple requests to view and get copies of readily available public documents. The results revealed a disturbing pattern. Several agencies performed miserably, including the Department of Justice, which counsels and represents many other state agencies on the Public Records Act, and all of the agencies violated at least one aspect of the law. Common problems included asking for identification, making illegal charges, and taking longer than allowed to release information. McKee undertook the audit while volunteering for Californians Aware, a nonprofit where his father, Richard McKee, is president. A copy of the audit, including its results and grades, was sent to each agency to help it better understand and adjust to its responsibilities. (Sarah Phelan)

Journalists

MICHELE MARCUCCI AND REBECCA VESELY, ANG NEWSPAPERS


ANG Newspapers regional reporters Rebecca Vesely and Michele Marcucci are being honored for the series "Broken Homes" and their unflinching pursuit of public records that exposed negligent care administered to people with autism and other forms developmental disabilities. The series highlighted problems ranging from a lack of proper supervision to unlicensed officials working at health care facilities. Some of these offenses were then linked to patient deaths.

The award recognizes the daunting and tedious task that befell the journalists: 15 months of scouring thousands of hard-copy papers from dozens of sources that included licensing agencies, multiple law enforcement bureaus, and coroner’s offices. The results were entered into a database and cross-checked against other sources of information.

"It’s not like we work at the New York Times, where you can lock yourself in a room for a year. This is one-stop shopping here," Marcucci told the Guardian, noting that both reporters continued their daily beats while working on the project. The series was well received and helped prompt state officials to reinstate inspections of licensed facilities that had been eliminated due to budget cuts. (Christopher Jasmin)

ANDREW MCINTOSH AND JOHN HILL, SACRAMENTO BEE


Two reporters from the Sacramento Bee, Andrew McIntosh and John Hill, get Freedom of Information props for exposing the cronyism and the corruption of the California Highway Patrol.

The two wrote a series of articles detailing how the CHP violated state and department regulations in awarding contracts for items ranging from pistols to helicopters.

"The CHP spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on equipment and goods," McIntosh told the Guardian. "That’s taxpayer money."

McIntosh said he and Hill took a systematic look at the department’s bidding process and found it was not competitive. The investigation led to the suspension of one officer, Gregory Williams, who the reporters found had awarded $600,000 worth of contracts to his daughter’s company for license plate scanning devices, $500,000 of which was canceled after the reporters exposed the scandal.

The reporters also found the CHP, which controls signature gathering at the Department of Motor Vehicles and other state buildings, denied more than 100 applications for permission to register voters or solicit signatures. Other stories pushed Senate majority leader Gloria Romero and Assemblymember Bonnie Garcia to call for a state audit of the CHP.

McIntosh told us the investigation showed "the CHP is not above public scrutiny or the law when it comes to business dealings." (Albon)

MEERA PAL, CONTRA COSTA TIMES


A good mayoral race isn’t really fun unless a bit of scandal emerges, like it did in Pleasanton two weeks before the November 2006 election.

Meera Pal decided to research the roots of a story that was handed to her by city council member Steve Brozosky, who was challenging incumbent mayor Jennifer Hosterman. Brozosky gave Pal e-mails his campaign treasurer obtained through open-records laws that showed Hosterman may have used her city e-mail account to solicit campaign donations and endorsements, a violation of state law.

But Pal went beyond Brozosky’s story and submitted her own public records requests for the city e-mail account of the mayor, as well as a year’s worth of e-mail from Brozosky and the three other council members.

Pal’s public records request revealed that Brozosky’s inbox was completely void of any e-mail, something neither he nor the city’s IT manager could explain. Brozosky is a computer expert who runs a company that vends city Web site software, so his technical expertise made the situation even more suspicious.

Investigations revealed it was just a setting on his computer that was inadvertently scrubbing the e-mail from the city’s server. Though both violations aren’t necessarily serious crimes, the race was close enough that dirt on either side could have had a profound impact on the outcome, and the results show 68,000 voters who were truly torn during the last two weeks before election day while Pal was reporting these stories. Hosterman eventually won by just 188 votes. (Amanda Witherell)

SUSAN SWARD, BILL WALLACE, ELIZABETH FERNANDEZ, AND SETH ROSENFELD, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE


In the wake of 2003’s so-called Fajitagate police scandal — in which San Francisco officer Alex Fagan Jr. and others were accused of assaulting and then covering up their alleged vicious beating of innocent citizens — the San Francisco Chronicle uncovered records showing that Fagan’s short history on the force was marked by regular incidents of abusive behavior, the kind of records that should have served as a warning for the problems to come.

"We decided to take a look to see how common it was. And we spent a lot of time doing that," Steve Cook, the Chronicle editor of what became last year’s five-part "Use of Force" series, told the Guardian. The team used the Sunshine Ordinance to gather boxloads of records on use-of-force incidents, which it organized into a database that was then supplemented and cross-referenced with a wide variety of other public records, along with old-fashioned shoe leather reporting, all the while fighting through bureaucratic denials and delays.

Despite an embarrassing mislabeled photo on the first day of the series that served as fodder for attacks by the Police Department and Mayor’s Office, the series made clear that rogue cops were abusing their authority, totally unchecked by their supervisors. "We were proud of what we were able to show," Cook said. "We showed a department in need of some basic reforms."

The series helped spur the early intervention system that was recently approved by the Police Commission. It’s a good first step, but one criticized by the Chron and the Guardian for failing to include some key indicators used in other cities (see our editorial "Fix Early Warning for Cops," 2/28/07), something that Cook said requires ongoing vigilance by the press, to bring about needed reforms: "Only the news media is really going to accomplish this, if they stay with the story." (Steven T. Jones)

Legal counsel

DAVID GREENE


The First Amendment was never about money. Free speech is supposed to be free. But these days threats to the First Amendment are growing, more and more people who lack the resources of a major media outlet are in need of help — and there aren’t many places dedicated to offering that assistance, free.

That’s where David Greene and the First Amendment Project come in.

Since 1999, as a staff attorney and executive director, Greene has helped dozens of freelance journalists, students, nonprofit organizations, and independent media outlets protect and expand their free speech and open government rights.

The operation he runs is totally independent. That’s a key point in an era of massive media consolidation: when the Guardian sought earlier this year to find legal representation to force open the key records in a lawsuit over Dean Singleton’s local newspaper merger, we found that just about every local media law firm represented at least one of the parties to the case and thus was conflicted. The FAP was not.

Greene and the FAP have represented blogger Josh Wolf and freelancer Sarah Olson in landmark subpoena cases. Greene, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, wrote the amicus brief on behalf of noted literary artists in the California Supreme Court case In re George T., in which the court, relying heavily on the FAP brief, overturned the conviction of a juvenile who made threats to other students with a poem. And the struggle just goes on. The FAP is funded largely by private donations and always needs additional support.

"Unfortunately," Greene told us, "we have to turn away a lot more cases than we can take." (Tim Redmond)

News media

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS


After years of last-minute backroom deals at San Jose’s City Hall, things came to a head when the City Council rubber-stamped proposals to give a $4 million subsidy to the San Jose Grand Prix, $80 million for a stadium to keep the Earthquake soccer team from leaving town, and $45 million for new City Hall furniture.

Clearly, something had to give. But it was left to San Jose Mercury News editorial writers to push for transparent and accessible government and better enforcement of the state’s open government laws.

First they shamed the city, pointing out that "San Francisco, Oakland, even Milpitas have better public-access laws." Next they hammered then-mayor Ron Gonzales for saying that calls for more open government were "a bunch of nonsense." Then they printed guiding principles for a proposed sunshine ordinance that they’d developed in conjunction with the League of Women Voters and Mercury News attorney James Chadwick.

When city council member Chuck Reed was elected mayor on a platform of open government reforms, the paper still didn’t give up. Instead, it’s continuing to champion the need to bring more sunshine to San Jose and working with a community task force on breaking new ground, such as taping closed sessions so they can one day be made available when there’s no further need for secrecy.

Somehow the Merc also managed to pull off another amazing feat: the paper built public understanding of and support for sunshine along the way. (Phelan)

SAN MATEO COUNTY TIMES


When outbreaks of the highly contagious norovirus sprang up in a number of California counties, San Mateo County was among those hit. Public health officials, however, would not release the names of the facilities where numerous individuals became infected, citing concerns about privacy and not wanting to discourage facility managers from contacting health officials.

Nonetheless, the San Mateo County Times ran a series of reports on the outbreaks in the named and unnamed facilities. After publishing reports on unnamed facilities, the news staff began to receive phone calls from residents who wanted to know the names of the facilities. Times reporter Rebekah Gordon told us it became clear that the public wanted to know this information, and the paper fought the county’s secrecy.

Gordon learned that facilities are required by law to report outbreaks, regardless of the potential for media exposure. Times attorney Duffy Carolan sought out and won the disclosure of the names of four facilities.

"The county’s initial nondisclosure decision evoked public policy and public safety concerns at a very broad level, and nondisclosure would have had a very profound effect on the public’s ability to obtain information that affects their own health and safety. By persisting in the face of secrecy, the Times was able to establish a precedent and practice that will well serve to inform their readers in the future," Carolan told us.

The paper learned the outbreak was far more widespread than the county had admitted, finding 146 cases in six facilities. Gordon said, "The numbers were so much higher than we were ever led to believe." (Julie Park)

Online free speech

JOSH WOLF


Even as he sits inside the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, where he’s been denied on-camera and in-person interviews, jailed freelance journalist Josh Wolf manages to get out the message. Last month Wolf, who is imprisoned for refusing to give up video outtakes of a July 2005 anarchist protest in the Mission that turned violent, earned a place in the Guinness World Records for being the journalist to have served the longest jail term in US history for resisting a subpoena.

His thoughts on the agenda behind his incarceration were read at press conferences that day, reminding everyone of the importance of a free press. Meanwhile, Wolf has managed to continue operating his blog, www.joshwolf.net, by sending letters to family, friends, and fellow journalists, including those at the Guardian.

Wolf has also managed to create two other Web sites: www.mediafreedoms.net, which supports journalists’ resistance to government pressure, and www.prisonblogs.net, which allows prisoners to air thoughts and grievances. If Wolf can do all this from behind bars, imagine what he’ll do when he finally gets out. As Wolf would say, if we could only speak to him without reserving a phone interview 48 hours in advance: "Free press? Then free Josh Wolf!" (Phelan)

Public official

JOHN SARSFIELD


As district attorney for San Benito County, John Sarsfield upset the political applecart when he tried to prosecute the County Board of Supervisors for ignoring the Brown Act’s prohibitions on private communication and consensus building among board members on matters that involved employment decisions, personnel appeals, contracting, and land use–growth control issues.

His decision didn’t sit well in a county where battles over the future of the land have spawned Los Valientes, a secret society that has targeted slow-growth advocates and anyone who gets in its way — including believers in open government. So the board retaliated by defunding Sarsfield’s office, forcing the DA to file for a temporary restraining order against the board, the county administrative officer, and the county auditor, a countermove that kept his office operating and the investigation alive — until he lost his reelection bid to the board’s chosen candidate in January 2006.

One of Los Valientes’s targets, Mandy Rose, a Sierra Club member and slow-growth advocate, recalled how people on the outside warned Sarsfield what he was up against, "but he insisted on working within the system. It was what he believed in. Someone even said he was a Boy Scout."

For his efforts, Sarsfield’s life was turned into a living hell that cost him his dogs, his marriage, and eventually his job. But now, with this award, he gets some small recognition for fighting the good fight. And he has also been appointed special assistant inspector general within the Office of the Inspector General by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Phelan)

Special citations

LANCE WILLIAMS AND MARK FAINARU-WADA, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE


Investigative reporter Lance Williams and sportswriter Mark Fainaru-Wada joined forces in 2003 to take on what became one of the biggest — and most controversial — local news stories of the past five years.

The investigation of the Burlingame-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, better known as BALCO, and the larger scandal of widespread steroid use among baseball players was, the San Francisco Chronicle editors decided, too big for one reporter.

In fact, it turned out to be big enough for a series of stories, a book, and a legal battle that almost sent the two writers to federal prison. The duo admits today it was mostly the fear of getting scooped that drove them through the story’s dramatic rise.

"I’m a baseball fan in recovery," Williams told the Guardian. "I used to think I knew the sport. I didn’t have a clue about this stuff. I’m not kidding you. I had no idea how much a part of baseball steroids had become … that whole sort of seamy underside of the drug culture and the game. I just didn’t know it was like that, and I think most fans don’t either."

Although prosecutors seemed to be focusing on BALCO executives, everyone following the story wanted to know what witnesses — in this case top sports stars — told a federal grand jury investigating the company. The outfit had allegedly distributed undetectable steroids and other designer drugs to some of the world’s greatest athletes, including Giants slugger Barry Bonds, who is on his way to making history with a new home run record.

In 2003 the Chronicle published lurid details of the grand jury’s investigation based on notes Williams and Fainaru-Wada had obtained from court transcripts leaked by an anonymous source. Bonds denied knowingly taking any steroids, but prosecutors waved in the air documents allegedly confirming his regular use of substances banned by Major League Baseball.

Furious prosecutors launched an investigation into the leak of secret grand jury transcripts. The reporters were called on to testify but refused — and so joined two other reporters last year threatened with jail time for resisting subpoenas. A lawyer stepped forward last month and admitted leaking the documents, but Williams and Fainaru-Wada came dangerously close to landing in the same East Bay lockup where blogger Josh Wolf is held for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury.

The rash of recent attacks on reporters by federal prosecutors has First Amendment advocates up in arms. After all, no one’s going to leak crucial information if the courts can simply bulldoze the anonymity that journalists grant whistleblowers. Fainaru-Wada and Williams have since inspired a bipartisan proposal in Congress to protect journalists at the federal level (dozens of states already have variations of a shield law in place).

"People roll their eyes when you start talking about the First Amendment," Fainaru-Wada said. "But the First Amendment is not about the press, it’s about the public."

In addition to the James Madison Freedom of Information Award, Williams and Fainaru-Wada’s coverage of the BALCO stories earned them the prestigious George Polk Award. But the story took a dark, unexpected turn last month.

Defense attorney Troy Hellerman, who represented one of the BALCO executives, pleaded guilty Feb. 15 to contempt of court and obstruction of justice charges and could serve up to two years in prison for admitting he twice allowed Fainaru-Wada to take notes from the grand jury’s sealed transcripts.

Just as he was spilling details in 2004, Hellerman demanded that a judge dismiss charges against his client, complaining that the leaks prevented a fair trial. He even blamed the leaks on prosecutors. A deputy attorney general called the moves "an especially cynical abuse of our system of justice."

Media critics lashed out at Williams and Fainaru-Wada for exploiting the leaks before and after Hellerman moved for a dismissal. Among those attacking the Chron reporters were Slate editor Jack Shafer and Tim Rutten at the LA Times, who described the conduct as "sleazy and contemptible."

Williams and Fainaru-Wada today still won’t discuss specifics about their sources, but Williams said without the leaks, names of the athletes involved would have otherwise been kept secret by the government even though the grand jury’s original BALCO investigation was complete.

"The witnesses didn’t have any expectation of privacy or secrecy of any kind," he said. "They were going to be trial witnesses. It was in that context that our reporting got under way. I am sensitive to the need of an investigative grand jury to remain secret. And I’m respectful in general of the government’s secrecy concerns. But it’s not the reporter’s job to enforce that stuff." (G.W. Schulz)

SARAH OLSON


When Oakland freelance writer and radio journalist Sarah Olson stood up to the Army by resisting a subpoena to testify in the case of Iraq war resister First Lt. Ehren Watada, she faced felony charges as well as jail time. But Olson understood that testifying against a source would turn her into an investigative tool of the federal government and chill dissent nationwide. "When the government uses a journalist as its eyes and ears, no one is going to talk to that journalist anymore," Olson told the Guardian.

She also objected to journalists being asked to participate in the prosecution of free speech. "The problem I have with verifying the accuracy of my reporting is that in this case the Army has made speech a crime," Olson said. Watada, whom Olson interviewed, has been charged with missing a troop movement and conduct unbecoming an officer, because he publicly criticized President George W. Bush and his illegal Iraq War.

In the end, Army prosecutors dropped the subpoena once Watada agreed to stipulate that Olson’s reporting was accurate. Olson, for her part, attributes the dropping of the subpoena to the support she received from media groups, including the Society for Professional Journalists. (Phelan)

Student journalist

STAFF OF THE LOWELL


The 2006 school year got off to a rough start for Lowell High School, one of the top-ranked public high schools in the country and certainly San Francisco’s finest. The school’s award-winning student newspaper the Lowell was covering it all.

After the October issue went to press, the school’s two journalism classes, which are solely responsible for writing and editing content for the monthly paper, received a visit from the school’s interim principal, Amy Hansen. Though Hansen says there was no attempt to censor the paper and the classes agree that no prior review was requested when it appeared that the students would be covering some controversial stories, the principal questioned their motivations as journalists and asked them to consider a number of complicated scenarios designed to make them second-guess their roles as reporters. The principal told the student journalists they had a moral responsibility, not to turn out the news, but to turn in their sources and information.

In separate meetings with each journalism class, Hansen questioned them about when it was appropriate to lay aside the pen and paper in the name of the law. The students maintained that as journalists they are in the position to report what happens and not pass moral judgment. Additionally, their privileged position as information gatherers would be compromised if they revealed their sources.

The lectures from Hansen did not deter the journalism classes from their basic mission to cover school news as objectively and thoroughly as possible. Even when police were called in to question Megan Dickey, who was withholding the name of a source she’d used in a story about a tire slashing, she still refused to say what she knew. (Witherell)

Whistleblower

MARK KLEIN


Mark Klein knew there was something fishy going on when his boss at AT&T told him that a representative of the National Security Agency would be coming by to talk to one of the senior technicians. Klein was a union communications tech, one of the people who keep the phone company’s vast network going every day. The NSA visitor stopped by, and before long Klein learned that AT&T’s building on Folsom Street would have a private room that none of the union techs would be allowed to enter.

Klein kept his eyes open and learned enough from company memos to conclude that the government was using AT&T’s equipment to monitor the private communications of unsuspecting and mostly undeserving citizens. When he retired in May 2004, he took a stack of material with him — and when he read in the New York Times a year and half later that the NSA had indeed been spying on people, he decided to go public.

The 62-year-old East Bay resident had never been a whistleblower. "I didn’t even know where to begin," he told us. So he surfed the Web looking for civil liberties groups and wound up contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It was a perfect match: the EFF was about to file a landmark class-action lawsuit against AT&T charging the company with collaborating with the government to spy on ordinary citizens — and Klein’s evidence was a bombshell.

"Mark Klein is a true American hero," EFF lawyer Kurt Opsahl told us. "He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T’s involvement with the government’s invasive surveillance program."

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker has kept Klein’s written testimony under seal, but the EFF is trying to get it released to the public. The suit is moving forward. (Redmond)

SPJ-NorCal’s James Madison Awards dinner is March 13 at 5:30 p.m. at Biscuits and Blues, 401 Mason, SF. Tickets are $50 for members and $70 for the general public. For more information or to see if tickets are still available, contact Matthew Hirsch at (415) 749-5451 or mhirsch@alm.com.

James Madison Freedom of Information Award Winners

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The Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California Chapter has been handing awards for 22 years to journalists, educators, public officials, and citizens who best exemplify the importance of open and accountable government and a free and diligent press. And every year the Guardian recognizes the winners and helps highlight the important issues that they raise for the Bay Area and beyond. Here are this year’s winners:

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

ROWLAND "REB" REBELE


Three few years ago the Oakland Unified School District announced that, due to budget constraints, it was shutting down all the student-run newspapers in the district. Rowland "Reb" Rebele lives in Aptos, but he read about the shutdown in a San Francisco Chronicle column.

He picked up the phone, made some calls, and found out the situation was desperate and how much money was needed. He then wrote a check sufficient to resurrect the student newspapers for a year. Then he kept on writing checks to keep the papers going last year and again this year. This was typical of Rebele. No one asked him for help. He received virtually no acknowledgment for his gift. But his timely action turned the lights back on for fledgling newspapers that were out of money and, it seemed, out of luck.

Rebele is a First Amendment mensch (a description that James Madison, had he any familiarity with Yiddish, would have approved of). In his half century of publishing community newspapers that he owned and operated in Coalinga, Chula Vista, and Paradise in California and across the country, he was energetic, inspiring, and devoted to his readers and his communities, and a demon in pushing for open government and accountability. He pursued the same policies as a stalwart for half a century in the California Newspaper Publishers Association and as an activist president who brought key reforms and exceptional leaders to the organization.

Rebele has been a director of the California First Amendment Coalition for a decade. He quickly became the one truly indispensable member of the organization, pushing it, pulling it, holding it together, and cajoling it to broaden its activities because he felt the organization and its mission were vital.

He has also launched an innovative internship program at Stanford University. Rather than just give money to the school, he and his wife, Pat, created a program that has enabled dozens of students to get hands-on experience writing for real newspapers in California. Quietly and selflessly, Rebele has spent his newspaper career fighting the good fight for First Amendment and public interest principles. (Bruce B. Brugmann)

Beverly Kees Educator Award

ROBERT OVETZ


Art Institute of San Francisco instructor Robert Ovetz was fired after he criticized the administration for confiscating a magazine his students produced for his class last December.

Ovetz, who had taught at the institute for three years, told his students to create a "culturally critical" magazine as their final project for a cultural studies class he taught last fall. They produced a 36-page zine called Mute/Off.

Less than 24 hours after he and students distributed 500 copies of the magazine, which Ovetz printed with the institute’s copy machine, most were gone. Ovetz initially attributed their disappearance to popularity, but he soon learned from students that the administration of the school, which was purchased by Goldman Sachs and General Electric last year, had removed them from its campuses and even literally pulled them out of students’ hands.

"This is an example of how a corporation is not held accountable for upholding basic constitutional rights [to] free speech. This is a private company that’s operating as an institution of higher learning," Ovetz told the Guardian. "Its only interest is its bottom line, and its bottom line is profit."

Ovetz complained to the administration about vioutf8g the students’ freedom of speech and received his pink slip Dec. 20, 2006. Dean of Academic Affairs Caren Meghreblian told Ovetz the magazine possibly violated copyright law by reproducing corporate logos without permission and had grammatical errors. She also said a story in the magazine called "Homicide," about three white kids playing a video game as black gangsters, might be racist.

After Ovetz and students complained and the media reported the story, the administration allowed students to redistribute the magazines, but it still refuses to give Ovetz his job back. (Chris Albon)

To size up the magazine yourself, visit www.brandedmonkey.com/muteOffLowRes.pdf.

Citizen

RYAN MCKEE


The object of the California Public Records Act is to ensure the people’s right to know how their state and local governments are functioning. Newspapers are often the entities that test the limits and loopholes of the law. But in January 2006 an 18-year-old college student, Ryan McKee, undertook an audit of each of the 31 California state agencies that was the first of its kind. McKee tested how these agencies, which he personally visited, responded to simple requests to view and get copies of readily available public documents. The results revealed a disturbing pattern. Several agencies performed miserably, including the Department of Justice, which counsels and represents many other state agencies on the Public Records Act, and all of the agencies violated at least one aspect of the law. Common problems included asking for identification, making illegal charges, and taking longer than allowed to release information. McKee undertook the audit while volunteering for Californians Aware, a nonprofit where his father, Richard McKee, is president. A copy of the audit, including its results and grades, was sent to each agency to help it better understand and adjust to its responsibilities. (Sarah Phelan)

Journalists

MICHELE MARCUCCI AND REBECCA VESELY, ANG NEWSPAPERS


ANG Newspapers regional reporters Rebecca Vesely and Michele Marcucci are being honored for the series "Broken Homes" and their unflinching pursuit of public records that exposed negligent care administered to people with autism and other forms developmental disabilities. The series highlighted problems ranging from a lack of proper supervision to unlicensed officials working at health care facilities. Some of these offenses were then linked to patient deaths.

The award recognizes the daunting and tedious task that befell the journalists: 15 months of scouring thousands of hard-copy papers from dozens of sources that included licensing agencies, multiple law enforcement bureaus, and coroner’s offices. The results were entered into a database and cross-checked against other sources of information.

"It’s not like we work at the New York Times, where you can lock yourself in a room for a year. This is one-stop shopping here," Marcucci told the Guardian, noting that both reporters continued their daily beats while working on the project. The series was well received and helped prompt state officials to reinstate inspections of licensed facilities that had been eliminated due to budget cuts. (Christopher Jasmin)

ANDREW MCINTOSH AND JOHN HILL, SACRAMENTO BEE


Two reporters from the Sacramento Bee, Andrew McIntosh and John Hill, get Freedom of Information props for exposing the cronyism and the corruption of the California Highway Patrol.

The two wrote a series of articles detailing how the CHP violated state and department regulations in awarding contracts for items ranging from pistols to helicopters.

"The CHP spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on equipment and goods," McIntosh told the Guardian. "That’s taxpayer money."

McIntosh said he and Hill took a systematic look at the department’s bidding process and found it was not competitive. The investigation led to the suspension of one officer, Gregory Williams, who the reporters found had awarded $600,000 worth of contracts to his daughter’s company for license plate scanning devices, $500,000 of which was canceled after the reporters exposed the scandal.

The reporters also found the CHP, which controls signature gathering at the Department of Motor Vehicles and other state buildings, denied more than 100 applications for permission to register voters or solicit signatures. Other stories pushed Senate majority leader Gloria Romero and Assemblymember Bonnie Garcia to call for a state audit of the CHP.

McIntosh told us the investigation showed "the CHP is not above public scrutiny or the law when it comes to business dealings." (Albon)

MEERA PAL, CONTRA COSTA TIMES


A good mayoral race isn’t really fun unless a bit of scandal emerges, like it did in Pleasanton two weeks before the November 2006 election.

Meera Pal decided to research the roots of a story that was handed to her by city council member Steve Brozosky, who was challenging incumbent mayor Jennifer Hosterman. Brozosky gave Pal e-mails his campaign treasurer obtained through open-records laws that showed Hosterman may have used her city e-mail account to solicit campaign donations and endorsements, a violation of state law.

But Pal went beyond Brozosky’s story and submitted her own public records requests for the city e-mail account of the mayor, as well as a year’s worth of e-mail from Brozosky and the three other council members.

Pal’s public records request revealed that Brozosky’s inbox was completely void of any e-mail, something neither he nor the city’s IT manager could explain. Brozosky is a computer expert who runs a company that vends city Web site software, so his technical expertise made the situation even more suspicious.

Investigations revealed it was just a setting on his computer that was inadvertently scrubbing the e-mail from the city’s server. Though both violations aren’t necessarily serious crimes, the race was close enough that dirt on either side could have had a profound impact on the outcome, and the results show 68,000 voters who were truly torn during the last two weeks before election day while Pal was reporting these stories. Hosterman eventually won by just 188 votes. (Amanda Witherell)

SUSAN SWARD, BILL WALLACE, ELIZABETH FERNANDEZ, AND SETH ROSENFELD, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE


In the wake of 2003’s so-called Fajitagate police scandal — in which San Francisco officer Alex Fagan Jr. and others were accused of assaulting and then covering up their alleged vicious beating of innocent citizens — the San Francisco Chronicle uncovered records showing that Fagan’s short history on the force was marked by regular incidents of abusive behavior, the kind of records that should have served as a warning for the problems to come.

"We decided to take a look to see how common it was. And we spent a lot of time doing that," Steve Cook, the Chronicle editor of what became last year’s five-part "Use of Force" series, told the Guardian. The team used the Sunshine Ordinance to gather boxloads of records on use-of-force incidents, which it organized into a database that was then supplemented and cross-referenced with a wide variety of other public records, along with old-fashioned shoe leather reporting, all the while fighting through bureaucratic denials and delays.

Despite an embarrassing mislabeled photo on the first day of the series that served as fodder for attacks by the Police Department and Mayor’s Office, the series made clear that rogue cops were abusing their authority, totally unchecked by their supervisors. "We were proud of what we were able to show," Cook said. "We showed a department in need of some basic reforms."

The series helped spur the early intervention system that was recently approved by the Police Commission. It’s a good first step, but one criticized by the Chron and the Guardian for failing to include some key indicators used in other cities (see our editorial "Fix Early Warning for Cops," 2/28/07), something that Cook said requires ongoing vigilance by the press, to bring about needed reforms: "Only the news media is really going to accomplish this, if they stay with the story." (Steven T. Jones)

Legal counsel

DAVID GREENE


The First Amendment was never about money. Free speech is supposed to be free. But these days threats to the First Amendment are growing, more and more people who lack the resources of a major media outlet are in need of help — and there aren’t many places dedicated to offering that assistance, free.

That’s where David Greene and the First Amendment Project come in.

Since 1999, as a staff attorney and executive director, Greene has helped dozens of freelance journalists, students, nonprofit organizations, and independent media outlets protect and expand their free speech and open government rights.

The operation he runs is totally independent. That’s a key point in an era of massive media consolidation: when the Guardian sought earlier this year to find legal representation to force open the key records in a lawsuit over Dean Singleton’s local newspaper merger, we found that just about every local media law firm represented at least one of the parties to the case and thus was conflicted. The FAP was not.

Greene and the FAP have represented blogger Josh Wolf and freelancer Sarah Olson in landmark subpoena cases. Greene, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, wrote the amicus brief on behalf of noted literary artists in the California Supreme Court case In re George T., in which the court, relying heavily on the FAP brief, overturned the conviction of a juvenile who made threats to other students with a poem. And the struggle just goes on. The FAP is funded largely by private donations and always needs additional support.

"Unfortunately," Greene told us, "we have to turn away a lot more cases than we can take." (Tim Redmond)

News media

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS


After years of last-minute backroom deals at San Jose’s City Hall, things came to a head when the City Council rubber-stamped proposals to give a $4 million subsidy to the San Jose Grand Prix, $80 million for a stadium to keep the Earthquake soccer team from leaving town, and $45 million for new City Hall furniture.

Clearly, something had to give. But it was left to San Jose Mercury News editorial writers to push for transparent and accessible government and better enforcement of the state’s open government laws.

First they shamed the city, pointing out that "San Francisco, Oakland, even Milpitas have better public-access laws." Next they hammered then-mayor Ron Gonzales for saying that calls for more open government were "a bunch of nonsense." Then they printed guiding principles for a proposed sunshine ordinance that they’d developed in conjunction with the League of Women Voters and Mercury News attorney James Chadwick.

When city council member Chuck Reed was elected mayor on a platform of open government reforms, the paper still didn’t give up. Instead, it’s continuing to champion the need to bring more sunshine to San Jose and working with a community task force on breaking new ground, such as taping closed sessions so they can one day be made available when there’s no further need for secrecy.

Somehow the Merc also managed to pull off another amazing feat: the paper built public understanding of and support for sunshine along the way. (Phelan)

SAN MATEO COUNTY TIMES


When outbreaks of the highly contagious norovirus sprang up in a number of California counties, San Mateo County was among those hit. Public health officials, however, would not release the names of the facilities where numerous individuals became infected, citing concerns about privacy and not wanting to discourage facility managers from contacting health officials.

Nonetheless, the San Mateo County Times ran a series of reports on the outbreaks in the named and unnamed facilities. After publishing reports on unnamed facilities, the news staff began to receive phone calls from residents who wanted to know the names of the facilities. Times reporter Rebekah Gordon told us it became clear that the public wanted to know this information, and the paper fought the county’s secrecy.

Gordon learned that facilities are required by law to report outbreaks, regardless of the potential for media exposure. Times attorney Duffy Carolan sought out and won the disclosure of the names of four facilities.

"The county’s initial nondisclosure decision evoked public policy and public safety concerns at a very broad level, and nondisclosure would have had a very profound effect on the public’s ability to obtain information that affects their own health and safety. By persisting in the face of secrecy, the Times was able to establish a precedent and practice that will well serve to inform their readers in the future," Carolan told us.

The paper learned the outbreak was far more widespread than the county had admitted, finding 146 cases in six facilities. Gordon said, "The numbers were so much higher than we were ever led to believe." (Julie Park)

Online free speech

JOSH WOLF


Even as he sits inside the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, where he’s been denied on-camera and in-person interviews, jailed freelance journalist Josh Wolf manages to get out the message. Last month Wolf, who is imprisoned for refusing to give up video outtakes of a July 2005 anarchist protest in the Mission that turned violent, earned a place in the Guinness World Records for being the journalist to have served the longest jail term in US history for resisting a subpoena.

His thoughts on the agenda behind his incarceration were read at press conferences that day, reminding everyone of the importance of a free press. Meanwhile, Wolf has managed to continue operating his blog, www.joshwolf.net, by sending letters to family, friends, and fellow journalists, including those at the Guardian.

Wolf has also managed to create two other Web sites: www.mediafreedoms.net, which supports journalists’ resistance to government pressure, and www.prisonblogs.net, which allows prisoners to air thoughts and grievances. If Wolf can do all this from behind bars, imagine what he’ll do when he finally gets out. As Wolf would say, if we could only speak to him without reserving a phone interview 48 hours in advance: "Free press? Then free Josh Wolf!" (Phelan)

Public official

JOHN SARSFIELD


As district attorney for San Benito County, John Sarsfield upset the political applecart when he tried to prosecute the County Board of Supervisors for ignoring the Brown Act’s prohibitions on private communication and consensus building among board members on matters that involved employment decisions, personnel appeals, contracting, and land use–growth control issues.

His decision didn’t sit well in a county where battles over the future of the land have spawned Los Valientes, a secret society that has targeted slow-growth advocates and anyone who gets in its way — including believers in open government. So the board retaliated by defunding Sarsfield’s office, forcing the DA to file for a temporary restraining order against the board, the county administrative officer, and the county auditor, a countermove that kept his office operating and the investigation alive — until he lost his reelection bid to the board’s chosen candidate in January 2006.

One of Los Valientes’s targets, Mandy Rose, a Sierra Club member and slow-growth advocate, recalled how people on the outside warned Sarsfield what he was up against, "but he insisted on working within the system. It was what he believed in. Someone even said he was a Boy Scout."

For his efforts, Sarsfield’s life was turned into a living hell that cost him his dogs, his marriage, and eventually his job. But now, with this award, he gets some small recognition for fighting the good fight. And he has also been appointed special assistant inspector general within the Office of the Inspector General by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Phelan)

Special citations

LANCE WILLIAMS AND MARK FAINARU-WADA, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE


Investigative reporter Lance Williams and sportswriter Mark Fainaru-Wada joined forces in 2003 to take on what became one of the biggest — and most controversial — local news stories of the past five years.

The investigation of the Burlingame-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, better known as BALCO, and the larger scandal of widespread steroid use among baseball players was, the San Francisco Chronicle editors decided, too big for one reporter.

In fact, it turned out to be big enough for a series of stories, a book, and a legal battle that almost sent the two writers to federal prison. The duo admits today it was mostly the fear of getting scooped that drove them through the story’s dramatic rise.

"I’m a baseball fan in recovery," Williams told the Guardian. "I used to think I knew the sport. I didn’t have a clue about this stuff. I’m not kidding you. I had no idea how much a part of baseball steroids had become … that whole sort of seamy underside of the drug culture and the game. I just didn’t know it was like that, and I think most fans don’t either."

Although prosecutors seemed to be focusing on BALCO executives, everyone following the story wanted to know what witnesses — in this case top sports stars — told a federal grand jury investigating the company. The outfit had allegedly distributed undetectable steroids and other designer drugs to some of the world’s greatest athletes, including Giants slugger Barry Bonds, who is on his way to making history with a new home run record.

In 2003 the Chronicle published lurid details of the grand jury’s investigation based on notes Williams and Fainaru-Wada had obtained from court transcripts leaked by an anonymous source. Bonds denied knowingly taking any steroids, but prosecutors waved in the air documents allegedly confirming his regular use of substances banned by Major League Baseball.

Furious prosecutors launched an investigation into the leak of secret grand jury transcripts. The reporters were called on to testify but refused — and so joined two other reporters last year threatened with jail time for resisting subpoenas. A lawyer stepped forward last month and admitted leaking the documents, but Williams and Fainaru-Wada came dangerously close to landing in the same East Bay lockup where blogger Josh Wolf is held for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury.

The rash of recent attacks on reporters by federal prosecutors has First Amendment advocates up in arms. After all, no one’s going to leak crucial information if the courts can simply bulldoze the anonymity that journalists grant whistleblowers. Fainaru-Wada and Williams have since inspired a bipartisan proposal in Congress to protect journalists at the federal level (dozens of states already have variations of a shield law in place).

"People roll their eyes when you start talking about the First Amendment," Fainaru-Wada said. "But the First Amendment is not about the press, it’s about the public."

In addition to the James Madison Freedom of Information Award, Williams and Fainaru-Wada’s coverage of the BALCO stories earned them the prestigious George Polk Award. But the story took a dark, unexpected turn last month.

Defense attorney Troy Hellerman, who represented one of the BALCO executives, pleaded guilty Feb. 15 to contempt of court and obstruction of justice charges and could serve up to two years in prison for admitting he twice allowed Fainaru-Wada to take notes from the grand jury’s sealed transcripts.

Just as he was spilling details in 2004, Hellerman demanded that a judge dismiss charges against his client, complaining that the leaks prevented a fair trial. He even blamed the leaks on prosecutors. A deputy attorney general called the moves "an especially cynical abuse of our system of justice."

Media critics lashed out at Williams and Fainaru-Wada for exploiting the leaks before and after Hellerman moved for a dismissal. Among those attacking the Chron reporters were Slate editor Jack Shafer and Tim Rutten at the LA Times, who described the conduct as "sleazy and contemptible."

Williams and Fainaru-Wada today still won’t discuss specifics about their sources, but Williams said without the leaks, names of the athletes involved would have otherwise been kept secret by the government even though the grand jury’s original BALCO investigation was complete.

"The witnesses didn’t have any expectation of privacy or secrecy of any kind," he said. "They were going to be trial witnesses. It was in that context that our reporting got under way. I am sensitive to the need of an investigative grand jury to remain secret. And I’m respectful in general of the government’s secrecy concerns. But it’s not the reporter’s job to enforce that stuff." (G.W. Schulz)

SARAH OLSON


When Oakland freelance writer and radio journalist Sarah Olson stood up to the Army by resisting a subpoena to testify in the case of Iraq war resister First Lt. Ehren Watada, she faced felony charges as well as jail time. But Olson understood that testifying against a source would turn her into an investigative tool of the federal government and chill dissent nationwide. "When the government uses a journalist as its eyes and ears, no one is going to talk to that journalist anymore," Olson told the Guardian.

She also objected to journalists being asked to participate in the prosecution of free speech. "The problem I have with verifying the accuracy of my reporting is that in this case the Army has made speech a crime," Olson said. Watada, whom Olson interviewed, has been charged with missing a troop movement and conduct unbecoming an officer, because he publicly criticized President George W. Bush and his illegal Iraq War.

In the end, Army prosecutors dropped the subpoena once Watada agreed to stipulate that Olson’s reporting was accurate. Olson, for her part, attributes the dropping of the subpoena to the support she received from media groups, including the Society for Professional Journalists. (Phelan)

Student journalist

STAFF OF THE LOWELL


The 2006 school year got off to a rough start for Lowell High School, one of the top-ranked public high schools in the country and certainly San Francisco’s finest. The school’s award-winning student newspaper the Lowell was covering it all.

After the October issue went to press, the school’s two journalism classes, which are solely responsible for writing and editing content for the monthly paper, received a visit from the school’s interim principal, Amy Hansen. Though Hansen says there was no attempt to censor the paper and the classes agree that no prior review was requested when it appeared that the students would be covering some controversial stories, the principal questioned their motivations as journalists and asked them to consider a number of complicated scenarios designed to make them second-guess their roles as reporters. The principal told the student journalists they had a moral responsibility, not to turn out the news, but to turn in their sources and information.

In separate meetings with each journalism class, Hansen questioned them about when it was appropriate to lay aside the pen and paper in the name of the law. The students maintained that as journalists they are in the position to report what happens and not pass moral judgment. Additionally, their privileged position as information gatherers would be compromised if they revealed their sources.

The lectures from Hansen did not deter the journalism classes from their basic mission to cover school news as objectively and thoroughly as possible. Even when police were called in to question Megan Dickey, who was withholding the name of a source she’d used in a story about a tire slashing, she still refused to say what she knew. (Witherell)

Whistleblower

MARK KLEIN


Mark Klein knew there was something fishy going on when his boss at AT&T told him that a representative of the National Security Agency would be coming by to talk to one of the senior technicians. Klein was a union communications tech, one of the people who keep the phone company’s vast network going every day. The NSA visitor stopped by, and before long Klein learned that AT&T’s building on Folsom Street would have a private room that none of the union techs would be allowed to enter.

Klein kept his eyes open and learned enough from company memos to conclude that the government was using AT&T’s equipment to monitor the private communications of unsuspecting and mostly undeserving citizens. When he retired in May 2004, he took a stack of material with him — and when he read in the New York Times a year and half later that the NSA had indeed been spying on people, he decided to go public.

The 62-year-old East Bay resident had never been a whistleblower. "I didn’t even know where to begin," he told us. So he surfed the Web looking for civil liberties groups and wound up contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It was a perfect match: the EFF was about to file a landmark class-action lawsuit against AT&T charging the company with collaborating with the government to spy on ordinary citizens — and Klein’s evidence was a bombshell.

"Mark Klein is a true American hero," EFF lawyer Kurt Opsahl told us. "He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T’s involvement with the government’s invasive surveillance program."

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker has kept Klein’s written testimony under seal, but the EFF is trying to get it released to the public. The suit is moving forward. (Redmond)

SPJ-NorCal’s James Madison Awards dinner is March 13 at 5:30 p.m. at Biscuits and Blues, 401 Mason, SF. Tickets are $50 for members and $70 for the general public. For more information or to see if tickets are still available, contact Matthew Hirsch at (415) 749-5451 or mhirsch@alm.com.

Law enforcement’s real battles

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OPINION In order to be smart on crime, law enforcement needs to make important choices about where to focus our resources. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has been making poor choices, and those choices are hitting home in San Francisco.

Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted raids in San Francisco and around the Bay Area, rounding up immigrants at their jobs and schools, in some instances with ICE agents announcing themselves as police. These actions sow fear in the immigrant community among undocumented and documented residents alike.

The raids conducted in San Francisco present many of us in local law enforcement with a great concern. One of law enforcement’s biggest challenges to protecting crime victims in immigrant communities is encouraging them to come forward. Because immigrants are often afraid to report crimes, they can be regarded as easy targets for violent criminals and con artists.

We all suffer when crime victims are isolated from law enforcement. If victims and witnesses do not report crimes or cooperate with law enforcement, criminals remain on the streets, and all of us are put at risk. That is why my office is holding immigrant resource fairs in the Mission District and Chinatown to support immigrant rights and to make clear to community members that they are protected by San Francisco’s Sanctuary Ordinance and that my office will not report them to ICE when they come forward as witnesses or victims of crime. Rather than driving immigrants deeper into the shadows, we need to encourage those who have been victimized by crime to work with us to hold criminals accountable.

At the same time, the US Justice Department is walking down an ominous path by threatening journalists with prison time when they protect their confidential sources. In San Francisco the US attorney has held journalist Josh Wolf in prison since September 2006. Wolf should be released. For very good reasons, 31 states, including California, have shield laws upholding the rights of journalists to protect the secrecy of their sources and unpublished information. We need a federal shield law as well.

Of course, I believe crimes against police officers should be aggressively prosecuted. But I also believe that federal authorities have an obligation to respect the First Amendment. Free speech rights are critical to the work of journalists, university researchers, organized labor, and all of us in a democracy. The Justice Department should recognize the importance of protecting free speech, not only as constitutional and civil liberties issues but as smart public safety policy. Journalists play a key role in connecting us to individuals with information about crimes, and threatening the confidentiality of their sources has a chilling effect. If sources fear their confidentiality will not be protected, they will be less likely to come forward to journalists with information that could expose corruption or assist us in solving violent crimes.

Cities across the country are grappling with serious gang violence. Precious resources should be focused on addressing violence, gun crime, and major white-collar crime, not wasted on prosecuting journalists and conducting immigration raids that sweep up innocent residents, actions that hinder our efforts to build trusting relationships with vulnerable, victimized communities and keep the public safe. *

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is the San Francisco district attorney.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s getting a bit creepy how easily and casually we are all starting to joke about global climate change.

It’s not coming, it’s here. My brother is framing houses in a T-shirt in upstate New York. And it’s so cold in California that the citrus crop is ruined. The other day one of my colleagues mentioned that global warming might not make every place warmer; "it’s just going to kill us all."

Maybe it will.

One of the most chilling (sorry) depictions of what’s about to happen comes not from Al Gore’s movie (which was powerful) but from a book called A Friend of the Earth, which is a pretty bad novel by a very good writer, T.C. Boyle. The story line is weak, but the scene — Santa Inez in 2025 — has a strange air of realism. It’s almost impossible to live there in Boyle’s future; the storms are so regular and fierce that only specially constructed homes can survive them, and almost nobody spends much time outdoors.

I have a friend who’s a very, very successful investment adviser, a self-made millionaire several times over, who has been living a dream of a life in Boca Raton, Fla., diving and spearfishing and cruising around on his yacht … and he just sold his place and bought a dirt farm in Kentucky. Florida is going to be wiped out by the hurricanes, he says. He’s also shut down a lot of his business, since he thinks the US economy is going to completely tank soon. He wants to be someplace where he can grow his own food.

I think this is crazy. I’ve never been into doomsday. I have two kids, which by itself is an act of optimism and hope. As we say in my family (which has elevated the art of denial to world-class levels), everything is going to be just fine.

So I laugh about the weather like everyone else. I live way up on a hill; if the ice melts and the sea rises all the way to my doorstep, it will be time to buy an ark. I’ve always been into boats anyway.

But right now it really feels like this is coming at us a lot faster than anyone expected. And the much-heralded moves by the governor of California to reduce greenhouse gases a little bit by a few years from now seem so incredibly puny.

In politics I’ve always felt that intent matters. There are some wonderful programs that don’t work as well as they should, not because of corruption but because the money is inadequate or the staff isn’t properly trained or somebody made some mistakes. That’s different from somebody deliberately lying, cheating, and stealing to game the system.

Pacific Gas and Electric Corp. is a corrupt institution with sleazy lawyers and consultants who abuse the local political system. Carolyn Knee, who was the treasurer for a group fighting on behalf of a ballot campaign for public power in 2002, is a good person who apparently made some mistakes in the complex process of filing all the campaign finance documents on a volunteer basis for a grassroots initiative. And she just told me the SF Ethics Commission wants to fine her $26,700.

There’s something very wrong here. *

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
I started getting all the usual calls last week, from all of the usual national media outlets, with all the usual questions that a local political reporter gets when a local politician makes good. “Who is Nancy Pelosi, really? What do her constituents think of her? Is she going to bring Burning Man and gay marriage to Washington?”
My answer to everyone, from the liberals to the conservatives, was exactly the same:
Relax. There’s nothing to get excited about. Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She’s a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology.
I’m glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she’s not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid antigovernment conservatives can love.
Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations.
And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is “not an issue that we’re fighting about here.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say she’s never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi, who is backing antiwar but also anti-abortion Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It’s nice moderate stuff — raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it’s brilliant: there won’t be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She’s whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.
Along the way, though, she’s pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn’t even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington.
There are a lot of people who think that’s fine. Now that she’s speaker, she’ll be able to do a lot for this city, particularly when it comes to bringing in federal money. I appreciate the fact that her work on the national level, which often involved running away from San Francisco, will allow more-progressive Democrats like Los Angeles’s Maxine Waters to chair powerful committees that can go after White House cronyism and corruption.
But if the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us. SFBG

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