Israel

Israeli Noise Pop: Monotonix’s cure for the perfection that ails ya

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By Alex Felsinger

Certainly the Noise Pop band farthest from home, Tel Aviv’s Monotonix is also the most distinctive group scheduled to perform. The combo brings sweat, mustaches, and outright stage destruction from Israel, but their music – which sports a hint of the Stone Temple Pilots and some blatant hair-metal influences – takes a back seat to their stage antics.

They’re known for dismantling the drum set and flinging the parts across the stage, and sometimes they’ll even light small fires while the music disintegrates into cymbal crashes and guitar feedback. If Noise Pop has you sick of perfect-to-the-note performances, Monotonix promises the cure.

Monotonix performs at Noise Pop with Gutter Twins, Great Northern, and Apache. March 1, 8 p.m., $18. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. (415) 474-0365.

Brad Will and the politics of oil

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MEXICO CITY – Flash back to October 27th, 2006. American photojournalist Brad Will is splayed out on a sidewalk in Oaxaca, Mexico, mortally wounded by the pistoleros of rogue governor Ulisis Ruiz during tumultuous street battles in that southern city. His killers have never been prosecuted.

Now fast forward to this past January 10th. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the unctuous leader of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party faction in the Mexican Senate, announces to a gaggle of reporters that the PRI is prepared to back President Felipe Calderon and his right-wing PAN in passing an “energy reform” package that would permit transnational corporations to generate 49% of the nation’s electricity and open PEMEX, the state petroleum monopoly expropriated from its Anglo-American owners in 1938 and nationalized by President Lazaro Cardenas, to such oil titans as Exxon, British Petroleum, and Shell. Beltrones’ personal preference to initiate the proposed “association of private capitals”: Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company which opened itself to private investment back in 1997 and which has extensive experience in deep water drilling.

What is the connection between these two apparently unconnected events? Just this: the cover-up of Brad Wills’ death smoothed the way for the PRI-PAN partnership to privatize PEMEX.

Although his killers were plainly identified as plainclothes police on Ulisis’s payroll, Wills’ inconvenient death was ignored by then-president Vicente Fox despite demands by human rights and journalist protection organizations for a full investigation of the killing, one of 26 perpetrated by Ruiz’s death squads between August and October of 2006. Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, followed suit and stonewalled an inquiry into Wills’ murder. Similarly, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico never sought justice for a slain citizen despite the personal pleas of the dead man’s family.

Why such studied indifference?

Because holding Governor Ruiz, a prominent PRIista, accountable for the killing(s) would have upset the burgeoning alliance between the PRI and the PAN to ratify Calderon’s legislative agenda, the most pertinent item of which was “energy reform” i.e. the privatization of PEMEX.

Embassy inaction on Brad Wills’ murder followed the same logic. As U.S. ambassador, Bush crony Tony Garza is charged with representing U.S. interests in Mexico and Washington’s interest in opening up Mexican oil to U.S. transnationals far outweighs its interest in bringing the killers of a freelance anarchist reporter to justice. The U.S. has long contemplated a North American Energy Alliance that would guarantee access to Mexican and Canadian reserves.

To this end, Washington has played an active role in facilitating the impending privatization of Petrolios Mexicanos. Over the past months, U.S. transnationals and their associates in government have orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to hoodwink Mexicans into swallowing the lie that PEMEX is hopelessly broken and must be opened to private capital forthwith for the salvation of the Fatherland.

Last July, ex-Federal Reserve czar Alan Greenspan was beamed into Mexico for a teleconference with the nation’s most exalted business council to deliver an ultimatum: if PEMEX was not fixed quickly, the country faced fiscal crisis. Indeed, the petroleum giant (the 11th largest on the planet) generates 40% of Mexico’s total budget and 100% of a social budget that keeps 70,000,000 Mexicans who live in and around the poverty line, in relative quiescence. By “fixing” PEMEX, Greenspan meant privatizing it.

It should be noted that Alan Greenspan is an expert on fiscal crises – his monetary policies just helped to tripwire such a crisis in his own country, the sub-prime disaster.

The Greenspan game plan was echoed December 13th in a memo issued by the International Monetary Fund urgently counseling legislation to allow private capital into PEMEX before the government went broke. Garza’s embassy chimed in the next day, warning of massive capital flight if the Mexican Congress did not pass Calderon’s “energy reform” package. On December 19th, The Economist, which ironically was founded on the fortune reaped by Anglo oil companies in Mexico that eventually became British Petroleum, opined that “the obvious solution to the disaster of PEMEX is to privatize.” Finally, the U.S. Department of Energy delivered the death knell on January 9th: the lack of investment in PEMEX’s Exploration and Exploitation (PEP) division spelled energy catastrophe – not a good sign for Washington’s North American Energy Alliance strategy. On January 10th, the PRI came on board to back Calderon’s “energy reform.”

Despite the Jeremiads, the putsch for privatization has lost considerable steam globally. In fact, a moderate swing to nationalization seems to be in process. Amidst prognoses of irreparable damage to the Venezuelan economy, Hugo Chavez renationalized sectors of PDVSA, the state oil company, and ran a 12% surge in domestic growth in 2007 in spite of it. Bolivia has renationalized natural gas production and Ecuador is on the brink of doing so. The most successful renationalization has been in Putin’s Russia where Gazoprom and Yukos became major world players overnight.

According to Mexican strategic resource writer Alfredo Jalife, 32% of the world’s petroleum supply is in the hands of private transnationals, 20% is nationalized or in the process of being renationalized, and the rest is held by mixed state-private corporations.

But despite their exaggerated anguish at an energy meltdown if PEMEX is not privatized, the doomsayers do have a point: Petrolios Mexicanos is in deep doo-doo. Daily accidents such as the unquenchable fire that took 21 workers’ lives on a Caribbean oil platform and contaminated surrounding waters last fall, pipeline bombings by the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army, and the failure to modernize infrastructure – no new refinery has been built in 20 years – is stark evidence of corporate corrosion.

Despite 100-weak-dollar-a-barrel prices (Mexican light crude tops out around $80 USD these days) that generated $2.3 billion in enhanced revenues during the first ten months of 2007, lack of refining capacity forces PEMEX to shell out $5 billion Yanqui dollars each year to import 40% of its gasoline needs – which is to say that for every $1 of the increased revenues PEMEX takes in, two bucks go out for gas.

Calderon’s solution? The so-called “Gasolinazo”, the President’s gift to the driving public on January 6th, the Day of the Kings (Mexican Christmas), that will increase prices at the pump incrementally each month indefinitely. Increased transportation costs are expected to impact food prices across the board.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there. The big battle over Mexican oil is really a battle over crumbs. If U.S. Department of Energy calculations are on target, Mexico only has 12.9 billion barrels in proven reserves, depletion of which could turn PEMEX into a net importer by 2018 if no new petroleum sources are uncorked before then – although Mexico is the sixth largest international oil producer, it has only 1% of the planet’s proven reserves.

With the Cantarell field in the Sound of Campeche, the magnum star of offshore production that has motored PEMEX since the 1990s, just about tapped out, the clock is ticking. To exacerbate this doomsday scenario, Mexico is pumping out what it has left at a record clip to capitalize on the booming barrel price – PEMEX now produces about 3.2 million barrels daily, fully 1.7 million of which are sent up the Gulf to the U.S., an export platform that is accelerating depletion and subsidizing Washington’s wars around the world.

Given this bleak picture, most experts concur that the only place PEMEX can go to drill for new reserves is deep water, five miles down in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch is that Petrolios Mexicanos does not have deep water drilling capacity. That’s where Petrobras, as contemplated in the PRI/PAN privatization scheme, would come in handy.

What exactly constitutes privatization? Auctioning off the corporation from the top

to the highest bidder or selling it off piece by piece from the bottom? During 35 years of oil boom and bust, PEMEX has systematically dismantled its Exploration & Exploitation division and handed it over to transnational subcontractors, emphasizes Autonomous National University researcher John Saxe- Fernandez who heads up the UNAM’s Strategic Resources Institute. At the top of Saxe-Fernandez’s list of prominent subcontractors is Halliburton with 159 PEMEX contacts since 2000 worth $1.2 billion USD – Halliburton moved into Mexico in the 1990s during the development of Cantarell when Dick Cheney was CEO.

But subcontracting out choice contracts goes back generations. George Bush pere partnered with PEMEX director Jorge Serrano (who later went to jail) in Zapata Offshore, a drilling outfit that operated in the Sound of Campeche in the 1970s. Today, virtually every major transnational driller has a piece of the Mexican action.

A recent daily La Jornada investigation by energy reporter Israel Rodriguez revealed the signing of a series of secret “pre-privatization” covenants to exploit Mexican fields with Shell (the mysterious “Project Margarita”), Exxon, Petrobras, Nexen (Canada), and StatsOil (Norway.) The contracts, accessed through Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act, contained clauses whose contents cannot be divulged for the next five years.

The PRI/PAN energy scam is currently being hatched in the Mexican Senate’s Energy Commission chaired by Francisco Labastida, a former secretary of energy (as is Calderon) and the PRI’s losing presidential candidate in 2000. Those who have gotten a peek at the details label the energy reform legislation “privatization lite” with foot-in-the-door measures that will allow for the “association of private capital” in such areas as pipelines and refineries. The legislation stops short of amending the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27, which stipulates that the petroleum belongs to the nation.

Skirting a constitutional amendment will deny ammo to AMLO – leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who many believe was swindled out of the presidency in 2006 and who has emerged as the leader of the fight against privatization. This January, Lopez Obrador announced formation of a cross-party Movement In Defense of Petroleum whose battle cry is “Mexico is not for sale!”

The ex-presidential candidate proposes that PEMEX can raise sufficient revenues without opening itself up to private investment by simply cleaning house – the corporation has long been riddled with corruption, bribe-taking, kickbacks and rampant dirty dealing. For decades, the PRI siphoned off millions to finance its electoral campaigns – in 2000, $110 million USD in PEMEX funds were funneled through the gangster-ridden petroleum workers union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, the so-called “PEMEXgate” scandal.

AMLO has also long advocated the construction of three new refineries to offset the escautf8g cost of importing gasoline which he tags “an absurd situation” for the world’s sixth largest oil producer.

In the opposite corner, Lopez Obrador’s archrival Felipe Calderon insists that opening PEMEX to private capital will somehow make Petrolios Mexicanos “more Mexican” (“more productive, more competitive, more Mexicano.”)

“To hand over our natural resources to foreign powers is an act of treason,” AMLO responds, quoting the man who expropriated and nationalized Mexico’s petroleum in 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas. Lopez Obrador’s defense of Mexican oil will be a first test for the grassroots base the leftist has been cultivating since the tainted 2006 election and is sure to frame the next round of his ongoing bout with Calderon and his allies. AMLO, who in the past has been able to mobilize millions, is calling for nationwide protests this March 18th, the 70th anniversary of Cardenas’s expropriation.

Petroleum is a patriotic fluid here. Expropriation of the oil industry from the “extranjeros” (foreigners, literally “strangers”) was the high point of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. But in a globalized world, the coming battle around the privatization of PEMEX is not just a Mexican matter anymore and, indeed, has far-reaching implications for the future of neo-liberalism in the Americas.

Sprawled in the Oaxaca street, the life blood leaking from him, the last thing Brad Will could have imagined is that in death he would become an accidental pawn to the transnationals’ ambitions to privatize Mexican oil. Tragically, in the end, that may be Wills’ most significant legacy.

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Endorsements

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President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA


This is now essentially a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, and no matter how it comes down, it’s a historic moment: neither of the front-runners for the White House (and by any standard, the Democratic nominee starts off as the front-runner) is a white man. And frankly, the nation could do a lot worse than either President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama.

But on the issues, and because he’s a force for a new generation of political activism, our choice is Obama.

Obama’s life story is inspirational, and his speeches are the stuff of political legend. He can rouse a crowd and generate excitement like no presidential candidate has in many, many years. He has, almost single-handedly, caused thousands of young people to get involved for the first time in a major political campaign.

The cost of his soaring rhetoric is a disappointing lack of specific plans. It can be hard at times to tell exactly what Obama stands for, exactly how he plans to carry out his ambitious goals. His stump speeches are riddled with words like change and exhortations to a new approach to politics, but he doesn’t talk much, for example, about how to address the gap between the rich and the poor, or how to tackle urban crime and poverty, or whether Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

In fact, our biggest problem with Obama is that he talks as if all the nation needs to do is come together in some sort of grand coalition of Democrats and Republicans, of "blue states and red states." But some of us have no interest in making common cause with the religious right or Dick Cheney or Halliburton or Don Fisher. There are forces and interests in the United States that need to be opposed, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history, and for all of Obama’s talk of unity, we worry that he lacks the interest in or ability to take on a tough, bloody fight against an entrenched political foe.

Still, when you look at his positions, he’s on the right track. He wants to raise the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payments (right now high earners don’t pay Social Security taxes on income over $97,000 a year). He wants to cut taxes for working-class families and pay for it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts on the rich expire (that’s not enough, but it’s a start). He wants to double fuel-economy standards. His health care plan isn’t perfect, but it’s about the same as all the Democrats offer.

And he’s always been against the war.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. Obama spoke out against the invasion when even most Democrats were afraid to, so he has some credibility when he says he’s going to withdraw all troops within 16 months and establish no permanent US bases in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has far more extensive experience than Obama (and people who say her years in the White House don’t count have no concept of the role she played in Bill Clinton’s administration). We are convinced that deep down she has liberal instincts. But that’s what’s so infuriating: since the day she won election to the US Senate, Clinton has been trianguutf8g, shaping her positions, especially on foreign policy, in an effort to put her close to the political center. At a time when she could have shown real courage — during the early votes on funding and authorizing the invasion of Iraq — she took the easy way out, siding with President Bush and refusing to be counted with the antiwar movement. She has refused to distance herself from such terrible Bill Clinton–era policies as welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and don’t ask, don’t tell. We just can’t see her as the progressive choice.

We like John Edwards. We like his populist approach, his recognition that there are powerful interests running this country that won’t give up power without a fight, and his talk about poverty. In some ways (certainly in terms of campaign rhetoric) he’s the most progressive of the major candidates. It is, of course, a bit of a political act — he was, at best, a moderate Southern Democrat when he served in the Senate. But at least he’s raising issues nobody else is talking about, and we give him immense credit for that. And we’ve always liked Dennis Kucinich, who is the only person taking the right positions on almost all of the key issues.

But Edwards has slid pretty far out of the running at this point, and Kucinich is an afterthought. The choice Californians face is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama, for all of his flaws, has fired up a real grassroots movement, has energized the electorate, and is offering the hope of a politics that looks forward, not back. On Feb. 5, vote for Barack Obama.

President, Republican

RON PAUL


We have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul and his libertarian worldview. He opposes the taxes that we need to make civil society function and the government regulations that are essential to protecting the most powerless members of society. From its roots in the Magna Carta and Adam Smith’s economic theories to the Bill of Rights, it’s clear the United States was founded on a social compact that libertarians too often seem to deny. And Paul compounds these ills in the one area in which he departs from the libertarians: he doesn’t support federal abortion rights. He’s been associated with some statements that are racially insensitive (to say the least). He clearly shouldn’t be president.

But he won’t — Paul isn’t going to win the nomination. So it’s worthwhile endorsing him as a protest vote for two reasons. His presence on the ballot serves to show up some of the hypocrisies of the rest of the GOP field — and he is absolutely correct and insightful on one of the most important issues of the day: the war.

Paul is alone among the Republican candidates for president in sounding the alarm that our country is pursuing a dangerous, shortsighted, hypocritical, expensive, and ultimately doomed strategy of trying to dominate the world militarily. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and thinks the US should pull out immediately. It’s immensely valuable to have someone like that in the GOP debates, speaking to the conservative half of our country about why this policy violates the principles they claim to hold dear.

Paul is absolutely correct that if we stopped trying to police the world, ended the war on drugs, and quit negotiating trade deals that favor multinational corporations over American families and workers, we would be a far more free and prosperous nation.

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY


We endorsed Ralph Nader for president in 2000, in large part as a protest vote against the neoconservative politics of the Bill Clinton administration (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, welfare "reform," etc.). And Nader’s Green Party campaign had a place (particularly in a state the Democrats were going to win anyway). We’ve never been among those who blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss — Gore earned plenty of blame himself. But four years later we, like a lot of Nader’s allies and supporters, urged him not to run — and he ignored those pleas. Now he may be seeking the Green Party nomination again. Nader hasn’t formally announced yet, but he’s talking about it — which means he still shows no interest in being accountable to anyone. It’s too bad he has to end his political life this way.

Fortunately, there are several other credible Green Party candidates. The best is Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congressional representative, who has switched from the Democratic to the Green Party and is seeking a spot on the top of the ticket. McKinney has her drawbacks, but we’ll endorse her.

The real question here is not who would make a better president (that’s not in the cards, of course) but who would do more to build the Green Party and promote the best course for a promising third party that still hasn’t developed much traction as a national force. We’ve been clear for years that the Greens should be working from the grass roots up: the party’s first priority should be electing school board members, community college board members, members of boards of supervisors and city councils. Over time, leaders like Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim, Matt Gonzalez, and Ross Mirkarimi can start competing for mayor’s offices and posts in the State Legislature and Congress. Running a presidential candidate only makes sense as part of a party-building operation. (That’s what Nader did in 2000, and for all the obvious reasons he’s incapable of doing it today.)

But the Greens insist on running candidates for president, so we might as well pick the best one.

McKinney has a lot to offer the Greens. She’s an experienced legislator who has won several tough elections and taken on a lot of tough issues. As an African American woman from the South, she can also broaden the party’s base. She was a solid progressive in Congress, where she was willing to speak out on issues that many of her colleagues ducked (she was, for example, one of the few members to push for an impeachment resolution).

McKinney has her downside — in recent years she’s been flirting with the loony side of the left, getting a bit close to some Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that hurt her credibility (although she’s also made some very good points about the attacks and the lack of a serious investigation into what happened). And some of her supporters have made alarmingly anti-Semitic statements (from which, to her credit, she has attempted to distance herself). But she has to come out now, strongly, to denounce those sorts of comments and show that she can build a real coalition.

With those (serious) reservations, we’ll give her the nod.

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO


Prop. 91 is essentially an effort to ensure that revenue from the state’s gas tax goes only to roads and highways. It’s a moot point anyway: Proposition 1A, which passed last year, did the same thing, and now even proponents of 91 are urging a No vote.

But we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our opposition to Prop. 1A, Prop. 91, and any other ridiculous effort to restrict the use of gasoline tax revenues.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the widespread overuse of automobiles is having far bigger impacts on California than just wear and tear on the roads. Cars are the biggest single cause of global warming, and they kill and injure more Californians than guns do, causing enormous costs that are borne by all of us. Driving a car is expensive for society, and drivers ought to be paying some of those costs. That should mean extra gas taxes and a reinstatement of the vehicle license fee to previous levels (and extra surcharges for those who drive Hummers and other especially wasteful, dangerous vehicles). That money ought to go to the state General Fund so California doesn’t have to close state parks and slash spending on schools and social services, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing.

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES


Prop. 92 is another example of how desperate California educators are and how utterly dysfunctional the state’s budget process has become.

The measure is complicated, but it amounts to a plan to guarantee community colleges more money — a total of about $300 million a year — and includes provisions to cut the cost of attending the two-year schools. Those are good things: community colleges serve a huge number of students — about 10 times as many as the University of California system — many of whom come from lower-income families who can’t afford even a small fee increase. And, of course, as the state budget has gotten tighter, community college fees have gone up in the past few years — and as a result, attendance has dropped.

Part of the way Prop. 92 cuts fees is by divorcing community college funding from K–12 funding — and that’s created some controversy among teachers. Current state law requires a set percentage of California spending (about 40 percent) to go to K–12 and community college education, but there’s no provision to give more money to the community colleges when enrollment at those institutions grows faster than K–12 enrollment.

Some teachers fear that Prop. 92 could lead to decreased funds for K–12, and that’s a real concern. In essence, this measure would add $300 million to the state budget, and it includes no specific funding source. This worries us. In theory, the legislature and the governor ought to agree that education funding matters and find the money by raising taxes; in practice, this could set up more competition for money between different (and entirely worthy) branches of the state’s public education system — not to mention other critical social services.

But many of the same concerns were voiced when Prop. 98 was on the ballot, and that measure probably saved public education in California. The progressives on the San Francisco Board of Education all support Prop. 92, and so do we. Vote yes.

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES


This is pathetic, really. The term-limits law that voters passed in 1990 has been bad news, shifting more power to the governor and ensuring that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits). But the legislature isn’t a terribly popular institution, and the polls all show that it would be almost impossible to simply repeal term limits. So the legislature — led by State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, who really, really wants to keep his job — has proposed a modification instead.

Under the current law, a politician can serve six years — three terms — in the assembly and eight years — two terms — in the senate. Since most senators are former assembly members, that’s a total of 14 years any one person can serve in the legislature.

Prop. 93 would cut that to 12 years — but allow members to serve them in either house. So Núñez, who will be termed out this year, could serve six more years in the assembly (but would then be barred from running for the senate). Senators who never served in the assembly could stick around for three terms.

That’s fine. It’s a bit better than what we have now — it might bring more long-term focus to the legislature and eliminate some of the musical-chairs mess that’s brought us the Mark Leno versus Carole Migden bloodbath.

But it’s sad that the California State Legislature, once a model for the nation, has been so stymied by corruption that the voters don’t trust it and the best we can hope for is a modest improvement in a bad law. Vote yes.

Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 (Indian gambling compacts)

NO


We supported the original law that allowed Indian tribes to set up casinos, and we have no regrets: that was an issue of tribal sovereignty, and after all the United States has done to the tribes, it seemed unconscionable to deny one of the most impoverished populations in the state the right to make some money. Besides, we’re not opposed in principle to gambling.

But this is a shady deal, and voters should reject it.

Props. 94–97 would allow four tribes — all of which have become very, very wealthy through gambling — to dramatically expand the size of their casinos. The Pechanga, Morongo, Sycuan, and Agua Caliente tribes operate lucrative casinos in Southern California, spend a small fortune on lobbying, and convinced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give them permission to create some of the largest casinos in the nation. Opponents of this agreement have forced the issue onto the ballot.

The tribes say the deals will bring big money into the state coffers, and it’s true that more gambling equals more state revenue. But the effective tax rate on the slot machines (and this is all about slot machines, the cash engines of casinos) would be as little as 15 percent — chump change for a gambling operation. And none of the other tribes in the state, some of which are still desperate for money, would share in the bounty.

The big four tribes refuse to allow their workers to unionize. While we respect tribal sovereignty, the state still has the right to limit the size of casinos, and if the tribes want the right to make a lot more money, they ought to be willing to let their workers, not all of them Indians, share in some of the rewards. We’re talking billions of dollars a year in revenue here; paying a decent salary is hardly beyond the financial ability of these massive operations.

The governor cut this deal too fast and gave away too much. If the tribes want to expand their casinos, we’re open to allowing it — but the state, the workers, and the other tribes deserve a bigger share of the revenue. Vote no on 94-97.

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES


This $185 million bond has the support of a broad coalition of local politicians and activists, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and every member of the Board of Supervisors. It would put a dent in the city’s serious backlog of deferred maintenance in the park system.

The measure would allocate $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks, selected according to their seismic and safety needs as well as their usage levels. It would also earmark $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms, which, the Recreation and Park Department assures us, will be kept open seven days a week.

The bond also contains $33.5 million for projects on Port of San Francisco land, including a continuous walkway from Herons Head Park to Pier 43 and new open spaces at regular intervals along the eastern waterfront. While some argue that the Port should take care of its own property, it’s pretty broke — and there’s a growing recognition that the city’s waterfront is a treasure, that open space should be a key component of its future, and that it doesn’t really matter which city agency pays for it. In fact, this bond act would provide money to reclaim closed sections of the waterfront and create a Blue Greenway trail along seven miles of bay front.

One of the more questionable elements in this bond is the $8 million earmarked for construction and reconstruction of city playfields — which includes a partnership with a private foundation that wants to install artificial turf. There’s no question that the current fields are in bad repair and that users of artificial turf appreciate its all-weather durability. But some people worry about the environmental impact of the stuff, which is made from recycled tires, while others wonder if this bond will end up giving control of 7 percent of our parkland to the sons of Gap founder Don Fisher (their City Fields Foundation is the entity contributing matching funds for city-led turf conversions). Although the Rec and Park Department has identified 24 sites for such conversions, none can take place without the Board of Supervisors’ approval — and the supervisors and the Rec and Park Commission needs to make it clear that if neighbors don’t want the artificial turf, it won’t be forced on them.

Prop. A also earmarks $5 million for trail restoration and $5 million for an Opportunity Fund, from which all neighborhoods can leverage money for benches and toilets through in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds.

And it includes $4 million for park forestry and $185,000 for audits.

With a 2007 independent analysis identifying $1.7 billion in maintenance requirements, this is little more than a start, and park advocates need to be looking for other, ongoing revenue sources. But we’ll happily endorse Prop. A.

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES


We’ve always taken the position that relying exclusively on police officers to improve public safety is as useless as simply throwing criminals behind bars — it’s only part of the solution and will never work as an answer all on its own.

But we’re also aware that the city is suffering a dramatic shortage of police officers; hundreds are expected to retire within a few short years, and those figures aren’t being met by an equal number of enrollees at the academy.

So we’re supporting Prop. B, even if it’s yet another mere stopgap measure the police union has dragged before voters, and even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association is often hostile to attempted law enforcement reforms and is never around when progressives need support for new revenue measures.

Prop. B would allow police officers who are at least 50 years of age and who have served for at least 25 years to continue working for three additional years with their regular pay and benefits while the pension checks they’d have otherwise received collect in a special account with an assured annual 4 percent interest rate.

The POA promises Prop. B will be cost neutral to taxpayers, and the city controller will review the program in three years to ensure that remains the case. Also at the end of three years, the Board of Supervisors, with a simple majority vote, could choose to end or extend it.

POA president Gary Delagnes added during an endorsement interview that department staffers in San Francisco who reach retirement age simply continue working in other police jurisdictions. If that’s the case, we might as well keep them here.

No other city employees are eligible for such a scheme, which strikes us as unfair. And frankly, one of the main reasons the city can’t hire police officers is the high cost of living in San Francisco — so if the POA is worried about recruitment, the group needs to support Sup. Chris Daly’s affordable-housing measure in November.

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO


We understand why some people question why a decaying old prison continues to be a centerpiece of Bay Area tourism. A monument to a system that imprisoned people in cold, inhumane conditions doesn’t exactly mesh with San Francisco values.

But the Alcatraz Conversion Project, which proposes placing a half–golf ball–like Global Peace Center atop the Rock, is a wacky idea that looks and sounds like a yuppie tourist retreat and does little to address the island’s tortured past. People don’t have to support everything with peace in the title.

The proposal includes a white domed conference center for nonviolent conflict resolution, a statue of St. Francis, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and an array of what proponents call "architecturally advanced domed Artainment multimedia centers."

We agree with the ideal of dedicating the island to the Native Americans who fished and collected birds’ eggs from this once guano-covered rock for thousands of years and whose descendants carried out a bold occupation at the end of the 1960s. But this proposal seems based on wishful thinking, not fiscal or environmental realities.

The plan is backed by the Global Peace Foundation, which is a branch of the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, a Mill Valley nonprofit founded by Marin resident and Light Party founder Da Vid. It’s just goofy. Vote no.

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

Year in Film: Things we lost in the theater

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The economy: Apocalypse Now — or at least soon. Iraq: No End in Sight. Israel: "Putting Out Fire with Gasoline (Theme from Cat People)." China, in its role as the principal backer of our colossal national debt: I Spit on Your Grave. Our president: National Lampoon’s Permanent Vacation.

In 2007, as life increasingly resembled lurid or delusional fiction, movies stepped up to the social-responsibility plate and started presenting a franker version of reality.

That is, the movies nobody saw.

The ones everyone did see, in quantifiable box office terms, were Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, the third Bourne and Pirates flicks, a fifth Harry Potter, and … Transformers. In other words, movies whose major reference points are other movies, comic books, and video games. (The Bourne films are refreshingly low-CGI, but they offer only a pretense of institutional critique.) If most multiplex patrons’ level of caring or knowledge about international and domestic politics was turned into a film, it could be titled Whatever-Man 3.

The summer — that silly season of things blowing up and boob jokes — is likely to spread even wider across the calendar henceforth, because this fall and winter offered serious year-end awards-bait stuff, and nobody wanted it.

Europeans have branded this the best year for United States cinema in a long time. But the ambitious, uncompromising two-and-a-half-hour-plus dramas released late in the year — 1970s ambling-epic throwbacks such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into the Wild, and There Will Be Blood — are against-the-wind efforts. Even intelligent dramas wrapped in easy-access thriller form, like Eastern Promises, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Rescue Dawn, and Gone Baby Gone, have attracted few takers. (You could deem the long, self-important American Gangster an exception, were it not so derivative. Check out Larry Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar.)

Commercially speaking, this fall’s glut of somber dramas — including Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Reservation Road, We Own the Night, and Lions for Lambs — collapsed like a row of dominoes. Their failure was variously blamed on an overcrowded marketplace and being pushed prematurely off screens by the latest CGI extravaganzas. Several of them just weren’t good, but even the best expired quickly.

Two films likely to face off for Academy Awards, No Country for Old Men and Atonement, have drawn larger numbers, though in their different ways neither has much to say about the world we live in now. No Country turns a minor Cormac McCarthy novel into a major Coen brothers effort that’s still just a great genre piece at the end of the day. Atonement turns a brilliant Ian McEwan novel into a sumptuous Merchant-Ivory-like affair, muffling the book’s bitter heart.

Every movie that did try to wrestle with our extremely precarious, morally compromised place in the scheme of things basically tanked. Maybe that’s less surprising than the fact that so many filmmakers actually got to make works dealing in one way or another with the current American realpolitik, if only on the relatively neutral, empathetic trickle-down level of grieving military spouses (Grace Is Gone), traumatized soldiers readjusting to civilian life (Home of the Brave), or World Trade Center widowers (Reign Over Me).

The Crash crowd shunned scenarist Paul Haggis’s much better (though not politically daring or even pointed) second film as director, In the Valley of Elah. It fictionalizes a real-life case (Iraq vet Richard Davis’s 2003 murder), as did Brian De Palma’s Redacted, drawn from a 2006 incident in which several US soldiers gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her entire family. An atrocious movie because of its ill-chosen mockumentary form, loutish tone, and garbled message, Redacted ironically attracted widespread notice due to the loud protestations of Bill O’Reilly and other conservative pundits who proclaimed it treasonous. They didn’t say it was fraudulent — as Republican saint Ronald Reagan once told us, "Facts are stupid things."

Despite the lure of Angelina Jolie and the publicity stumping of her producer–spouse–love slave Brad Pitt, Michael Winterbottom’s more overtly fact-based A Mighty Heart — about kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s murder by Pakistani jihadists — got no audience love. Ditto Rendition, with America’s sweetheart Reese Witherspoon as another agitating spouse with a missing husband, this one an Egyptian-born US citizen imprisoned and tortured by the CIA on dubious terrorism charges.

That the year’s better feel-bad dramas didn’t take off despite their star power is disappointing, if not unexpected. But it truly depresses that Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, the year’s best documentary — and arguably best movie, period — failed to break out despite universal raves. This engrossing, incendiary, genuinely balanced chronicle of how the George W. Bush administration destroyed and betrayed Iraq — and probably doomed everyone to a general fucked-up-ness only global warming might trump — doesn’t even bother indicting the reasons we attacked in the first place. It’s busy enough simply detailing the arrogance and ineptitude that have turned our supposed reconstruction of the nation into a lit match hovering beside the tinder of pissed-off former allies worldwide.

No End in Sight should have been a must-see that marshaled voter-taxpayer opposition to the freaks in the seats of power. It should at least have ignited as much enthusiastic outrage as An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11. But it was an intended bombshell that landed like a softball on Astroturf.

There are a few more politically charged movies in the pipeline, notably director Kimberly Peirce’s first feature since Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss. But given the commercial cold shoulder such films have received lately, what can we expect from a post–writers’ strike Hollywood that will be looking to restore its brief income slowdown as safely as possible? Gems like Norbit, Because I Said So, Bratz, Good Luck Chuck, Daddy Day Camp, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Halloween, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, License to Wed, Saw IV, and Wild Hogs — not to mention the three- to fivequels. Even when those movies bombed, they landed softly enough (often redeemed by profitable DVD releases) to affirm the wisdom of sticking to strict formulas.

Escapism: good. Wholesale obliviousness: better. Will there be a 2010 equivalent to 2007’s finest narrative flick, The Assassination of Jesse James (estimated cost: $30 million; domestic gross: $3 million, despite a career-best Brad Pitt)? Not likely.

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL NARRATIVE TOP 10

1. Adam’s Apples (Anders Thomas Jensen, Denmark)

2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

3. Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, US)

4. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, US)

5. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al., US)

6. Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, US)

7. The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden, US/Iceland)

8. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US)

9. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, US)

10. Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, Australia)

Up against the wall

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There’s a new mural at 24th and Capp streets that does a stellar job of capturing the urban, cultural vibe of the Mission’s residents. No, not the skinny jeans–wearing, Burning Man bohemians who’ve colonized the area in recent years. I’m talking the baggy jeans–wearing Latino youths who are the inheritors of a proud local tradition of Chicano mural art. Craftily melding urban motifs, the mural celebrates their bicultural realities: lowriders cruise alongside hyphy "scrapers," pachucos and Mac Dre mingle, and graffiti lettering makes the same statement as silk-screened Brown Pride posters of the ’70s.

The work was created from July to September by members of Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth, a neighborhood-based youth leadership nonprofit serving at-risk Latino teens and young adults. The primary goal of HOMEY is violence prevention. Through art, education, and skill-building activities, the organization offers alternatives to young people growing up in a rough environment where gangbanging, drug dealing, gun violence, and incarceration are the norm.

The mural is a shining example of the numerous creative projects initiated by HOMEY to bring together young folks who might otherwise have beef or get caught up in the neighborhood’s dangerous Sureño-Norteño turf rivalry. According to HOMEY project coordinator Nancy Hernandez, the mural bolstered the organization’s other violence-prevention efforts because "young people who didn’t know each other got to know each other. People in the community who didn’t know each other got to know each other. And people were educated on a lot of things to be proud of about their culture, their history, and their neighborhood." Although a core group of teen and adult artists executed the initial planning and design for the mural, in the end more than 200 community members contributed to the painting.

The title of the piece is Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers. Taking unity as a starting point, the artists began by brainstorming about the influences that divide people, communities, and cultures: everything from national boundaries to gang-affiliated colors. No national flags appear in the 100-foot-long painting. The United States–Mexico border wall figures prominently, snaking through the background of the mural’s central panels, but it’s juxtaposed with portrayals of intra- and interethnic alliance in the foreground. Mexican Revolucionarios, members of the United Farm Workers, and Brown Berets, all painted in sepia tones, float beneficently behind modern-day Raza activists wearing white tees and white bandanas — a purposefully neutral color worn nationwide by Latino youths during the immigrant rights rallies of May 1. In the Bay Area, many of those activists were HOMEY members.

As celebratory as the painting is, one controversial panel on its far right-hand side threatened to overshadow the entire project. It’s a portrayal of Palestinians garbed in traditional Arab kaffiyeh head scarves breaking through a concrete wall — ostensibly the Israeli West Bank security barrier. The image fits into a third-world rights vignette expressing solidarity with indigenous groups and colonized peoples.

Some members of San Francisco’s Jewish community took issue with the image, which originally included a hole in the wall in the shape of the state of Israel. Two Jewish advocacy groups, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Anti-Defamation League, brought these concerns to the San Francisco Arts Commission, the board charged with approving all public art. "We thought this one panel was disjointed from the rest of the mural," JCRC associate director Abby Michelson Porth recalls telling HOMEY and the Arts Commission at a public forum this August. "It didn’t demonstrate peaceful coexistence, which is, frankly, contrary to the theme of the work."

Rather than battle it out and fling loaded accusations of censorship and anti-Zionism at each other — which would indeed completely contradict the intent of the community-building project — the two factions engaged in a civil dialogue that turned out to be a learning experience for all. HOMEY agreed to make some changes to the imagery: the kaffiyeh shrouding one figure’s face, which the JCRC and the ADL claimed connoted terrorism, is now pulled back and worn as a simple Muslim head scarf; the wall opening now breaks into an expansive blue sky; and the branches of an olive tree now weave around the wall — a symbol of peace and a near-literal olive branch. Still, according to Porth, "It’s not the imagery that we would choose, but we recognize the muralists made significant changes and that they came far from the original design."

Hernandez is quick to point out that many Jewish San Franciscans supported the original design and that several of the artists are in fact Jewish. But she acknowledges that "when we’re painting somebody else’s culture, we have to be humble. We have to say, ‘You know what? We don’t know everything about everybody, but we do know about ourselves, and we’re trying to draw parallels between ourselves and other peoples.’<0x2009>"

To many, it may come as a surprise that the mural’s Palestinian imagery was so controversial. After all, claiming solidarity with Palestine is a common stance among San Francisco’s radical left. Nonetheless, by giving their input, the mural’s detractors wound up being collaborators on a project authored by, as it turned out, truly disparate voices in the community.

www.homeysf.org

Remain in light

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"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian’s firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late ’60s and early ’70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.

What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the hundred-plus-member Source Family. As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The family’s experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco (the Guardian‘s classified section is mentioned twice in The Source) before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family’s carnage and Jonestown’s horror.

Three events this week — an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists’ Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord — commemorate the publication of Isis "Keeper of the Record" Aquarian’s Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my memories come from one single year of my life").

Still, it’s their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed jewelry…. They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian’s book lies in the ephemera — commandments, names, menus, costumes — that, even in their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group’s high hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration. In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."

This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod’s commanding vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to Aquarian’s book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a two-year period, though many have been lost). The band’s changing permutations and relentless output anticipated the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of Man.

Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It’s a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source Family’s reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius (see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the various sponsors of this week’s Source events are impeccably hip: Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.

What distinguishes today’s backtracking from the brief vogue for peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early ’90s is the depth of the fascination. Seekers aren’t contenting themselves with the usual icons; they’re hungrier than that. How else to explain reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA, the same venue hosted another convergence of ’60s esoterica: Ira Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian Beck’s documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.

As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult the Source Family group shots before convening his own family portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there be something of Father Yod’s TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked in White Rainbow’s recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I’m inclined to think so, especially after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father Yod have become elders in their own right.

Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white) aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies. Forty years later, the book’s disarming photographs do not seem to represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *

ERIK DAVIS AND ISIS AQUARIAN ON FATHER YOD AND THE SOURCE FAMILY

Sat/17, 8:30 p.m., $7.77

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

BOOK SIGNING AND LISTENING PARTY

Sun/18, 1 p.m., free

Aquarius Records

1055 Valencia, SF

(415) 647-2272

www.aquariusrecords.org

YA HO WA 13

With Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Entrance, and Ascended Master

Sun/18, 8 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

The Syrian perspective on American empire

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imad.jpg
The U.S. is playing a dangerous and disingenuous game in the Middle East, Syria’s ambassador to the U.S. Imad Moustapha said last night at the Commonwealth Club. Yet he remains hopeful that peace will eventually prevail in that troubled region, saying “we believe peace between the Arabs and Israelis is inevitable.”
But first, the Bush Administration needs to stop demonizing and refusing to engage with countries like Syria and Iran and with democratically elected factions like Hezbollah, and to stop hindering peace talks. He said the White House was the biggest barrier to Syria reaching a peace treaty with Israel, and he predicted the Middle East peace conference that the Bush Administration called for the end of November will be a failure, mostly because there has been no preliminary work done, unlike most peace conferences that are preceded by frenzied diplomatic efforts to set the agenda and talk about a framework for discussions.
“We don’t seriously believe that this is a peace conference that will lead to anywhere,” Moustapha said. “Forgive us if we deduce that this is only about a photo opportunity and about people in Washington, D.C., telling their electorate, ‘Look, don’t accuse us of only starting wars; we’re working for peace in the Middle East.’ “

Green City: Meeting the Climate Challenge

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GREEN CITY It is easy to become discouraged by environmental problems, but a few San Franciscans are reminding us that we have collective power to make positive change. And we might even have a little fun along the way.

Paul Scott came up with the idea of the San Francisco Climate Challenge, a citywide contest to reduce household energy consumption. Scott is a lawyer and founding member of One Atmosphere — a nonprofit created by North Beach neighbors concerned with sustainability and conservation. "I think a lot of folks are concerned about climate change, but frustrated by the seeming inaction by the government to solve the problem," Scott told the Guardian. "The purpose of the San Francisco Climate Challenge is to give people something they can do right now."

A joint project by One Atmosphere, the Sierra Club, and SF Environment, the Climate Challenge officially starts Oct. 25 and registration ends the day before. Two top prizes of $5,000 (cash!) will be awarded for greatest overall energy savings and greatest percentage reduction in energy use. Winners will be determined by comparing last November’s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. bill with this November’s bill, so participants must pay their own utility bill and have lived in their current home — apartment, condo, or house — for at least a year.

Private residences account for about 20 percent of San Francisco’s carbon emissions, so the SF Climate Challenge is specifically focused on reducing household emissions. "Hopefully, this contest will increase people’s awareness of what they can do and the environmental damage done by normal activities," said Jonathan Weiner of One Atmosphere. "Simple changes can have significant impacts."

And what are some of these simple changes to make at home? Turn off lights when you leave a room, replace incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat. And something that people often forget is that appliances use energy even when they’re turned off. So plug your television and stereo into a power strip and, when you’re done watching TV or listening to music, turn that power strip off.

"Eliminating unnecessary, wasteful use and being more efficient with the energy we do use is important," said Aaron Israel of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco chapter. "But you don’t have to eat in the dark or live like a monk. There are very easy things you can do if you’re just a little bit more aware."

Contest participants can sign up for the Climate Challenge as individuals or teams. So far, there teams have been created by neighborhoods, social groups, and sports teams. Even the Board of Supervisors has formed a team, with supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Aaron Peskin, and Sean Elsbernd already committed to participating. Word on the street is that even the Mayor’s Office may compile a team.

The Climate Challenge is also about building community. "This is an initiative to bring together a bunch of folks around how we, as residents in the city, can do things differently," said Mark Miller of One Atmosphere. "The more we see how we’re connected, the more we see how much we affect each other."

Making simple, painless changes at home is a great place to start taking responsibility for the health of our communities, city, and planet. Hopefully, the San Francisco Climate Challenge will inspire people to think about the environment in terms of the positive changes we can make instead of the overwhelming problems we feel helpless to fix.

"We need to paint a vision of our own lives that is better in the future than it is right now, so we are all motivated to take action," said Cal Broomhead of SF Environment. "How can we transform our neighborhoods so they’re more sustainable? We have collective power to make change."

To register for the San Francisco Climate Challenge, or to see a list of sponsors, prizes, and energy-saving tips, go to www.sfclimatechallenge.org. Or attend this upcoming event to learn more: ClimatePalooza, Fri/Oct. 19, 7 p.m., $12 or free with sign up for the SF Climate Challenge, at the Swedish American Hall, 2170 Market, SF. Live music by Ryan Auffenberg, Hyim, Valerie Orth, Sheldon Petersen, and Pixie Kitchen. Call (415) 861-5016 for more information. *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Beyond borders

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An uneasy double consciousness attends the able and purposeful world premiere of Benedictus — now up at the Thick House — whose plot concerns a back-channel effort to avert an impending US invasion of Iran. An international collaboration two years in the making, Golden Thread’s 10th anniversary season opener moves in uncanny lockstep with today’s headlines, which reflect the increasingly aggressive push from the outlaw centers of American power for yet another and wider war in the Middle East.

Benedictus (a project cocreated by Iranian director Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, Israeli playwright Lotti Lerner, dramaturge and Theatre Without Borders cofounder Roberta Levitow, designer Daniel Michaelson, and Golden Thread artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian) opens with the secret reunion of two old school friends, one Muslim and one Jewish, both Iranian born, and both former activists in the politically broad-based mass uprising that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s CIA-installed dictator, in 1979. That revolution was, of course, eventually co-opted by the right-wing fundamentalist bloc under Ayatollah Khomeini, and since then Asher Muthada (Ali Pourtash) has emigrated to Israel and become an arms merchant, while his friend Ali Kermani (Al Faris) has become part of the reform movement within the Islamic republic.

A mere 72 hours before the United States plans to launch its secret attack, Kermani (wise to the countdown) has arranged the meeting with his old chum in the relatively neutral and secluded grounds of a Benedictine monastery. But Muthada arrives first. He’s a nervous ball of energy, and after shooing away his overly solicitous hostess (a nun played by Lisa Tateosian) he habitually overturns the decor in an effort to unearth any microphones. This first impression of supreme distrust amid a web of John le Carré–type espionage is belied, or at least made more complex, by the affectionate reunion of the two men. In the smooth and genial performances by Pourtash and Faris, Muthada immediately becomes expansive and dryly witty as Kermani, with a gentle air of cosmopolitan tact, arrives in his mullah’s robes and wire-framed glasses and inquires into his friend’s health.

In the conversation that follows they rehearse (in dialogue inevitably somewhat didactic but overall nuanced and unforced) the historic events that have passed through their lives, the betrayed promise of the revolution, the political machinations in each of their countries that play on external fears for internal gain, and so on. But there’s a more immediate concern and a deal to be brokered. Kermani, with his eye on the Iranian presidency, wants Muthada’s help in getting his peace proposal to the Americans in time to avert the bombing. For his part, Muthada wants his sister and her family ensured a safe exit from Iran, which is loath to let her go.

(The quasi-familial complexity of relationships here is inspired by a real-life incident: the 2005 chance meeting between then–Iranian president Mohammad Khatami — on whom Kermani is clearly based — and then–Israeli president Moshe Katsav, who were seated alphabetically beside each other at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and ended up exchanging pleasantries in Farsi, being compatriots from the same Iranian province.)

The tentative arrangement reached by Muthada and Kermani leads to an increasingly revealing but politically frustrating set of further meetings, some involving a US ambassador, Ben Martin (Earll Kingston). Martin — Muthada and Kermani’s would-be channel to the US government and a fluent Farsi speaker who was among the hostages taken by Iranian militants at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 — is a hard-drinking and hard-bitten man (played with engaging conviction) who turns out to have a close if fraught relation to Kermani, a moderating influence and protective presence during Martin’s captivity.

While the play’s premise is a look behind the headlines at the real interests and history roiling the Middle East, these behind-the-scenes encounters have depth of their own, as each character pursues and cloaks distinct ends that hopelessly entangle personal and geopolitical perspectives. As the clock ticks down, Kermani’s parallel effort to urge the intercession of the pope (one of several references made by the play’s title) seems as desperate as it is unexpected.

In the end, the plot’s impasse is another jarring reminder of the play’s real-world immediacy. Resisting any solution within the terms of the discourse represented by the three main characters, Lerner’s script suggests something about the incommensurable contradictions not of language (since everyone speaks the same one here) but of the discourse of the political world they share, which has become too degraded, too warped by the interests and logic of power, to grant any way out but catastrophe. This bleak circumstance doesn’t necessitate fatalism, however, but implicitly puts the onus for an alternative elsewhere. Our perspective as audience — implicated in but also outside the power games that define the limits of the possible onstage — allows perhaps for another set of possibilities for transcending the old discourse and inaugurating another, built (like the play itself) on new alliances across an overwhelmingly common interest. *

BENEDICTUS

Through Oct. 21, $12–$25

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat, 2 p.m.); Sun., 5 p.m.

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 401-8081

www.thickhouse.org

Gimme lip

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Do you believe in magic? Or voodoo? Or the links between ecstasy and long-term memory loss? If you’re a firm believer in the last, then you probably can’t recall the good ole days of garage rock — and no, I’m not talking about ’60s snarlers like the Seeds, the Standells, and the Chocolate Watchband nor ’80s revivalists like the Fleshtones, the Chesterfield Kings, and Holly Golightly. I’m searching the motley gray matter for that fuzzed-out, lo-fi, house-rockin’ turn-of-the-century blast from the early ’00s past, the one that teetered forth in the crusty, musty, mop-topped form of the Hives, the Von Bondies, the Vines, the Dirtbombs, the Strokes, the Detroit Cobras, the White Stripes, the Makers, the Datsuns, et al. In ’02 you were crap on a cracker if you didn’t come with the thes and the esses and the three chords and the loud, plowed, and way-too-gristly grizzly rock ‘n’ roll.

So where did all the good times go, troglodytes? The initial ’60s American garage rock siege was hopped up on the rawboned, blues-indebted British Invaders. But this time around did the bands simply get bored of the same few chords? Or weary of the uniforms? Was it simply another historical hiccup in musical trend cycles, a brief burst of energy fed by pink-slipped creatives and millennial joie de vivre?

Still, longtime listeners know garage rock never quite stops. The ahistorical trendoids who leaped aboard the bandwagon — who didn’t know your Kingsmen from your Chesterfield Kings or "Louie Louie" from "Talk Talk" — may have moved on to the next flavor of the weak. But snotty rock springs eternal — like mucus. Among the main remaining perpetrators today are those bone-deep bad boys with one foot in rock’s past and another in the future the Black Lips, the kid bros of all of those ’00s garage third wavers, who arrived kitted out with a tumescent, prepubescent sense of humor, a hot and sweaty live show, innumerable 7-inches, and now four full-lengths. I remember taking a listen to the Black Lips’ first self-titled Bomp! CD four years ago and finding that it rose above the pile of garage-bound by-the-bookers like so much toxic, nonnutritious, black-flecked, punky foam.

The Atlanta group’s latest CD, Good Bad Not Evil (Vice), finds them name-checking girl-group matresfamilias right up front — looking to a line from the Shangri-Las’ "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" with the album title — while still plying their grimy tricks: they sing the praises of "Magic City titties," strike pseudoreverent poses with "How Do You Tell the Child That Someone Has Died," and invoke the spirit of Professor Longhair and the 13th Floor Elevators while slamming the "ruthless old bag" that swept through N’awlins on "O Katrina!" The epicenter of Good Bad Not Evil might be "Veni Vidi Vici," punctuated by creepy slaps and skin-crawling licks as vocalist-guitarist Cole Alexander mocks, "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who’s the greatest of them all / My man Muhammad, Boy Jesus too / ‘Cause I came, I saw / I conquered all / All y’all, all y’all, all y’all / People look towards Mecca’s way / Sistine Chapel people pray / It don’t matter what you do / Holy World War will come for you." Call it flower punk, as the Black Lips are wont to do, or conscious garage rock or backpacker bop, but it sounds like the scamps are reaching past the retro toward some real issues these days.

Of course, the Black Lips won’t spill the goods. Not that they can, when talking to Alexander, 25, turns out to be an exercise in total frustration. On a mobile and on the move through Indianapolis with the rest of the combo, the vocalist kept dropping out — or hanging up — betwixt juicy tidbits on dating Osama bin Laden’s niece Wafah Dufour ("We discussed making some instrumental tracks and hung out. She was really nice and pretty and cool, so we’ll just see how it goes") and giving equal Lip to Israel and Palestine, performance-wise ("These things make it seem like we’re more politically involved, but we just like to have fun. None of the Palestinians were able to come to see us, so we played in front of a mosque with just guitars. There are posters everywhere of suicide bombers’ faces — those guys are like rock stars there. But the kids loved it and were really intrigued that a punk band would play for them"). Still, after spending more time yammering to dead air than engaging with the vocalist — and finding "Veni Vidi Vici" inexplicably skipping on my copy of the new LP — I finally understood: these kids were born under a bad sign, and how. Good bad, though, not evil. *

THE BLACK LIPS

With the Spits

Mon/15, 8 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

THE VOODOO YOU DO

RUINS


With the departure of bassist Hisashi Sasaki, drummer Tatsuya Yoshida goes it alone, boosting the virtuosic noise spasms and live and unreleased skronkercise of Refusal Fossil (Skin Graft). With Good for Cows and Birgit Ulher Quintet. Wed/10, 9 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BRUTAL SOUND FX NO. 43


The noise-peddling umpteenth iteration includes Winters in Osaka, Pink Canoes, Mykel Boyd, Kukie Matter, Mr. Mercury Goes to Work, Ozmadawn, and Head Boggle Domo. ‘Nuff said. Thurs/11, 8 p.m., pay what you can. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org

CRYPTACIZE


Chris Cohen, once of Deerhoof, and Nedelle Torrisi dust off their new Asthmatic Kitty combo, Cryptacize. With Half-Handed Cloud, Lake, and Joel. Sat/13, 7 p.m., $5. Mama Buzz Café, 2318 Telegraph, Oakl. www.mamabuzzcafe.com

MATT POND PA


News flash: ebullient indie rocker overcomes stolen gear and The O.C. associations. Tues/16, 8 p.m., $14. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com

Will the US bomb Iran?

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OPINION Half the warships in the US Navy are sitting within striking distance of Iran. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have stepped up their rhetoric, accusing Iran of killing Americans in Iraq and of threatening to start a nuclear holocaust. The British media is predicting that the Bush administration will bomb Iran in the near future.

The White House is using the same propaganda techniques to whip up popular opinion against Iran that it used four years ago against Iraq. Here’s the real story:

Iran has no nuclear weapons and couldn’t have them for years. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that was right about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says it has no proof of Iranian plans to build nuclear bombs. The IAEA recently reached a binding agreement for Iran to reveal its past nuclear activities and allow full inspection of nuclear-power sites.

The sophisticated explosively formed penetrators supposedly supplied by Iran to militias in Iraq are easily made in Iraqi machine shops and can be purchased commercially for mining operations.

For years Iran has given political, economic, and military support to Shia and Kurdish militias, but the Bush administration has never proved that Iran is intentionally targeting US soldiers.

For two years the United States has helped splinter groups among Iran’s ethnic minorities to blow up buildings, assassinate revolutionary guards, and kill civilians in an effort to destabilize the Tehran regime. In short, the United States does to Iran what it accuses Iran of doing in Iraq.

The hardliners in the administration, led by Cheney, see a dwindling opportunity to bomb Iran before Bush leaves office. They hope to launch a massive bombing campaign to so weaken Tehran that the regime will fall and Iranians will see the United States as their savior. Does this sound the faintest bit familiar?

In reality, a US attack would be disastrous. Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 25 percent of the world’s oil supplies passes. Oil prices would skyrocket. Iran could encourage Hezbollah to launch missiles into Israel. Muslims would hold demonstrations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Iran could mobilize that anger and encourage Shiite parties in Iraq to attack US troops.

In a truly nightmare scenario, Iran could encourage terrorist attacks inside the United States and in allied countries. When I interviewed Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad in 2006, he said, "If you do a military strike, you will have chaos. It’s very dangerous."

The decision to bomb Iran depends, in part, on actions by the American people. Now is the time to let your national and local politicians know that we don’t need another human disaster in the Middle East. Code Pink is organizing a national campaign to get city councils to pass resolutions against attacks on Iran (www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?list=type&type=135). US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has introduced a Senate bill to prohibit an attack on Iran without congressional authorization.

I can’t predict with certainty that the United States will bomb Iran, but the danger is greater today than anytime in the past 25 years. The question is, what will you be doing to stop it?

Reese Erlich

Reese Erlich (www.reeseerlich.com) is author of the new book The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis (Polipoint). Oct. 2 will be Reese Erlich Day in Oakland to honor his work and that of all investigative journalists.

Punk you, Bad Brains

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By Duncan Scott Davidson

I went to the Bad Brains show at Slim’s last night. The sad admission: I’d never seen them before. I mean, I had, for the Rise (Epic, 1993) tour with Israel Joseph I on vocals instead of HR, which really doesn’t count, now does it? Sort of like going to the Wonka Chocolate Factory and being shown around by someone named “Millie Monka” instead of Willie Wonka.

Needless to say, I was stoked on the show last night, though I wasn’t expecting to see HR playing a guitar, an F-hole Ibanez with a blue sunburst paint job. That was all well and good, and added a little more crunch to the music (as if it needed any). I remember being physically moved by the early Brains footage in American Hardcore, just floored by how raw and forceful they were live. Nonetheless, I knew HR wasn’t in his twenties anymore, and wouldn’t be wearing a white droogie outfit and doing flips. Still, during the reggae tracks, when he wasn’t moored to his guitar, he stood with his hands in the pockets of his oversized ragamuffin Harry Potter hoodie-cardigan-blazer thing, his eyes slits, clearly higher than Haile Selassie I. You figure the guy can’t be a whole lot older than fellow DC favorite son Henry Rollins, but you know Hank wouldn’t rock out with his hands in his pockets. Of course, Rollins doesn’t smoke a whole cannabis club to his head every day. And what is it with being from DC and affecting a Jamaican accent? Does playing reggae and being a Rasta mean God sends down and authentic accent from above? Does converting to Hinduism make you speak like a Bollywood star?


Bad Brains, back in the day.

Carbon-neutral madness

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GREEN CITY Are you carbon neutral yet? Al Gore says he is. The concert tours for the Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews, and other big acts say they are too. Indeed, going neutral is hot these days as, almost overnight, the fledgling market in carbon offsets has burgeoned into a multimillion-dollar industry.

The method is simple, at least in theory. For a fee, companies will balance, or offset, the greenhouse gases emitted by your car or home by spending money on climate-healing initiatives such as renewable energy, forestation projects, and capturing deleterious gases like methane from farms and landfills.

But the sheer number of offset firms out there is staggering, with hundreds of companies vying for your dollars. And as the industry has exploded in popularity, questions have arisen about its reliability and whether the millions of dollars being spent are really making it to worthwhile projects.

"It’s the Wild, Wild West out there with carbon offsetting," the Sierra Club’s Aaron Israel told the Guardian. "Until it becomes a truly functional market, it’s going to continue to be confusing to the consumer who really wants to do the right thing."

A San Francisco firm is looking to bring some accountability to the freewheeling new sector. Since California’s energy deregulation disaster, the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions has run the Green-e program, which oversees and authenticates energy companies that claim to produce renewable power. Starting this fall, the CRS’s Sarah Krasley told us, Green-e will police the carbon offset market as well and put its seal on worthy companies.

Green-e has already been certifying one method for slowing climate change for years: the sale of renewable energy certificates, or RECs. A local firm called 3 Degrees (formerly 3 Phases Energy) specializes in RECs, mainly for small and large businesses. With each one-megawatt-hour certificate its customers buy, the company helps wind, solar, and other renewable-energy producers compete with cheaper, fossil fuel–based sources of energy. As 3 Degrees’ Steve MacDougal explained, "Utilities purchase energy at a commodity price, the same price for coal as for renewables. RECs allow [green-power companies] to have a premium, which makes them more profitable."

While 3 Degrees deals primarily in RECs for business clients, two other local firms, TerraPass and LiveNeutral, peddle offsets for individuals. Since it opened shop just two years ago, the for-profit TerraPass has sold tens of thousands of "passes" on its Web site for car emissions, air travel, home electricity use, and even weddings. The average buyer spends "about $50," company founder Tom Arnold told us, with the money going to initiatives like wind farms in the Midwest and the capturing of greenhouse gas emissions from farms and landfills. About one-third of 3 Degrees’ outlays go to RECs.

LiveNeutral takes a different approach from TerraPass or any other company. Rather than spending money on individual projects or methods, the Presidio nonprofit buys and then permanently retires carbon offset credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange. "By purchasing these credits and then never reselling them," LiveNeutral executive director Jason Smith explained, "we drive up the price of the credits and encourage [big greenhouse gas emitters] to reduce." LiveNeutral sells a one-ton emissions reduction credit for $7.50, Smith said. Most customers use the company’s DriveNeutral program and purchase five credits to offset one year of driving. The firm also offers a FlyNeutral option for air travel.

But many critics have likened the offset business to medieval papal indulgences, with environmental sins like owning an inefficient vehicle or cranking up the thermostat absolved for the right price. Israel said the Sierra Club does not openly oppose the practice, but he is worried that offsets could become "a distraction for people…. It’s really the last thing you should do, not the first. First you should conserve and become more efficient, then you can see about offsetting what’s left."

For Arnold, TerraPass’s phenomenal success is not about exploiting guilt or bad behavior. Instead, he reasoned, it simply shows that people want to do all they can to make a difference. "Most of our users are already green," he said. "But we want to reach the people who are just now waking up to enormity of the problem too…. What our customers are saying is very American: ‘Let’s not wait for someone else to do it, let’s get something done ourselves.’ " *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Importing injustice

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More than 100 tractor trailers were lined up at 6:30 a.m., inching toward the Port of Oakland’s Terminal 7, waiting for their next load. Against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline, a mammoth freight ship emblazoned with the name Hyundai glided toward the port, pregnant with multicolor shipping containers.

A driver told the Guardian that he expected to be in line for at least two hours waiting to drop off the empty container attached to his big rig. His 1989 truck lacks air-conditioning, so the windows were rolled down, allowing diesel exhaust to pollute the air he was breathing.

It’s the same scene at many of the port’s other terminals: long lines of ancient trucks slowly snaking toward their destinations, their primarily immigrant drivers performing the essential and thankless task of transporting cheap clothes from Asia to the nation’s big-box retailers or helping to export California’s agricultural goods to Hawaii.

The fourth-busiest container port in the nation, the Port of Oakland is the economic engine of the region, providing thousands of jobs and more than $1 billion in revenue. But activists say that the port system has also led to sweatshoplike conditions for truckers and created a health crisis for the surrounding community.

On their poverty-level wages, truckers are usually able to buy only the oldest, most polluting trucks. Their diesel pollution is a major factor driving asthma rates through the roof in the neighboring, primarily African American neighborhood of West Oakland, where, the American Lung Association says, one in every five kids has asthma.

A new national coalition of labor, environmental, and community activists has advanced a proposal that would make all drivers employees with benefits, radically changing the way work is done on the waterfront and possibly heralding the return of the Teamsters to the ports for the first time in more than 20 years. In the process, the proposal would make the port’s biggest customers responsible for its environmental problems.

The coalition places the blame for the current situation squarely on giant retail shippers such as Wal-Mart and Target and is calling for them to be held accountable for the full environmental and labor costs of the cheap goods they sell — a call the corporations are strenuously resisting. The American Trucking Association, whose members contract directly with the corporation, has threatened a lawsuit if the change is adopted. But port officials have voiced a willingness to seriously consider implementing the proposal.

Having long claimed that the trucking industry is outside its control, the Port of Oakland could embrace the proposal as a means of satisfying community, environmental, political, and business concerns. With impending directives to clean the air coming from Sacramento, trade planned to almost double by 2020, two new Port Commission appointees representing labor and environmental concerns, and a federal antiterrorism tracking plan slated for this fall, the port is poised to play a leadership role that could reverberate up and down the West Coast and across the country.

THE TRUCKER’S LIFE


The Port of Oakland’s estimated 1,500 to 2,500 drivers are a far cry from the middle-class, long-haul Teamsters and the Smokey and the Bandit–<\d>style freewheeling rebels who have long been engrained in the American imagination. Instead, they are at the bottom of the port’s food chain and are the most exploited trucking sector in the country, consisting primarily of recent immigrants struggling to make ends meet.

Dawit Fre, 39, immigrated to Oakland from the small nation of Eritrea two years ago. "I wanted to see a better life," he told us. Fre was a driver in Africa and went to work for the Port of Oakland after his cousin told him people start their trucking careers there. He said he works up to 60 hours a week for one company, making the equivalent of about $8 an hour after expenses.

Fre arrives at work every day no later than 6:30 a.m., waits for dispatches from his company, and spends a minimum of two hours in line for each container he picks up or drops off. He is paid $42 for each load by the company. He doesn’t know how much the trucking companies make but has heard that some get $200 per load. He returns home around 6:30 at night.

"The whole time I’m at the port, I’m thinking about my family," he said. "I got children. The only thing I’m thinking inside the terminal is, how many moves am I going to do? Am I going to do four or five or three or two?"

On a good day he can get four, on a bad day as few as one, depending on the length of the lines and the generosity of the dispatcher. Then there are his expenses. As an independent operator, Fre is solely responsible for a tankful of diesel that costs him up to $250 a pop. DMV registration is $178 a month, and 12 percent of his weekly earnings goes to his boss for insurance on his truck, not to mention annual federal income tax.

He receives no benefits, no overtime pay, and no health care coverage at a time when his wife, a diabetic, is suffering from severe stomach complications. "I’m taking her to Highland Hospital," he told us. "If it’s easy for them to fix, they can do it. But if she has a big problem, they can’t do it."

Fre has his own health problems. "Most of the drivers, we have old trucks," he said. "You don’t have AC, your windows are down, and you get sick in the truck" from the diesel. Fre’s remedy for his persistent coughing and the burning in his throat is several glasses of milk after each day of work.

A 1998 study published in the Journal of Independent Medicine found that truck drivers face a risk of cancer 10 times greater than Occupational Safety and Health Administration–acceptable levels, and a 1990 study published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that truckers face nearly double the average lifetime lung cancer risk.

Fre has little money to invest in his truck, a ragged 1987 model that he said needs $5,000 in repairs. He doesn’t trust it on the freeway, so he’s asked his dispatcher to send him only from pier to pier, not outside the port, further dipping into his earnings. "I came here to see a better life," he said. "When I got here, I found it is different. Here we don’t get paid for the overtime. We don’t get benefits. When I get into the terminal, there is no respect."

His experience is typical of those of port truckers across the country. A study by the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, found that the average Port of Oakland trucker makes as little as $8 an hour after expenses, works 11 hours a day, and spends two and a half hours in line per load. Almost none of the truckers reported receiving benefits on the job, and 66 percent don’t have health insurance.

This is consistent with data from a 2004 survey of port truckers in Los Angeles and Long Beach, conducted by a professor of economics at California State University Long Beach. That report found they had a median income of $25,000 a year after expenses and an average workday of 11.2 hours, with up to 33 percent of their time spent waiting in line.

Port truckers generally drive only the oldest, most polluting trucks because that’s all they can afford. An industry adage is that ports are "the place trucks go to die," a reality that has dire impacts on the surrounding communities.

POLLUTING THE COMMUNITY


West Oakland has long been a dumping ground for the Bay Area’s toxic waste. The community has one of the five highest asthma hospitalization rates in California, with an estimated 20 percent of its K–<\d>12 students suffering from the disorder, according to the ALA. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that children living within a few hundred meters of freeways leading out of ports not only are more likely to suffer from asthma but also actually develop smaller lungs.

Margaret Gordon, a 60-year-old community health activist who has lived just blocks from the Port of Oakland for 15 years, told us that she and four of her grandchildren living with her all suffer from asthma. When one grandchild was born with severe asthma and her own asthma worsened after she moved to West Oakland, Gordon, then a housekeeper, started reading about the causes of asthma and made the connection to the port. Like many in the low-income neighborhood, she cannot afford to move elsewhere in the Bay Area.

Gordon has been fighting for clean air for more than a decade, and in April she was inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame for her work. In 2001, Gordon formed the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which she now cochairs. The project has released more than half a dozen studies related to air quality. A 2003 report showed that trucks traveling through West Oakland in one day produce the same amount of toxic soot as 127,677 cars, leading to indoor air in some neighborhood homes that is five times more toxic than that in other parts of the city.

Still, Gordon told us that port officials are "only starting paying attention." Last year the California Air Resources Board passed a resolution related to air quality at ports and announced that it was developing a regulatory mechanism. A 2006 CARB report found that truck diesel exhaust accounts for the majority of the estimated 2,400 deaths related to freight transport each year and 70 percent of the state’s air pollution–<\d>related cancer risk. Freight transport will cost California residents $200 billion in health costs over the next 15 years. Most of this is borne by low-income communities of color near freight transport hubs.

The combination of state mandates and local community concerns is starting to spark a change. "They would sit down and talk with us before that, but there was not anything concrete done," Gordon told us. The port is now in the early planning stages of an air-quality-improvement program, working with Gordon and other activists.

That movement is getting vigorous new support from the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, a national partnership of labor, environmental, and community activists organizing at the country’s major container ports: Los Angeles, Long Beach, Miami, Oakland, New York–New Jersey, and Seattle.

"Every one of those ports has the same environmental and labor problems we have in Oakland," Doug Bloch, the coordinator for the coalition in Oakland, told us during a tour of the port’s heavy industrial landscape. Virtually all of its 900 maritime acres are covered by concrete and asphalt, monster cranes that inspired Star Wars‘ Imperial Walkers, and 20-foot steel containers stacked up like Legos behind chain-link fences.

The Port of Oakland has no direct relationship with its truckers at the present. Shippers take price bids from among roughly 100 trucking companies at the port, then contract the work to the independent-contractor truckers. The CCSP says bidding wars lead to poverty wages for truckers, older trucks and more pollution, and a chaotic port full of inefficiencies like long pickup waits.

Under the proposed system, ports would call on their ability as landlords to set standards for the trucking and shipping companies. They would require trucking companies to hire drivers as employees, shifting maintenance costs from the drivers to the companies, which would retrofit or replace all port trucks with more environmentally friendly rigs. The ports would allow only new, cleaner trucks to enter. The companies could then, in theory, pass the costs on to shippers and end users.

If drivers were paid as employees by the hour instead of by the trip, the coalition expects the market would reduce inefficient truck wait times and air pollution.

"When you rent an apartment you sign a lease," Bloch told us. "If you trash the place, you get evicted. Corporations are trashing this community, but they’re not being evicted."

A test case could soon be under way at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest in the United States, and the situation is being closely watched by ports and industries across the country. Port commissioners there had hoped by the end of this month to approve the coalition’s program, which they expect to reduce diesel truck emissions by as much as 80 percent over the next five years. But growing opposition and the threat of lawsuits by groups like the California Trucking Association, which represents the owners of truck companies, and the Waterfront Coalition, a consortium of major retailers, led the ports to delay their decision. The commissioners now expect to vote in September after completing an economic impact survey.

At the center of the storm is the fact that as employees, truckers would be able to organize and form a union. As independent contractors, they are barred from doing so because of antitrust laws originally created to oppose vast enterprises that dominated industries. (A further irony is that giant retail steamship companies have experienced incredible consolidation and enjoy a limited antitrust immunity.)

If passed by LA port officials, the plan would be implemented there starting Jan. 1, 2008, and could result in a domino effect at the other, smaller ports across the country. "The industry is fighting like hell in LA," Bloch told us. "They know that if they’re going to have to pay, the party’s over."

Meanwhile, Bloch told us that more than 1,000 truckers have signed a petition asking the Port of Oakland to pass a version of the coalition’s proposal, and it will be presented to the Port Commission, the seven-member body that would eventually vote on the proposal. Spokesperson Libby Schaff told us that the port "agrees with the coalition that the port can and should have a more direct relationship with its truckers" and is "very seriously considering the coalition’s proposal."

Because the proposal "constitutes a major overhaul of the way trucking is done today," Schaff said the port is currently holding stakeholder meetings with residents, truckers, terminal operators, elected officials, the business community, and labor to consider it in the context of a more comprehensive port plan. Schaff said a comprehensive plan could be crafted in less than a year.

The port has not taken a position on granting truckers employee status. It is also looking into other funding mechanisms for a clean-truck program, including money from a pending state bill that would impose a $30 fee on every 20-foot-equivalent unit passing through the Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland port complexes, to be used for improvements in road and rail infrastructure and for clean-air programs.

The legislation, Senate Bill 974, by Alan Lowenthal (D–Long Beach), would generate more than $525 million annually. But it faces tough opposition from some very powerful interests.

RESISTING CHANGE


Bill Aboudi, president of Oakland’s AB Trucking and a member of the CTA, told us truckers are "treated like second-class citizens," and he believes long lines and trucker asthma are serious problems. But he strongly opposes the coalition’s proposal. Instead, he told us, state regulations like those forthcoming from CARB and other piecemeal reforms are the answer.

"The coalition’s main goal is to unionize the drivers," Aboudi said. He was wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with two American flags and the words "Oakland Trucker." An immigrant from Israel, he has been at the Port of Oakland since 1992. "If these guys choose to be owner-operators, why are you rocking the boat? You can’t be playing with my livelihood just because you want to get union dues," Aboudi said. "Truckers want to own a piece of the American dream. They want to own their own truck."

It’s an appealing image to many. Kevin Leonard, an owner-operator trucker who contracts with Aboudi and others, told us he doesn’t want to give up his independent status. "I have the freedom to work when I want," he said. "I don’t see how the Teamsters can represent me better than I can."

The trucking industry as a whole says the coalition plan will force away trade and drive out small trucking companies, which will have to maintain the trucks and start paying benefits such as health insurance and workers’ compensation.

Yet Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D–Oakland) brushed aside those arguments. "I’ve been involved in Bay Area politics for more than 30 years," he told us. "I’ve seen these same claims made against farmworkers as they were organizing for better conditions. I’ve seen these arguments made when we were raising the minimum wage. I think the opposite is true. If you have a workforce with a livable wage, it’s a more productive workforce, and I think everyone benefits. Truckers deserve more, and we’re going to do what we can to help them."

Oakland City Council president Ignacio de la Fuente, who drafted and helped pass a minimum-wage law for port employees, told us he supports the right of truckers to unionize but labor and environmental concerns must be balanced with economic growth. "You can’t ignore the fact that you have the port of Oakland competing with other ports," he said. "I support the fact that the Teamsters are going to bargain collectively on a national level. This port competes with other ports, and you cannot be put at a disadvantage."

Bloch says the coalition’s target is the shipping companies, not the trucking companies. "The shippers are hiding behind the trucking companies," he told us. "On the one side there are the giant shipping companies, like Wal-Mart and Target, huge global companies that demand low prices from trucking companies. On the other side are tiny trucking companies, immigrant truckers, and communities of color. Wal-Mart’s slogan is ‘always low prices,’ but ‘always low prices’ means one out of five children in West Oakland with asthma and drivers making $8 an hour who can’t support their families."

Oakland mayor Ron Dellums may be signaling his support for reform with two new appointees to the Port Commission. Even before he took office, Dellums was working to influence the Port Commission; as mayor-elect, he requested that outgoing mayor Jerry Brown hold off on appointing a new nominee so Dellums could appoint someone working on environmental and community impacts. He lost this battle when a majority of the city council voted to appoint Mark McClure, the director of marketing at a business technology company focused on security.

Dellums’s latest appointees, announced earlier this month, are a marked contrast to the business-oriented appointees of the Brown era: Victor Uno, a financial secretary with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and Gordon, the longtime resident and environmental activist in West Oakland.

"The port’s policy has been all about business and not about the people," Gordon told us. "The mayor really wants someone there to talk about health issues. I have never known a mayor to put someone on the commission and one of their engagements is to talk about health." She would also like to see a public participatory-process policy built into the port. "This is about sharing the power," Gordon said. "I don’t think West Oakland residents know they have power." She has "no problem" with truckers unionizing but also wants to find a way for drivers to remain independent contractors if they prefer.

Uno told the Guardian that he is highly supportive of the proposal. "I think that if the whole commission takes the lead of Mayor Dellums that this proposal will be very seriously considered," he said. "I’m very optimistic." Asked if he thought a proposal could succeed without requiring trucking companies to hire truckers as employees, he said, "I do not see how that is possible, given the lack of regulations in the trucking industry. It’s a dog-eat-dog world among independent truckers."

DEREGULATION HISTORY


The ports were not always structured as they are now. Before the 1980s the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated trucking, and most truckers at California ports were members of the Teamsters. They had health care, pensions, and workers’ compensation insurance and were paid a middle-class wage.

As part of a national push toward deregulation in the late 1970s, Congress, spurred by President Jimmy Carter, deregulated the trucking industry in 1980. In the following few years, a flood of new trucking companies entered the ports, with shippers choosing between a growing number of companies for each job. As small trucking companies undercut one another in bidding wars, the falling rates translated into declining driver pay, the bankruptcy of Teamster-organized companies, and increasing reliance on independent contractors whom companies could hire without spending money on payroll taxes, health care costs, or other benefits that unions might try to extract.

Trucking expert Michael Belzer, an economics professor at Wayne State University, has shown that long-haul truckers now earn less than half of prederegulation wages and work an average of more than 60 hours a week, while retailers like Wal-Mart have thrived. "The low rates paid to truckers in this global-trade game acts as a subsidy for increasing the amount of trade," Belzer told us. "Pollution and safety hazards are the negative externalities." If all ports on the West Coast required employee drivers, he said, "the market result would be that cost and safety would go up, and pollution would go down."

There have been a handful of Teamsters-related or trucker-led rallies and work stoppages at the Port of Oakland since deregulation, including a technically illegal strike in 2004 protesting the soaring price of diesel fuel, which virtually shut down the port for eight days. Many of the same complaints of today’s port truckers were aired at that time — long waits in lines, poor pay, long hours, and no benefits.

"This business is like the Mafia," Lorenzo Fernandez, 36, said, standing in front of two metal taco trucks glinting in the noon sun, along with about a half dozen other truckers on their lunch break. "They’re doing whatever they want with us, between the [truck companies] and the shippers. There is so much competition between the companies, and they know that we need the job. They know that our kids will go hungry."

Muhammad Khan, 33, said he’s sometimes forced to make up for long wait times by driving dangerously fast on the freeways. "We have our families. We have to take care of them. We all risk our lives because we have to. We don’t make enough money if we don’t make a load," Khan told us.

"We’re all immigrants here," Fernandez said. "We make it possible for the economy to grow up, but they’re stepping on our faces…. We have to work together. Otherwise we are going to be slaves for life."

A sign on a chain-link fence near the taco trucks reads, "Got an old truck? The Port of Oakland can help! Replace your old truck today!" Call the number at the bottom of the sign, and a recorded message issues an invitation to an informational barbecue that took place four months ago. The message explains that the port will provide qualifying owners with up to $40,000 to replace trucks dating from 1993 or before with a 1999-model truck. But Schaff told us, "Due to overwhelming demand, new applicants are currently not being accepted."

Money for the program came from a $9 million settlement of a lawsuit West Oakland residents filed against the Port of Oakland in 1998, alleging that their health was being harmed by port operations. The port says it will replace a total of 80 of the estimated 2,500 port trucks with those funds. When asked if the port had a responsibility to truckers, Schaff said it was "consistent with the port’s commitment to social responsibility…. We’ve done a lot, and we’re going to do more."

But the only specific programs the port could point to were the truck replacement program, a trucker access committee and working group started after the 2004 strike, and new GPS cell phone technology that is being touted as a solution for bottlenecks. Chuck Mack, the Teamsters’ Western Region vice president, isn’t impressed. "They’re a joke," he said of the programs. "Very few independent contractors have utilized them."

The recent purchase of the GPS system particularly irritates Mack. "Here is a quasi-governmental agency supplying services to the trucking companies," he told us. "It’s bizarre that we’re using taxpayer money for this. Any other industry would buy the devices themselves."

"We don’t disagree with using this money" for truck replacement, Mack said, "but what you’re doing is blowing $2 million in taxpayer money. Years down the road they’re going to need a new truck and another million in taxpayer money. For Wal-Mart and Target it’s great because they can have the taxpayer pick up the bill. Without changing the model, it’s just a short-term fix at the expense of the taxpayer."

EMPLOYEE BENEFITS


Beyond the environmental and economic benefits of making truckers employees of the companies, the change also might improve port security. The federal Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, expected to be implemented in the fall, will check the identities of the nation’s 750,000 port employees, 110,000 of whom work as truckers. Under the present system, there is no way to track the independent port truckers.

Employees are easier to track, and they are also better for port security in other ways. Among low-paid port truckers, turnover rate is extremely high, according to the ATA. "We all know that having a stable, well-trained, reliable workforce only leads to more security," Bloch said. "If they’re trained, they can be the eyes and ears of the port."

Well-paid truckers also would lead to safer ports. In a 2005 report, Belzer showed that "a substantial fraction" of independent operators actually loses money each year, resulting in "a high risk of unsafe operations among those earning the least money." The low compensation also "presents a national security risk," his report read, "since those who desperately work to break even might be at risk to engage in activities that put the nation at risk, whether intentionally or unintentionally, just trying to find a way from not going under."

Driving past another long line of trucks idling outside a gate after lunch break, Bloch pointed out one truck. A placard on the back of the rig read, "End sweatshops on wheels."

The current port system "just heaps abuse and abuse on these truck drivers and this community," Bloch told us. "The big businesses like Wal-Mart don’t pay the cost of polluting Oakland. It’s the truck drivers and the community that pay the cost. People pay with their lives."

"You can’t fix the environmental problems without fixing the problems of the driver," he said. "And now you have labor and the community coming together, and that’s powerful."*

Pro-Palestine protesters poke Pelosi

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By Ross Moody
Protesters converged outside the Burton Federal Building in downtown San Francisco yesterday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Arab-Israeli 6-Day War, targeting their message to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose district office is inside. The pro-Palestinian group was confronted by another group that supports Israel, and the ensuing ruckus led to both groups getting kicked off the property.
palpic.jpg
Photo courtesy of 60/40 Campaign

Quite an interview: a talk with Judy Stone

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"There’s no craft. I’m just curious." To which I respond, "Are you sure?" as if this respected journalist could be putting me on. I’ve just read Judy Stone’s new book of interviews, Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World (Silman-James Press). "How do you prepare your questions?" I ask. "I don’t," she replies as I stare down at my list of prepared questions. "But don’t let that intimidate you."

Because Stone was born into a family that "couldn’t resist a joke," her confessed lack of organization seems unconvincing. This is the woman who, during a colossal televised press conference for Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, asked Hitch what he’d like on his gravestone. Later, Pauline Kael confronted Stone about her question, to which she responded, "Pauline, the whole movie was about that."

"I don’t include myself in my interviews because that’s not the point," Stone insists. Regardless, her priorities and ethics are clear in her writing. Take the subject of Israel: "I have always felt that I have ethical obligations," she says. "I’m not a Zionist. I’d like to see equal justice for Palestinians. My oldest brother [I.F. Stone] wrote a book called Underground to Palestine. He went with people right out of the concentration camps on the first ship to Palestine. In his articles he came out for a binational state." As if to suppress emotion, she fidgets with her copy of Not Quite a Memoir and reads a quote from her interview with Amos Oz: "Israel was a land for two people, not just one…. This particular national movement is the most stupid and cruel in modern history but we ought to do business with it…. You can’t make peace with nice neighbors." This quote, Stone says, is relevant today, not simply because the conflict in Palestine persists but because "it also applies to the question of negotiating with Iran. Their president is an imbecile and dangerous; so is Bush. So now we have two imbeciles making policy, and it’s a very, very dangerous situation. However, I hope that my interviews with Iranian directors show more of the human side of Iran."

Stone’s new book and her previous collection, Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers, should be regular fare in college film classes. But although her first book, The Mystery of B. Traven (about the enigmatic author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), has recently been republished, Eye on the World is currently out of print. And Not Quite a Memoir, boasting more than 120 interview portraits, including ones of Jean Genet, Leroi Jones, Donald Ritchie, Kathy Acker, Anne-Marie Melville, and Juan Goytisolo, has been publicized little and reviewed less. "It hasn’t even been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked for 30 years."

Partly guided by an interest in "how each person’s homeland has affected him," Stone’s interviews with writers and filmmakers have taken her all over the world. Although Bernardo Bertolucci didn’t like Stone’s review of his film Luna, he told her a critic is supposed to be "a bridge between the filmmaker and the audience," to which she replied, "I try, I try." Proof positive: her interview with novelist Orhan Pamuk helped American critics better understand his complex work The Black Book.

Today she feels as she did while writing "Encounter in Montenegro." The previously unpublished piece, written in 1959, concludes Not Quite a Memoir and is the only one in which she reveals the way she responds to people. In it she’s a young reporter riding a bus through the black mountains of Yugoslavia. She engages in a discussion with a student from Ghana who makes clear his contempt for Stone, a stranger, and worse, an American. "I still feel that way," she says now. "Feel what way?" I ask. "Feel what way?" she repeats, pausing to help me understand. "This man despised me because I was an American." "So you felt despised?" To which she replies, "Don’t you?" (Sara Schieron)

I heart your dark side

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› duncan@sfbg.com

I’ve got to admit — I was intimidated. I’ve done enough interviews that I don’t usually get the jitters beforehand, but San Francisco songwriter Rykarda Parasol’s sheer self-possession on last year’s full-length Our Hearts First Meet (Three Ring) had me a little spooked. Yeah, I’ve sat through enough interminable creative-writing workshops to know not to confuse the author with the story, the narrator with the narrative, the singer with the song. Nonetheless, on such numbers as "Night on Red River," there’s a glow of eternal bad-ass that outlasts the spinning of the CD. "So my steps were slow and my swagger [pause] deliberate," Parasol sings at her throatiest — almost on the edge of phlegmy, really. "And if ever my heart grieved, now my body must not confess it." And she walks and wails, more in triumph than lament, into the Texas dark, leaving the jeering crowd back in the bar, "walking through everyone out on Red River tonight."

The situation plays itself out more than once. On "Arrival, a Rival," Parasol sings, "So this is Texas, so this is ache / So this is Texas on your knees now don’t you break." With "En Route," she tells the story of a lone motorcyclist, an ex-lover, who died on the way to New Orleans. At his funeral, she mourns, "Not a dry eye was to be seen / Unless you looked into mine." The record — set largely in Texas but also in New York — has a novelistic, dare I say, cinematic feel to it. There’s crashing thunder, and there’s light. There are lonesome plains and evil deeds, with only the sound of "Texas Midnight Radio" to hold off the darkness. But what in lesser hands (and with lesser voices) could come across as ham-handed and weepy, another alterna–heartbreak opus, rises above. Parasol’s background — yeah, that’s her real name — as a University of San Francisco literature grad shines through, and the songs come across as the tales of a woman, an outsider, in crisis situations. Parasol’s character digs deep and summons an inner strength just strong enough to edge out self-doubt and to stand up and walk on.

WHEN WE FIRST MEET


So yeah, I was intimidated a bit. Our Hearts First Meet feels like literature to me: it makes me think of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and — I’m a little reticent to say it because I think she gets this a lot — Nick Cave.

Of course, when I met Parasol for coffee in the Mission District, she wasn’t swaggering deliberately. She didn’t put her cigarette out in my drink, like the famous story of Cave dousing his smoke in Richard Butler’s cocktail at a London party. Really, what the fuck did I expect? While careful, which is to say trained with an almost Pavlovian rigor, not to confuse the writer with the writing, I could see the path she’d taken from being "extremely shy my whole life" to the "I shall overcome" — or, to take another quote from "Red River," "To myself I will be true" — attitude of the disc.

"I was told not to sing in the school chorus," Parasol told me. "I used to lip-synch. I was … I wouldn’t say ‘tone deaf,’ because that’s a real clinical term. They call it a ‘lack of relative pitch.’ " She went on to say she had "no natural aptitude" for music, rather "such a strong desire. I just wanted to push myself further."

This desire led to opera lessons. Although Parasol wanted to sing rock, she also knew her parents wouldn’t bite, so she pitched opera to appeal to her mother’s sense of elegance. "I was kind of a ratty kid," she added, laughing. From opera lessons she went on to a few bands, none of which she wanted to name. Finally, toward the tail end of a venture with ex-Jawbreaker drummer Adam Pfahler, wherein she didn’t write any of the music, he asked her if she had any songs. "It was, like, ‘Somebody actually wants to hear what I’ve written. Oh, my god.’ I never felt I had any business being a musician."

PERPETUAL OUTSIDER


Beyond feeling musically unworthy, Parasol felt like a cultural outsider. Her father is a Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland, he spent his early years hiding from Nazis before immigrating to the newly formed State of Israel and later, through the beneficence of a distant relative, to California. He met his future wife, a Swedish woman, in a San Francisco bar. "He probably saw a big, tall blond lady and thought, ‘I’m going to have kids that will be Hitler’s worst nightmare,’ " Parasol said. "Aryan Jews!" Holidays saw "Hanukkah wrapping paper underneath the Christmas tree that we referred to as ‘the bush.’ You know, like the burning bush. We were very confused."

Despite wacky Decembers, Parasol’s upbringing was largely secular. Nonetheless, she grew up feeling outside the main current of American culture. Having recently seen the PBS documentary on Andy Warhol, she related to the artist as an outsider who came to the States as a child and never really fit in. "Although I was born in the US, everybody around me was a foreigner," Parasol explained. "My parents didn’t have any American friends. Everything in their house was sort of European." What she calls her "funny accent" as a child was drilled out of her in school as a "speech impediment." When she studied American literature in college, "it was a brand-new world."

Maybe it was the relative unfamiliarity of the surrounding culture that led her to move from Northern California to Hollywood and later to Austin and New York, where she seems to have continued in her role as a perennial outsider. Looking back on the interview, I think we had a bit of a misunderstanding about the setting of the album and its overarching Southern Gothic tone. Texas has a mythos to it, one that’s certainly embraced by Texans, right down to their "Don’t Mess with Texas" anti-littering campaign. It’s the Lone Star State, and everything’s bigger there. I don’t know, but when I brought Texas up, I think Parasol thought I was somehow challenging her right to use the state as a backdrop. Which, of course, I would have — had it felt unearned or tacked on. She even went so far as to send me an e-mail addendum stating, "Art is frequently artificial. These songs are not grand statements about Texas or the South. They’re about hurt, loss, and isolation."

They’re outsider songs, I’d add. Which isn’t to say they don’t conjure up a set of imagery and the aforementioned mythos — they just know when to transcend it. They’re powerful enough to transcend it. Parasol mentioned a well-meaning fan with a video idea. "He was talking about sticking me in period costume with 1930s hair, and I was, like, ‘This isn’t 1930,’ " she said. "I wasn’t keen on the concept. I want it to be timeless." This is where I think we weren’t seeing eye to eye. Just because something has a setting in time and space, that doesn’t mean it’s not timeless.

I’ve got to admit that I see a woman on a barren plain when I listen to Our Hearts First Meet, in the middle of a thunderstorm, and damn it all if she isn’t often wearing a worn gingham dress, reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s famously destitute Okies. This woman doesn’t have fancy hair, because it’s pouring rain, and besides, she can’t afford an expensive hairdo. But it’s not a helpless, waifish image, even though the woman may very well be weeping in the rain. The feeling I get from it is that of the final scene in King Lear. Lear is half naked and half mad, rid of everything he once held dear. And he’s shouting, taking a stand against the very universe. He’s been sunk to the depths in terms of worldly stature, but his humanity has been raised to its zenith.

It was funny to hear Parasol talk about "Night on Red River." Never mind separating the singer from the song: the scenario is that she’s in a bar with her boyfriend and "a young girl who passed judgment on people she didn’t know. A clique person." When the protagonist’s boyfriend does nothing to stand up for her, she takes that burning walk down Red River. But whereas the song’s narrator comes across as pure bad-ass, Parasol herself frames the real-life situation differently: "I have no power in this situation," she said of that night. "Nothing I can do can make it better or worse. I’m going to have to stick this out. But I don’t have to stay here."

And I guess that’s it: finding the sense of power in powerlessness. Parasol seems to have done this in her life as well as in her music: she’s found her bad-ass gland and tapped it. *

RYKARDA PARASOL AND THE TOWER RAVENS

With Elephone, French Disco, and Dora Flood

Fri/5, 9 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

>

The P-U-litzer prizes

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Competition has been fierce for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes. Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer. As the judges for this un-coveted award, Jeff Cohen and I have deliberated with due care. (Jeff is the founder of the media watch group FAIR and author of the superb new book “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”)

And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006:

“FACT-FREE TRADE” AWARD — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

In a press corps prone to cheer on corporate-drafted trade agreements as the key to peace and plenty in the world, no cheerleader is more fervent than Tom Friedman. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in July, Friedman confessed: “I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown, in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA,
the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.’”

(Friedman may not have read even the pact’s title; CAFTA actually stands for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.)

LOCK UP THE FIRST AMENDMENT PRIZE — CNN’s William Bennett

Soon after being hired as a CNN pundit, Bennett went on his radio talk show and offered his views on freedom of the press — and on reporters who broke stories about warrantless wiretapping and secret CIA detention sites “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others.” Bennett fumed: “Are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award — I think what they did was worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward.”

BROKE-BRAIN MOUTHING AWARD — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

As the movie “Brokeback Mountain” (about a relationship between two cowboys) was gaining attention and audience in January, Chris Matthews appeared on the Imus show to hail “the wonderful Michael Savage” and the talk-show host’s nickname for the movie: “Bareback Mounting.” Matthews and Savage had been MSNBC colleagues until “the wonderful” Savage was fired — after referring to an apparently gay caller as a “sodomite” and telling him to “get AIDS and die.” Now that’s hardball.

CASUAL ABOUT CASUALTIES AWARD — Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch

Echoing an Iraq war talking-point heard regularly on Fox News, owner Murdoch said on the eve of the November election: “The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.” As FAIR noted, U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed those in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, not to mention the combined U.S. deaths of all this country’s other military actions since Vietnam — including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

FRONT-PAGE PUNDIT AWARD — Reporter Michael Gordon and The New York Times

With many voters telling pollsters that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the Times front-paged a post-election analysis by Michael Gordon — headlined “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” — quoting three hand-picked “experts” who decried the possibility of troop withdrawal. Gordon didn’t tell readers that one of his “experts,” former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, had relentlessly promoted an Iraq invasion based on wildly false claims about an Iraqi threat. Gordon took off his reporter’s hat that night on CNN to become an unabashed advocate for his view that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to “civil war” (as though civil war weren’t already underway).

“PROVE YOU’RE NOT A TRAITOR” PRIZE — CNN’s Glenn Beck

In November, Beck — an Islamophobic host on CNN Headline News — launched into his interview with Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim American, this way: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Beck then added: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Is it possible that primetime bigots like CNN’s Beck have something to do with the prejudices “that a lot of Americans feel”?

GROUNDHOG DAY AWARD — Ted Koppel

One role of journalism should be to help the public learn from past government policy disasters in hopes of preventing future ones. But in a New York Times column on Oct. 2, former ABC News star Koppel wrote that Washington should tell Iran it is free to develop an atomic bomb — with a Mafia-like warning: “If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear ‘accident,’ Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.” In other words, no matter what the evidence, Koppel urged our government to attack a predetermined foe, Iran. Didn’t that happen in 2003 with Iraq?

Hold your nose and prepare yourself for 2007.

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Weather channeling

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Dancer-choreographer David Dorfman is a poet of the ordinary. He digs below the commonplace and lets us see what’s underneath. Early in his career, with Out of Season, he paired football players with highly trained dancers. Ten years ago he invited his ensemble’s family members to join in performances of Familiar Movements. Both pieces revealed fresh ideas about dance, community, and beauty. They also showed Dorfman to be an artist of sparkling wit with a generous spirit.
In the two pieces that his David Dorfman Dance company made its Bay Area debut with last year, he worked single conceits into exuberant, athletic choreography that resonated beyond its voluptuously evocative appeal. In See Level, sprawled bodies on a studio floor suggested maps of continents, with individual countries that were self-contained yet had relationships with each other. A naked lightbulb inspired Lightbulb Theory, a meditation on death. Is it better, the piece asked in densely layered images, to die quickly or to flicker for a while?
Dorfman’s newest work, the 50-minute underground, opens the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ new Worlds Apart series, which according to executive director Ken Foster features artists who “create work that inspires us to think deeply and become responsible citizens of the global village.”
For underground, Dorfman started with history, using local filmmaker Sam Green’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Weather Underground as a jumping-off point. The film documents the activities of the Weathermen (later, Weather Underground). In the 1960s and ’70s, this radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society advocated violence to incite change. For Dorfman, the film and his associated research raised questions about individual and social responsibilities when faced with injustice. He also began to wonder about the effect of age on one’s perspective and decision-making process.
Speaking from his home in Connecticut, Dorfman explained that he was a Chicago teenager during the Days of Rage — four days in 1969 when stores and public buildings were attacked in protest of the Chicago Seven trial. “Now, I wanted to look at the idea of resistance against an unwarranted war from the perspective of a man with a 50-year-old body.”
Dorfman’s underground will strike a raw nerve with audiences, though he refuses to narrowly assign blame for the causes of societal unrest. He wants to unearth root causes, not apply Band-Aids. “Yes, of course I feel burned by the elections of 2000 and 2004 and the shameful behavior of our government. But this is not just about the current administration. Much damage was done before,” he said, pointing out that our conversation happened to be taking place on the anniversary of 9/11.
“I try hard to be a good global citizen, and I mourn the needless loss of life. So I want my generation and younger people to look at the nature of activism and what, if anything, justifies the use of force and violence.”
After the June premiere at the American Dance Festival, which occurred during the Israel-Lebanon conflict, a young audience member told Dorfman that he wanted to get off his backside and do something. “I don’t know what that something is,” Dorfman responded. “But we have to talk about it.”
The show stitches documentary footage, photo collages, spoken and projected text, and a commissioned score by Bessie winner Jonathan Bepler to Dorfman’s choreography for his nine dancers — plus some 20 local performers whom he auditioned this month. Though he still loves to work with people he calls “folks who don’t think they can dance,” underground’s choreography requires professionally trained artists.
Reminded of his ideal “to get the whole world dancing,” Dorfman is quick to point out that while realistically war may not always be avoided, perhaps we could learn to tolerate each other, and that dance — “nonsexual, noninvasive physical contact” — just might help.
Besides, he said, “If people are dancing, for that one brief moment they cannot kill each other.” SFBG
UNDERGROUND
Thurs/21 and Sat/23, 8 p.m.;
Sun/24, 2 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater
700 Howard, SF
$19–$25
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Project Censored on the Will and Willie show at 8:05 a.m. Wednesday on 960 the Quake radio

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Why didn’t the Conglomerati Media cover this major local news story?

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, will make a rare mainstream media appearance at 8:05 a.m. Wednesday morning (Sept. l3) to discuss the l0 big stories the nation’s major news media refused to cover last year, as the Bay Guardian put it in its cover story of the last issue.

Peter will explain lay out the stories and explain why the media
censored the following top l0 stories (in descending order):

l. The Feds and the Media Muddy the Debate over Internet Freedom.

2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technology to Iran.

3. World Oceans in Extreme Danger.

4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the United States.

5. High-tech Genocide in Congo.

6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy.

7. U.S. Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq.

8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act.

9. World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall.

10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians.

And then there are the junk food news stories that got far more attention than they deserved:

(l) Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt Got Together. (2) Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson Break Up. (3) “American Idol” Hits an All-Time High. (4) The Runaway Bride who didn’t. (5) Martha Stewart is Back in Town. (6) “Brokeback Mountain” Breaks Through. (7) Britney Spears (it just wouldn’t be a list without her. (8) MySpace Infiltrates our Space. (9) Steroids in Baseball Get Pumped Up. (l0) “The DaVinci Code” ad nauseam.

A tip of the derby to Willie Brown and Will Durst and Producer Paul Wells and the Quake/Clear Channel Radio for being the only mainstream media in the Bay Area to our knowledge to give the proper publicity to this important local story and local project (Sonoma State University).

Memo to Phillips, Will and Willie: ask if anybody has spotted the story in any mainstream media. That proves the censorship point.

I (B3) will appear on the show at 9:05 Thursday morning (Sept. l4) to discuss why the local regional monopoly (Hearst/Singleton/McClatchy/Gannett/Stephens) has not only blacked out this major story but also one of the biggest local censored stories of the year (the regional monopoly). Memo to the editors and city desks of the Conglomerati: why did you black out these major censored stories? B3

CENSORED!

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› sarah@sfbg.com
Last month, two news stories broke the same day, one meaty, one junky. In Detroit, US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless National Security Agency surveillance program was unconstitutional and must end. Meanwhile, somewhere in Thailand, a weirdo named John Mark Karr claimed he was with six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey when she died in 1996.
Predictably, the mainstream media devoted acres of newsprint and hours of airtime to the self-proclaimed beauty queen killer, including stories on what he ate on the plane ride home, his desire for a sex change, his child-porn fixation, and — when DNA tests proved Karr wasn’t the killer — why he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.
During that same time period, hardly a word was written or said in the same outlets about Judge Diggs Taylor’s ruling and the question it raises about why Bush and his power-grabbing administration repeatedly lie to the American public.
The mainstream media’s fascination with unimportant stories isn’t anything new. Professor Carl Jensen, a disenchanted journalist who entered advertising only to walk away in greater disgust and become a sociologist, says the media’s preoccupation with “junk food news” inspired him to found a media research project at Sonoma State University about 30 years ago to publicize the top 25 big stories the media had censored, ignored, or underreported the previous year.
That was the beginning of Project Censored, the longest-running media censorship project in the nation — and it drew plenty of criticism from editors and publishers.
“I was taking a lot of flak from editors around Project Censored’s annual list of the top stories the mainstream media missed,” recalls the now-retired Jensen. “They said the reason they hadn’t covered the stories was that they only had a limited amount of time and space, and that I was an academic, sitting there criticizing.”
But Jensen had an answer: there was plenty of time and space, but it was just being filled with fluff.
Since 1993, Project Censored has been running not only the stories that didn’t get adequate coverage but also the “junk food news” — the stories that were way, way overblown and filled precious pages and airtime that could have been used for real news.
While Jensen would love to be able to claim that Project Censored solved the media’s problems with censorship and junk food news, that didn’t happen.
“If anything, it’s gotten worse,” Jensen says, pointing to increased media monopolization.
Project Censored’s current director, Peter Phillips, says entertainment news may be addictive, but that’s no excuse for the media to push it.
“Massacres, celebrity gossip — we’re automatically attracted,” Phillips says. “It’s like selling drugs. But we don’t tolerate the drug dealer on the corner. For the democratic process to happen, we have to have information presented and made available. To just give people entertainment news is an abdication of the First Amendment.”
Art Brodsky, a telecommunications expert at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group based in Washington, DC, says some of the problems with censorship are a product of journalistic laziness. Brodsky, who has written extensively on network neutrality, which is the number one issue on this year’s list, says the topic hasn’t received enough coverage, partly because the debate has largely remained couched in telecommunications jargon.
“Network neutralilty is a crappy term, other than its alliterative value,” Brodsky says. “It’s one of those Washington issues that gets intense coverage in the field where it happens but can be successfully muddied, and it’s technical. So a lot of editors and reporters throw their hands up in the air, a lot like senators.
Following are Project Censored’s top 10 stories for the past year.
1. THE FEDS AND THE MEDIA MUDDY THE DEBATE OVER INTERNET FREEDOM
In its relatively brief life, the Internet has been touted as the greatest vehicle for democracy ever invented by humankind. It’s given disillusioned Americans hope that there is a way to get out the truth, even if they don’t own airwaves, newspapers, or satellite stations. It’s forced the mainstream media to talk about issues it previously ignored, such as the Downing Street memo and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.
So when the Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies aren’t required to share their wires with other Internet service providers, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the major media did little in terms of exploring whether this ruling would destroy Internet freedom. As Elliot Cohen reported in BuzzFlash, the issue was misleadingly framed as an argument over regulation, when it’s really a case of the Federal Communications Commission and Congress talking about giving cable and telephone companies the freedom to control supply and content — a decision that could have them playing favorites and forcing consumers to pay to get information and services that currently are free.
The good news? With the Senate still set to debate the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, as the network neutrality bill is called, it’s not too late to write congressional representatives, alert friends and acquaintances, and join grassroots groups to protect Internet freedom and diversity.
Source: “Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story,” Elliot D. Cohen, BuzzFlash.com, July 18, 2005
2. HALLIBURTON CHARGED WITH SELLING NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY TO IRAN
Halliburton, the notorious US energy company, sold key nuclear reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent US sanctions, journalist Jason Leopold reported on GlobalResearch.ca, the Web site of a Canadian research group. He cited sources intimate with the business dealings of Halliburton and Kish.
The story is particularly juicy because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation of US law.
Leopold contended that the Halliburton-Kish deals have helped Iran become capable of enriching weapons-grade uranium.
He filed his report in 2005, when Iran’s new hard-line government was rounding up relatives and business associates of former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, amid accusations of widespread corruption in Iran’s oil industry.
Leopold also reported that in 2004 and 2005, Halliburton had a close business relationship with Cyrus Nasseri, an Oriental Oil Kish official whom the Iranian government subsequently accused of receiving up to $1 million from Halliburton for giving them Iran’s nuclear secrets.
Source: “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team,” Jason Leopold, GlobalResearch.ca, Aug. 5, 2005
3. WORLD OCEANS IN EXTREME DANGER
Rising sea levels. A melting Arctic. Governments denying global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean floor in the hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, zinc, and the planet’s last pristine fishing grounds. This is the sobering picture author Julia Whitty painted in a beautifully crafted piece that makes the point that “there is only one ocean on Earth … a Mobiuslike ribbon winding through all the ocean basins, rising and falling, and stirring the waters of the world.”
If this world ocean, which encompasses 70.78 percent of our planet, is in peril, then we’re all screwed. As Whitty reported in Mother Jones magazine, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 found “the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer,” including the discovery “that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of human-induced greenhouse gases.” But while a Scripps researcher recommended that “the Bush administration convene a Manhattan-style project” to see if mitigations are still possible, the US government has yet to lift a finger toward addressing the problem.
Source: “The Fate of the Ocean,” Julia Whitty, Mother Jones, March–April 2006
4. HUNGER AND HOMELESSNESS INCREASING IN THE UNITED STATES
As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a data source that supports this embarrassing reality — a survey that’s been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans.
President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2007 includes an effort to eliminate the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Founded in 1984, the survey tracks American families’ use of Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care, and temporary assistance for needy families.
With legislators and researchers trying to prevent the cut, author Abid Aslam argued that this isn’t just an isolated budget matter: it’s the Bush administration’s third attempt in as many years to remove funding for politically embarrassing research. In 2003, it tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on mass layoffs and in 2004 and 2005 attempted to drop the bureau’s questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.
Sources: “New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness,” Brendan Coyne, New Standard, December 2005; “US Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire,” Abid Aslam, OneWorld.net, March 2006
5. HIGH-TECH GENOCIDE IN CONGO
If you believe the corporate media, then the ongoing genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is all just a case of ugly tribal warfare. But that, according to stories published in Z Magazine and the Earth First! Journal and heard on The Taylor Report, is a superficial, simplistic explanation that fails to connect this terrible suffering with the immense fortunes that stand to be made from manufacturing cell phones, laptop computers, and other high-tech equipment.
What’s really at stake in this bloodbath is control of natural resources such as diamonds, tin, and copper, as well as cobalt — which is essential for the nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries — and coltan and niobium, which is most important for the high-tech industries. These disturbing reports concluded that a meaningful analysis of Congolese geopolitics requires a knowledge and understanding of the organized crime perpetuated by multinationals.
Sources: “The World’s Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow,” The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005; “High-Tech Genocide,” Sprocket, Earth First! Journal, August 2005; “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo,” Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Z Magazine, March 1, 2006
6. FEDERAL WHISTLEBLOWER PROTECTION IN JEOPARDY
Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste, fraud, and other financial abuse since George W. Bush became president, the agency charged with defending government whistleblowers has reportedly been throwing out hundreds of cases — and advancing almost none. Statistics released at the end of 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led to claims that special counsel Scott Bloch, who was appointed by Bush in 2004, is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistleblower rights.
What makes this development particularly troubling is that, thanks to a decline in congressional oversight and hard-hitting investigative journalism, the role of the Office of Special Counsel in advancing governmental transparency is more vital than ever. As a result, employees within the OSC have filed a whistleblower complaint against Bloch himself.
Ironically, Bloch has now decided not to disclose the number of whistleblower complaints in which an employee obtained a favorable outcome, such as reinstatement or reversal of a disciplinary action, making it hard to tell who, if anyone, is being helped by the agency.
Sources: “Whistleblowers Get Help from Bush Administration,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Web site, Dec. 5, 2005; “Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins,” PEER Web site, Oct. 18, 2005; “Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections,” PEER Web site, Sept. 22, 2005
7. US OPERATIVES TORTURE DETAINEES TO DEATH IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ
Hooded. Gagged. Strangled. Asphyxiated. Beaten with blunt objects. Subjected to sleep deprivation and hot and cold environmental conditions. These are just some of the forms of torture that the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan inflicted on detainees, according to an American Civil Liberties Union analysis of autopsy and death reports that were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
While reports of torture aren’t new, the documents are evidence of using torture as a policy, raising a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as: Who authorized such techniques? And why have the resulting deaths been covered up?
Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU’s FOIA request, 21 were homicides and eight appear to have been the result of these abusive torture techniques.
Sources: “US Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” American Civil Liberties Union Web site, Oct. 24, 2005; “Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantánamo to Iraq,” Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, March 5, 2006
8. PENTAGON EXEMPT FROM FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT
In 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, a crucial law that allows journalists and watchdogs access to federal documents. The stated reason for this dramatic and dangerous move? FOIA is a hindrance to protecting national security. The ruling could hamper the efforts of groups like the ACLU, which relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the US military’s torture of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
With ACLU lawyers predicting that this ruling will likely result in more abuse and with Americans becoming increasingly concerned about the federal government’s illegal intelligence-gathering activities, Congress has imposed a two-year sunset on this FOIA exemption, ending December 2007 — which is cold comfort right now to anyone rotting in a US overseas military facility or a secret CIA prison.
Sources: “Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information,” Michelle Chen, New Standard, May 6, 2005; “FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency,” Newspaper Association of America Web site, posted December 2005
9. WORLD BANK FUNDS ISRAEL-PALESTINE WALL
In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall Israel is building deep into Palestinian territory should be torn down. Instead, construction of this cement barrier, which annexes Israeli settlements and breaks the continuity of Palestinian territory, has accelerated. In the interim, the World Bank has come up with a framework for a Middle Eastern Free Trade Area, which would be financed by the World Bank and built on Palestinian land around the wall to encourage export-oriented economic development. But with Israel ineligible for World Bank loans, the plan seems to translate into Palestinians paying for the modernization of checkpoints around a wall that they’ve always opposed, a wall that will help lock in and exploit their labor.
Sources: “Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank,” Jamal Juma’, Left Turn, issue 18; “US Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion,” Linda Heard, Aljazeera, March 9, 2005
10. EXPANDED AIR WAR IN IRAQ KILLS MORE CIVILIANS
At the end of 2005, US Central Command Air Force statistics showed an increase in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian deaths thanks to increased bombing of Iraqi cities. But with US bombings and the killing of innocent civilians acting as a highly effective recruiting tool among Iraqi militants, the US war on Iraq seemed to increasingly be following the path of the war in Vietnam. As Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker at the end of 2005, a key component in the federal government’s troop-reduction plan was the replacement of departing US troops with US air power.
Meanwhile, Hersh’s sources within the military have expressed fears that if Iraqis are allowed to call in the targets of these aerial strikes, they could abuse that power to settle old scores. With Iraq devolving into a full-blown Sunni-Shiite civil war and the United States increasingly drawn into the sectarian violence, reporters like Hersh and Dahr Jamail fear that the only exit strategy for the United States is to increase the air power even more as the troops pull out, causing the cycle of sectarian violence to escalate further.
Sources: “Up in the Air,” Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker, December 2005; “An Increasingly Aerial Occupation,” Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, December 2005 SFBG
For the next 15 of Project Censored’s top 25 stories, go to www.sfbg.com.

Yay Area five-oh

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› johnny@sfbg.com
“Before Vanishing: Syrian Short Cinema” A series devoted to films from Syria kicks off with a shorts program that includes work by Oussama Mohammed. (Sept. 7, PFA; see below)
The Mechanical Man The PFA’s vast and expansive series devoted to “The Mechanical Age” includes André Deed’s 1921 science fiction vision of a female crime leader and a robot run amok. The screening features live piano by Juliet Rosenberg. (Sept. 7, PFA)
“Cinemayaat, the Arab Film Festival” This year’s festival opens with the Lebanon-Sweden coproduction Zozo and also includes the US-Palestine documentary Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority, which looks at events before and after Israel’s 1948 occupation of Palestine.
Sept. 8–17. Various venues. (415) 863-1087, www.aff.org
“Global Lens” The traveling fest includes some highly lauded films, such as Stolen Life by Li Shaohong, one of the female directors within China’s Fifth Generation.
Sept. 8–Oct. 4. Various venues. (415) 221-8184, www.globalfilm.org
“MadCat Women’s International Film Festival” MadCat turns 10 this year, and its programming and venues are even more varied. Not to mention deep — literally. 3-D filmmaking by Zoe Beloff and Viewmaster magic courtesy of Greta Snider are just some of the treats in store.
Sept. 12–27. Various venues. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org
The Pirate The many forms and facets of piracy comprise another PFA fall series; this entry brings a swashbuckling Gene Kelly and Judy Garland as Manuela, directed by then-husband Vincente Minnelli. (Sept. 13, PFA)
“A Conversation with Ali Kazimi” and Shooting Indians Documentarian Kazimi discusses his work before a screening of his critical look at Edward S. Curtis’s photography. (Sept. 14, PFA)
“The Word and the Image: The Films of Peter Whitehead” The swinging ’60s hit the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as curator Joel Shepard presents the first-ever US retrospective dedicated to the director of Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London. Includes proto–music videos made for Nico, Jimi Hendrix, and others. Smashing! (Sept. 14–28, YBCA; see below)
Edmond Stuart Gordon of Re-Aminator infamy makes a jump from horror into drama — not so surprising, since he’s a friend of David Mamet. Willam H. Macy adds another sad sack to his résumé. (Sept. 15–21, Roxie; see below)
Anxious Animation Other Cinema hosts a celebration for the release of a DVD devoted to local animators Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, and others. Expect some work inspired by hellfire prognosticator Jack Chick!
Sept. 16. Other Cinema, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.othercinema.com
Kingdom of the Spiders Eight-legged freaks versus two-legged freak William Shatner. I will say no more.
Sept. 17. Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF. (415) 401-7987, www.darkroomsf.com
Landscape Suicide No other living director looks at the American landscape with the direct intent of James Benning; here, he examines two murder cases. (Sept. 19, PFA)
La Promesse and Je Pense à Vous Tracking the brutal coming-of-age of scooter-riding Jérémie Renier, 1997’s La Promesse made the name of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, but Je Pense is a rarely screened earlier work. (Sept. 22, PFA)
Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied Billed as the first authoritative doc about the man who invented electric blues, this plays with Always for Pleasure, a look at New Orleans by the one and only Les Blank. (Sept. 22–26, Roxie)
Rosetta and Falsch The Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta made a splash at Cannes in 1999; Falsch is their surprisingly experimental and nonnaturalistic 1987 debut feature. (Sept. 23, PFA)
loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies A reunion tour movie. (Sept. 29–Oct. 5, Roxie)
American Blackout Ian Inaba’s doc about voter fraud made waves and gathered praise at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival; it gets screened at various houses, followed by a Tosca after-party, in this SF360 citywide event.
Sept. 30. Tosca Café, 242 Columbus, SF. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org
Them! “Film in the Fog” turns five, as the SF Film Society unleashes giant mutant ants in the Presidio.
Sept. 30. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org
“Zombie-Rama” Before Bob Clark made Black Christmas, Porky’s, and A Christmas Story, he made Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. The ending is as scary as the title is funny.
Oct. 5. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net
“Swinging Scandinavia: How Nordic Sex Cinema Conquered the World” Jack Stevenson presents a “Totally Uncensored” clip show about the scandalous impact of Scandinavian cinema on uptight US mores and also screens some rare cousins of I Am Curious (Yellow). (Oct. 5 and 7, YBCA)
“Mill Valley Film Festival” Why go to Toronto when many of the fall’s biggest Hollywood and international releases come to Mill Valley? The festival turns 29 this year.
Oct. 5–15, 2006. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org
“Fighting the Walking Dead” Jesse Ficks brings They Live to the Castro Theatre. Thank you, Jesse. (Oct. 6, Castro; see below)
Phantom of the Paradise Forget the buildup for director Brian de Palma’s Black Dahlia and get ready for a Paul Williams weekend. This is screening while Williams is performing at the Plush Room.
Oct. 6. Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-1124, www.thelatenightpictureshow.com
Calvaire Belgium makes horror movies too. This one is billed as a cross between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance — a crossbreeding combo that’s popular these days. (Oct. 6–12, Roxie)
Black Girl Tragic and so sharp-eyed that its images can cut you, Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 film is the masterpiece the white caps of the French new wave never thought to make. It kicks off a series devoted to the director. (Oct. 7, PFA)
“Animal Charm’s Golden Digest and Brian Boyce” Boyce is the genius behind America’s Biggest Dick, starring Dick Cheney as Scarface. Animal Charm have made some of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.
Oct. 7. Other Cinema, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.othercinema.com
Madame X, an Absolute Ruler Feminist director Ulrike Ottinger envisions a Madame X much different from Lana Turner’s — hers is a pirate. (Oct. 11, PFA)
“The Horrifying 1980s … in 3-D” Molly Ringwald (in Spacehunter), a killer shark (in Jaws 3-D), and Jason (in Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D) vie for dominance in this “Midnites for Maniacs” three-dimensional triple bill. (Oct. 13, Castro)
“Dual System 3-D Series” This program leans toward creature features, from Creature from the Black Lagoon to the ape astronaut of Robot Monster to Cat-Women on the Moon. (Oct. 14–19, Castro)
“Early Baillie and the Canyon CinemaNews Years” This program calls attention to great looks at this city by Baillie (whom Apichatpong Weerasethakul cites as a major influence) and also highlights the importance of Canyon Cinema. (Oct. 15, YBCA)
“War and Video Games” NY-based film critic Ed Halter presents a lecture based on From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games, his new book. (Oct. 17, PFA)
Santo Domingo Blues The Red Vic premieres a doc about bachata and the form’s “supreme king of bitterness,” Luis Vargas.
Oct. 18–19. Red Vic, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com
“Monster-Rama” The Devil-ettes, live and in person, and Werewolf vs. the Vampire Women, on the screen, thanks to Will “the Thrill” Viharo.
Oct. 19. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net
“Spinning Up, Slowing Down”: Industry Celebrates the Machine” Local film archivist Rick Prelinger presents six short films that epitomize the United States’ machine mania, including one in which mechanical puppets demonstrate free enterprise. (Oct. 19, PFA)
The Last Movie Hmmm, part two: OK, let’s see here, Dennis Hopper’s 1971 film gets a screening after he personally strikes a new print … (Oct. 20–21, YBCA)
What Is It? and “The Very First Crispin Glover Film Festival in the World” … and on the same weekend, Hopper’s River’s Edge costar Glover gets a freak hero’s welcome at the Castro. Sounds like they might cross paths. (Oct. 20–22, Castro)
I Like Killing Flies And I completely fucking love Matt Mahurin’s documentary about the Greenwich Village restaurant Shopsin’s, possibly the most characterful, funny, and poignant documentary I’ve seen in the last few years. (Oct. 20–26, Roxie)
“Miranda July Live” Want to be part of the process that will produce Miranda July’s next film? If so, you can collaborate with her in this multimedia presentation about love, obsession, and heartbreak.
Oct. 23–24. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org)
The Case of the Grinning Cat This 2004 film by Chris Marker receives a Bay Area premiere, screening with Junkopia, his 1981 look at a public art project in Emeryville. (Oct. 27, PFA)
The Monster Squad The folks (including Peaches Christ) behind the Late Night Picture Show say that this 1987 flick is the most underrated monster movie ever.
Oct. 27–28. Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-1124, www.thelatenightpictureshow.com
Neighborhood Watch Résumés don’t get any better than Graeme Whifler’s — after all, he helped write the screenplay to Dr. Giggles. His rancid directorial debut brings the grindhouse gag factor to the Pacific Film Archive. (Oct. 29, PFA)
“Grindhouse Double Feature” See The Beyond with an audience of Lucio Fulci maniacs. (Oct. 30, Castro)
“Hara Kazuo” Joel Shepard programs a series devoted to Kazuo, including his 1969 film tracing the protest efforts of Okuzaki Kenzó, who slung marbles at Emperor Hirohito. (November, YBCA)
“International Latino Film Festival” This growing fest reaches a decade and counting — expect some celebrations.
Nov. 3–19. Various venues. (415) 454-4039, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org
Vegas in Space Midnight Mass makes a rare fall appearance as Peaches Christ brings back Philip Ford’s 1991 local drag science fiction gem.
Nov. 11. Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-1124, www.thelatenightpictureshow.com
“As the Great Earth Rolls On: A Frank O’Hara Birthday Tribute” The birthday of the man who wrote “The Day Lady Died” is celebrated. Includes The Last Clean Shirt, O’Hara’s great collaboration with Alfred Leslie.
Nov. 17. California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org
Sites and Silences A shout-out to A.C. Thompson for his work with Trevor Paglen on the well-titled Torture Taxi, which helped generate this multimedia presentation by Paglen. (Nov. 19, YBCA)
“Kihachiro Kawamoto” One of cinema’s ultimate puppet masters receives a retrospective. (December, YBCA)
“Silent Songs: Three Films by Nathaniel Dorsky” The SF-based poet of silent film (and essayist behind the excellent book Devotional Cinema) screens a trio of new works. (Dec. 10, YBCA)
CASTRO THEATRE
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
www.castrotheatre.com
PFA THEATER
2575 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-5249
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
ROXIE FILM CENTER
3317 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
www.roxie.com
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS (YBCA)
Screening room, 701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org\ SFBG

Signs of the times

0

› steve@sfbg.com
The Mission has become a battleground between those trying to stop war and those trying to combat blight — a clash of values that is headed for a court battle that will determine whether San Francisco has gone too far in its campaign against the posting of handbills.
On one side are the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, World Can’t Wait, and other groups that stage the city’s biggest rallies against war and injustice. They’ve been hit by the city with tens of thousands of dollars in fines for their notices getting posted in violation of a city law cracking down on blight, and ANSWER has responded with a lawsuit.
On the other side is a 56-year-old activist named Gideon Kramer, who led the campaigns against graffiti and illegal signs and eventually became the eyes and ears of the city’s Department of Public Works and the Clean City Coalition. That nonprofit antiblight group gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in city money annually and in turn gave Kramer a full-time job pursuing his zealous fight against blight.
Kramer’s job is to cruise around in a city-provided motorized cart to document and remove illegal signs and submit that information to the DPW, which then issues citations and levies fines. Although Kramer maintains he doesn’t single out antiwar groups, he does admit that it was the blanketing of the Mission with ANSWER flyers and posters during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq that animated his animus toward sign posting.
“They hide behind the First Amendment, but this is not a free speech issue,” Kramer told the Guardian. “They completely obliterated this neighborhood for two years until I got them to stop…. This place looked like a war zone five years ago, when I finally took this area over.”
To Kramer, his efforts are simply about beautifying the Mission, which to him entails removing graffiti and flyers, particularly the ones affixed to any of the 88 historic lampposts along Mission Street, violations that draw a fine of $300 per notice rather than the $150 fine for most poles.
But to ANSWER’s West Coast coordinator Richard Becker, the city and Kramer are chipping away at fundamental rights of speech, assembly, and due process in their myopic effort to gentrify the Mission and other still-affordable neighborhoods.
“It is connected to a drive in San Francisco against working-class communities. This is being done in the name of fighting blight,” Becker said, “but it’s part of the transformation of San Francisco to a city that caters only to the middle class and above.”
The antihandbill measure — passed by the Board of Supervisors in 1999 — is part of a clean-city campaign that includes aggressive new measures aimed at removing graffiti and punishing those responsible, increased spending on street and sidewalk cleaning, crackdowns on the homeless, and most recently, the prohibition of campaign and other signs on utility poles.
State law already prohibits all handbills and signs from being on traffic poles. The local law extends that absolute prohibition to “historic or decorative streetlight poles,” such as those along Mission from 16th to 24th streets, along Market Street, around Union Square and Fisherman’s Wharf, and on a half dozen other strips around the city.
In addition, the measure sets strict guidelines for all other postings. Unless those posting handbills want to register with the DPW and pay permit fees, their signs must be no larger than 11 inches, “affixed with nonadhesive materials such as string or other nonmetal binding material (plastic wrapped around pole is OK),” and with a posting date in the lower right corner. Signs must be removed within 10 days if they’re for an event, otherwise within 70 days.
Any deviations from these conditions will trigger a fine of $150, payable by whatever entity is identifiable from the content of the handbill, regardless of whether the group actually did the posting or knew about it. That standard of guilt, known legally as the “rebuttable presumption” — wherein someone is considered guilty unless they request an administrative hearing and can prove otherwise — is one of the targets of the ANSWER lawsuit, which is scheduled for its first pretrial hearing next month.
“In San Francisco, the distribution of handbills and other such literature is a quintessentially protected First Amendment activity, as it is everywhere. But the moment someone posts a group’s literature on city property, the DPW is entitled to presume, under the rebuttable presumption, that the group itself is responsible — absent any evidence of a connection between the group and the person who did the posting,” wrote attorney Ben Rosenfeld, who is representing ANSWER and two other accused violators, in a brief to San Francisco Superior Court.
Furthermore, he argues that there are no evidence standards for contesting the fines, which themselves have a chilling effect on free speech, particularly for poorly funded social and political activists. And, as he told the Guardian, “most people believe that posting flyers, because it’s such a time-honored way of communicating, is legal.”
Yet the City Attorney’s Office argues that city law is defensible and that rebuttable presumption — which is a similar legal precept to how parking tickets are handled — has been validated by the courts.
“We are going to argue that it’s reasonable and fair and it mirrors a state law that has withstood challenges,” said city attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey. “As a matter of principle, we don’t think the right of free speech allows defacing public property.”
It is that argument — that illegally posting signs is akin to vandalism or littering — that seems to be driving city policy.
“It happens very frequently, and the concern for the city is it costs a lot of money to remove,” the DPW’s Mohammed Nuru told the Guardian. “It adds to urban blight and makes the neighborhood look ugly.”
The view that handbills are blight has gotten a big boost from city hall in recent years — and so have those who advocate that point of view most fervently.
The nonprofit group San Francisco Clean City Coalition — whose board members include city director of protocol Charlotte Schultz and NorCal Waste executive John Legnitto — identifies its mission as keeping “San Francisco clean and green by building bridges between resources and the neighborhood groups, merchant associations, and residents that need them.”
A review of its federal nonprofit financial disclosure forms shows the organization has steadily received more public funds from at least three different city departments in recent years, totaling almost $300,000 in 2004, the last year for which the forms are available, plus another $170,000 in “direct public support.”
“Our organization has grown substantially,” said Clean City executive director Gia Grant, who is paid almost $70,000 per year and has been with the group for five years. “It has increased every year for the last five years.”
Most recently, the group won the $140,000 annual contract to manage the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, bringing to that low-income neighborhood the same kinds of blight abatement work they’ve been doing in the Mission, mostly through their contract with Kramer and his alter ego: SF Green Patrol.
“I believe all San Francisco residents have the right to live in a beautiful neighborhood, no matter where they live,” Grant told us.
Kramer has been applying that mantra to the Mission for several years now: tearing down signs, removing graffiti, painting and repainting the lampposts, and tending to the landscaping at Mission High and other spots. Kramer told us he volunteered his days to the cause even before he was paid for his efforts.
“Basically, the Green Team deals with the restoration of public property,” Kramer said. “I’m doing a lot of things in the community on behalf of the Mission District.”
Yet Kramer is hostile to the view that maybe the Mission was fine just the way it was, a point made by many residents interviewed by the Guardian — particularly activists with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (MAC) — who are more concerned with gentrification than the proliferation of signs for war protests.
“Because their causes are so lofty, they feel like they’re above the law…. They think that because their cause is so important, the end justifies the means,” Kramer said of the many groups with which he’s battled, from ANSWER and MAC to New College and the Socialist Action and Anarchist bookstores. “Free speech is not unlimited and the war in Iraq has nothing to do with clean streets. They’re just lazy and would rather just wheat-paste posters everywhere.”
Kramer said he’s been paid a full-time salary for his efforts for the last year, although neither he nor Clean City — which contracts with him — would say how much he makes. But whatever it is, Grant said Kramer’s days as a fully funded antisign enforcer might be coming to an end.
“The Green Patrol is not being funded by DPW anymore,” Grant said, noting that the contract expires at the end of August. “At this time, there’s no plan to carry it past August.”
ANSWER’s Becker has had several confrontations with Kramer, although both men insist that their actions aren’t personally directed at the other. Kramer is just trying to remove what he sees as blight and Becker is just trying to keep the public aware that the United States is waging an illegal war on Iraq and supporting Israel’s aggressive militarism.
“The war, from our perspective, is really growing,” said Becker. “A considerable number of people are becoming more alarmed by what’s happening. The war has intensified and it’s a complete disaster.”
Set against that global imperative — and the role of US citizens in allowing it to continue — Kramer’s “sacred lampposts” are a little silly to Becker. “He’s got this attitude that ‘I’m preserving your community for you,’” Becker said. “It’s a crazy thing and it’s gotten completely out of control.”
But facing fines that could total $28,000 with penalties, ANSWER has been forced to take the sign laws seriously, pursue legal action for what it believes is an important constitutional right, and instruct volunteers on the rules (with only limited effectiveness, considering some unaffiliated antiwar activists simply print flyers from ANSWER’s Web site and post them).
“The most important issue to us and to other political organizations with limited income is being able to communicate with the public,” Becker said.
And the sign ordinance has made that more difficult. Nonetheless, ANSWER has remained aggressive in calling and publicizing its protests, including the antiwar rally Aug. 12, starting at 11 a.m. in Civic Center Plaza.
As Becker said, “Despite the threat of these massive fines, we’re going to keep moving forward.” SFBG

Lebanon calling

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About 300 people gathered in front of Sen. Diane Feinstein’s office in downtown San Francisco on July 27 to protest her support for what they — and the citizens of most countries around the world — criticize as unjustified aggression by the Israeli military against Lebanese civilians.
Organizers with the recently formed Break the Siege Coalition had Lebanese and Palestinian experts and eyewitnesses on the telephone lines, hoping to broadcast them to protesters over a sound system, but they were prevented by technical difficulties.
Instead, after listening to a series of speakers — including Todd Chretien, a Green Party candidate challenging Feinstein, and Krissy Keefer, another Green who’s vying for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat — demonstrators marched to Union Square and then the Chronicle — whose coverage the protesters criticize as biased toward Israel. Eight were arrested there for blocking traffic.
Paralleling the organizers’ efforts, the Guardian reached out to civilians still in Lebanon to get unfiltered perspectives directly from the ground. What we encountered was profound outrage and unprecedented support for Hezbollah. They say the international community has turned its back on them again.
“The level of destruction is incomprehensible,” said Ghassan Mankarem, a pro-democracy and LGBT rights activist experienced in humanitarian relief efforts who is now volunteering with the grassroots Sanayeh Relief Centre in Beirut. “What’s happening here is a systematic act of ethnic cleansing.”
As of July 30, 620 Lebanese — mostly civilians — had been killed since Israel began its onslaught July 12, according to official Lebanese government figures. That’s 12 Lebanese dead for each Israeli killed by Hezbollah rockets and gunfire.
The number of internal refugees was expected to reach one million before this issue of the Guardian went to print, according to Mankarem. Another 220,000 have fled to neighboring countries. Thousands more are trapped in their homes or nearby shelters, too afraid to flee.
The Israelis “are hitting anything they see,” reported Mankarem, including caravans of fleeing civilians and even “Red Cross ambulances and UN observers.” They’ve bombed the airport, reduced whole neighborhoods to rubble, targeted seaports, destroyed most major highways, and obliterated power plants — in one case causing an oil spill in the Mediterranean Sea that local environmental groups say is the worst ecological disaster in Lebanon’s history.
“On the radio, doctors are warning there is no more medicine, no more water, no more space in the hospitals,” wrote Raida Hatoum, an organizer with Najdeh, a women’s nongovernmental organization that works in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps, in a July 24 e-mail to the Guardian. (Hatoum has no access to a phone). “Burnt and shredded bodies are still on the roads” in southern Lebanon.
The same day Hatoum typed those words, Human Rights Watch condemned Israel for using American “cluster munitions in populated areas.” Aid workers on the ground report seeing evidence that Israel has also been using bombs (again, provided or funded by the United States) containing white phosphorus — a chemical agent that burns through the skin, sometimes to the bone, as well as “vacuum” bombs and “bunker busting” bombs containing depleted uranium.
For the first time since World War I, “there’s a real fear of people dying of hunger,” Mankarem said. Israel has been blocking food and other basic necessities from entering the country and has bombed grain silos as well as Lebanon’s main milk production plant, he said.
While Sanayeh struggles to provide food, water, blankets, and medical care to an ever-growing number of refugees, it’s also scrambling to address the profound trauma suffered by Lebanese children.
“Ten percent of the refugees are under five years old,” Mankarem said, speaking to us by phone from the relief center. “Some of them have seen family members decapitated in front of them. Unfortunately, the position of the United States has been to send more missiles,” while vetoing United Nations Security Council calls for an immediate cease-fire. “People here are looking to the rest of the world and asking, why aren’t they doing anything about this?”
It’s the kind of scenario that gave rise to Hezbollah in the first place. And today it’s resulting in a widespread surge of support for the group. A whopping 87 percent of Lebanese — including, significantly, 80 percent of the Christians and Druze — support the resistance to Israel (synonymous with Hezbollah), according to a nationwide poll conducted by the Beirut Center for Research and Information. And that was before an Israeli bomb killed more than 60 civilians — including 37 children — as they slept in a bomb shelter in Qana.
“Had Israel not invaded Lebanon in 1982, there would be no Hezbollah,” said academic Rania Masri, a blogger and regular contributor to www.electroniclebanon.net. “Had the international community enforced UN resolution 425 [demanding Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon], there’d be no Hezbollah. Had the international community [acted more decisively during] Israel’s massive assaults on Lebanon in 1993 and 1996, there would be no Hezbollah…. This is the history that people need to understand. It didn’t begin on July 12 with Hezbollah’s capture of the two Israeli soldiers.”
Another fact not widely understood in the United States is that Hezbollah isn’t simply a militia or terrorist group: in many impoverished, largely Shiite areas — particularly in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Lebanese Bekaa valley — Hezbollah has provided schools, health care, and basic necessities where the central government failed to do so.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to draw clear distinctions between Hezbollah and Lebanon’s “legitimate” government early in the conflict. But Hezbollah members are part of that government, and the two entities have each sought a cease-fire that the United States and Israel have rejected, claiming that Hezbollah must disarm.
“We get lectured all the time about democracy,” Mankarem said. “But whenever we make a democratic choice, we get punished.”
Many Lebanese insist they too have the right to defend themselves. And they view American collaboration as the result of a deep-seated racism that presumes that Arabs simply aren’t as valuable as Israelis.
Regardless of the reasons for the assault, one thing is certain: it is resulting in a sharp spike in anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment, which isn’t making either country safer.
“Even if Israel and the US were to kill every member of Hezbollah, there’d be people to replace them,” Masri warned. “You cannot stop a movement for liberation.” SFBG