San Franciscans rarely get excited about Republican presidential candidates, and it’s rarer still to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows, beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city’s streets. But that’s what Ron Paul has been inspiring.
"I would give my entire net worth to see Ron Paul elected president," a man holding a "Ron Paul ’08" sign on the corner of Powell and Geary on Dec. 16 said. "I’ve never contributed to a candidate’s campaign in my life, but in the past months I’ve given about $600 or $700."
Paul’s frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire got his campaign rolling, and it has gathered serious momentum in the past couple of months, as evidenced by an increasing online presence and record-breaking fundraising for November and December. Paul’s essentially libertarian platform is attracting support from a surprisingly diverse range of people, from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.
Perhaps even more surprising, this Republican from Texas is generating significant support among Bay Area voters. "Ron Paul" signs are now visible at antiwar protests, on lawns, and in apartment windows. People who have never been politically active or have never felt excited by a candidate before are spending their free time tabling at weekend farmers markets and walking precincts after work in support of the candidate.
A recent recruit of the San Francisco Ron Paul meetup.com group, which is attracting new members daily, captured the fervor of Paul supporters with this posting: "I can’t believe my new hero is a politician. Never in my life have I encountered any political leader who actually represented me. This country needs Ron Paul desperately."
Despite their demographic diversity, one unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate’s integrity. He is perceived as a man who says what he thinks and takes action according to what he says; he is seen as a rare breed among politicians, especially those who, like Paul, have served several terms in Washington DC. "My gut tells me Ron Paul is different," said John Harvan, one of about 60 radiant Paul supporters gathered amid Union Square holiday shoppers Dec. 16.
Bay Area supporters — organized through online meet-up groups — were congregated on the chilly Sunday in solidarity with a national Paul fundraising push, or what the campaign dubbed "a moneybomb." Staged to coincide with the anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, the Ron Paul Tea Party was, as one Web site put it, "a symbolic dumping of these tyrannical systems that thwart our true destiny of Freedom & Liberty!"
The Dec. 16 fundraising push was an unquestionable success, raising more than $6 million in a 24-hour period. Paul’s campaign had already received national attention when it received $4.2 million in donations Nov. 5, which precipitated his much-needed boost in the polls. But $6 million broke the record for funds raised in one day, a record previously held by the John Kerry campaign for raising $5.7 million in 2004.
Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. Proving the grassroots nature of Paul’s support, the average size of each donation is consistently around $100.
Yet there is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articuutf8g the same message — one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets — since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas. And his dependability is starting to gain traction with libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, and independents.
"A real mix of people are brought together by Ron Paul’s message because we sense the danger in the country," Gerald Cullen of San Francisco told the Guardian. "I think the [George W.] Bush administration has just about destroyed the country. Nothing in the Constitution provides for a president to attack another country that hasn’t attacked us."
Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he’s more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation. "A lot of people are frustrated by the different regulations and infringements on our liberty day in and day out," said Ralph Crowder, who lives in Berkeley. "Ron Paul’s not trying to sell you on himself; he’s just selling you the message of freedom."
And while there are varying definitions of freedom, Paul’s fundamental noninterventionist belief translates into a variety of positions that appeal to voters on both ends of the political spectrum. He sees the USA PATRIOT Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.
Appealing to the opposite end of the spectrum, he is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US’s borders.
Adrian Bankhead, who also lives in Berkeley, wants Paul to be the Republican nominee but disagrees with his social policies too heartily to vote for him in the general election. "His social views against immigration, abortion, affirmative action, and women make me nervous," Bankhead told the Guardian. But Bankhead respects what he sees as Paul’s fundamental honesty: "He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election in November."
However, Bankhead’s position is a minority one among Paul supporters. Crowder and Cullen, for instance, agree with almost everything Paul says. "There’s not much difference between where he stands and where I stand," Crowder said. And Cullen, who worked for Paul during his 1988 bid for the presidency as a Libertarian candidate, sees the candidate’s principles as "very much in line with the old Republican Party principles … before the madness took over the country."
Stephanie Burns, one of the main organizers of online Bay Area meet-up groups, says she agrees with Paul "all the time."
There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country — 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article — and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul’s perspectives.
Scott Loughmiller sees the Paul campaign as being in a prime position to steal the nomination, with his polling numbers rising, his momentum building, and plenty of money in the coffers. "We’re right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when [Howard] Dean had already been crowned winner by the media," Loughmiller said.
While chatting with her Guatemalan house cleaner one day, journalist Sonia Nazario casually asked the immigrant mother of four if she planned to have more children. The house cleaner broke down and began crying. She explained to Nazario, a Los Angeles Times reporter, that she hadn’t seen her kids in 12 years, having migrated to the United States so she could make money to send home to them.
Nazario realized her house cleaner’s plight was a common one among Central American women, whose families are so often abandoned by the fathers that the women must do whatever is necessary to ensure that their kids have enough to eat. "Most Americans don’t understand that kind of desperation," Nazario explained to a crowd at San Francisco Public Library’s Koret Auditorium on Nov. 28.
She felt bewildered that someone could come to work in the US while leaving her children behind to live in squalid conditions in Central America. At first, Nazario said, she even felt a bit judgmental. But her house cleaner’s story inspired Nazario to learn more about the level of desperation so many immigrants and their families live with.
Touched by the women’s sacrifices and curious to learn more about the struggles of immigrants — undocumented immigrants in particular — Nazario embarked on an epic journey that led to her writing a newspaper series about a Honduran boy named Enrique who braved numerous obstacles so he could reunite with his mother in the US.
The series won Nazario a prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and became the blueprint for her book Enrique’s Journey (Random House, 2006), which is currently being developed as an HBO special. Nazario’s work offers a complex and insightful perspective on an immigration issue that has often been oversimplified by pandering presidential campaigns.
TRAIN OF DEATH
Tens of thousands of Latin American youths travel from their home countries toward the US each year on top of trains. The perilous, Odyssey-like trip takes weeks to complete, and migrants rarely reach their goal on their first try. Enrique, for instance, attempted the journey eight times. Other immigrants try dozens of times.
Nazario, wanting to understand the struggles of undocumented immigrants as intimately as possible, replicated Enrique’s journey by boarding the top of a train in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and riding through the heart of Mexico in a three-month excursion. Having received permission from Mexican officials and with the resources to spend the occasional night in a hotel, she didn’t rough it to the extent that migrants — adults and children alike — have to.
But that’s doesn’t mean it was easy. On returning to the US, Nazario began having nightmares about being raped by bandits during the journey and ended up in therapy to deal with the trauma.
The US-Mexico border, she noted, is far from the most daunting leg of the journey for these immigrants: the hardest part is the lush southern Mexican state of Chiapas, which migrants call "the Beast." The region is home to Mexican immigration authorities, corrupt cops who are out to shake down and deport travelers, and ruthless gangsters who control the tops of many of the trains. Mexico deports roughly 200,000 illegal immigrants each year, mostly from Central America.
Enrique still wears the scars of a beating he sustained at the hands of bandits. Torrid heat, all the more unbearable to those riding atop trains made of metal, exhausts and wears down the travelers in an unforgivable fashion.
They call the trains los trens de la muerte, or the trains of death, due to the regularity of death and maiming that occurs when immigrants fall off. Nazario, during her trip, was once hit in the face with a branch and nearly tumbled off the train top, an experience she describes as "harrowing."
HUMAN FACE
The ubiquity of bandits and harmful forces along the railroads is not without a yang to its yin. The enormous compassion of the people of Veracruz, an impoverished region in the south of Mexico, made an indelible impact on Nazario. When trains pass by villages, crowds of supportive villagers throw food and water to the migrants. When townsfolk have no material possessions to share with the immigrants, they offer them their prayers.
Nazario has not only studied the physical dangers experienced by undocumented immigrants during their northbound trips but also analyzed the psychological toll taken by splitting up families. Enrique and many children like him have often wondered of their absent mothers, "Does she really love me?" Enrique, whose mother left him when he was five and was apart from him for 11 years, would stare out his window every Christmas during his mother’s absence, hoping for her return.
Hundreds of thousands of Latin American children have trouble adjusting socially without parental guidance. Given that many fathers in Latin America’s third world enclaves "stray in more ways than one," as Nazario said, many mothers come to the US to find work. Sometimes children like Enrique grow up resenting, even hating, their mothers. Most mothers, Nazario learned, only intend to be away for a year or two, but when they discover that the quality of life and opportunities in America aren’t quite as golden as advertised, their stays become extended indefinitely.
Nazario learned through countless interviews that many children left behind can’t fully comprehend why their mothers left, and they say they’d rather remain penniless than apart.
CROSSING OVER
The immigration debate is hotly contested in the US, particularly in the wake of the May Day protests and the George W. Bush administration’s failure to pass a comprehensive immigration reform package. Rather than bombard listeners and readers with ideological pleas to mend America’s broken immigration system, Nazario mixed her humanizing account of the immigrants’ hardships with relevant facts. Dedicated journalist that she is, she parroted neither the La Raza talking points nor Pat Buchanan’s.
Around 100,000 children like Enrique cross the US border annually in search of their parents. And while the US permits about one million immigrants to enter the country legally each year, they are joined by an additional 850,000 people who enter illegally. Business interests seeking "cheap and compliant" labor lobby on behalf of the influx of undocumented workers, Nazario explained.
Undocumented immigrants undoubtedly do many jobs that Americans won’t, Nazario noted, most prominently agricultural and domestic work.
That said, the large number of undocumented immigrants does undercut wages for some Americans and denies citizens and legal immigrants jobs in fields like construction.
SOLUTIONS
"The women I talked to said it wouldn’t take radical changes to keep them in Honduras," Nazario told her audience. The US, she argued, must play a more proactive role in helping Latin American nations develop their economies. For instance, many products the US imports from China could just as easily be manufactured in countries like Honduras, which would dramatically reduce the number of illegal immigrants from Central America and keep more families together.
In an e-mail to the Guardian, Nazario said that if the US is serious about reducing the flow of undocumented immigrants through its borders, it should not only supply foreign aid to nations in need but also provide "micro-loans through NGO’s to women to create jobs in these countries. They then pay back the loan, which can go to another woman to start a business, and create jobs."
A quarter of El Salvador’s citizens, she added, live outside the country, mostly in the US. Were it not for El Salvador’s dismal economy, most of those people would choose to remain in their native land.
Renee Saucedo, the community empowerment coordinator for La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco, an immigrant rights organization, told us that "using enforcement and punitive policies are never going to be effective…. Many of the reasons people are forced to uproot their families are because of global free trade agreements." Saucedo said the only effective way to deal with the issue of illegal immigration is to develop policies that serve the poor majority, not the economic elite.
Nazario believes, based on her conversations with countless immigrants, that the US government’s decision to build a fence along the border with Mexico is wasteful and will not accomplish its goals. "People this determined will find their way over a wall, under a wall, around a wall." *
You can read the club’s press release here ; club members got in such a nasty fight at the last meeting that some don’t even accept tomorrow’s meeting as legitimate.
But here’s the thing: At some point, we all have to put this behind us and move on.
I think the odds are pretty good that Migden will win the Milk Club. I’m not going to say it was all done with perfect adherence to the rules; the Migden forces pulled some fast ones. The Leno people pulled some stunts, too, and would have played fast and loose with the rules earlier on if it helped them. That’s how these clubs work.
And frankly, a Migden nod won’t surprise anyone (Carole’s a former Milk Club president) and it won’t be a horrible blow to Leno (who has the Alice B. Toklas Club). Leno is clearly trying to appeal to the progressives, and the Milk endorsement would help, but there are other ways he can do that. So his campaign, and the Republic as a whole, will survive this vote.
If Migden wins tomorrow, it seems to me that the Leno folks should register their protests if they please, but then let it go. And if Leno manages to pull it out, the Migden folks should do the same.
This isn’t worth the sort of bitter fights, name calling and personal demonization that could be the result of an extended, bruising battle.
James Baldwin said it most eloquently and publicly: "Urban renewal … means Negro removal" — during a 1963 TV interview on meeting a boy displaced by the Fillmore-area redevelopment projects of the ’50s and ’60s. Wondering what happened to the Fillmore’s vibrant jazz, blues, and R&B clubs — which once drew musical giants like Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and fostered local neophytes like Etta James and Chet Baker? Look to the two phases of the Western Addition Project, which swept over at least 30 blocks and affected more than 17,000 residents from 1953 to 1967.
Long before the bulldozers arrived, the Fillmore was renowned as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in San Francisco, a magnet for Japanese and Filipino immigrants. A few African American families had been living in the neighborhood prior to the 1906 earthquake, and when World War II brought the removal and internment of the Fillmore’s Japanese and Japanese American residents, the African American population exploded as workers moved from the South to the West Coast to work in the shipyards. Their arrival led to the blossoming of black-owned businesses and the Fillmore music scene. Hollywood stars could be spotted in back rooms, experimental filmmaker Harry Smith painted murals on the walls of Bop City, and marquee names such as Lionel Hampton would jam with local talents like Jerome Richardson and Vernon Alley and take them on the road.
Yet after the war, despite the early protests of community leaders, the Fillmore was slated for redevelopment — one of many "modernization" projects spurred by US redevelopment agencies created in the late ’40s that inevitably pinpointed neighborhoods populated by the poor and people of color. The two-lane Geary Avenue was transformed into a six-lane thoroughfare to speed commuters toward the Financial District, thousands were forced to move, and by 1967, when the Western Addition Community Organization managed to win a lawsuit against the city to stop demolition, only two venues had survived: the third incarnation of Jack’s Tavern, currently the Boom Boom Room, and the Majestic Ballroom, now the Fillmore.
More than 5,000 displaced people were left with "certificates of preference" promising dislocated residents and business owners spots when they returned, which few did. Instead, many moved away and lost contact with the Redevelopment Agency, chalking up their losses to false promises; still others have fought to have their certificates honored, such as Leola King, the owner of jazz-era nightspot the Blue Mirror (see "A Half-Century of Lies," 3/21/07).
King lives just down the street from the Fillmore Heritage Center, which houses Yoshi’s, the Jazz Heritage Center, and 1300 on Fillmore. It’s the final piece of the puzzle and fills the last remaining lot left by the redevelopment begun in 1953 — more than 50 years after the fact.
As the devastated dirt lots have remained barren for decades, the Fillmore has become more associated with crime and shattered dreams than the hot sounds and wild times of the 1940s and ’50s. When the Fillmore Center, with its Safeway, was finally built in the late ’80s, the community hoped for an economic renaissance which never quite arrived, old-timer Reggie Pettus of the New Chicago Barber Shop recalls. Jazz — in all its permutations — continues. And the oft-cited villain of the piece, the Redevelopment Agency, has attempted to redress its wrongs, producing booklets about the Fillmore’s musical heritage to spur developers to build in the neighborhood renamed the Fillmore Jazz Preservation District.
"The signs here always cracked me down because there’s nothing left to preserve!" says Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of Harlem of the West (Chronicle, 2006), who initially learned about the neighborhood at the behest of Bill Graham as the Fillmore theater’s day manager in the late ’80s. "It’s all been bulldozed down. It shouldn’t be called ‘preservation district.’ It should be called ‘resurrection district.’<0x2009>"
All that’s left are memories and photos, which she and coauthor Lewis Watts gathered for their book and curated for 1300 on Fillmore’s walls. Pepin has done her share of work for the agency and the neighborhood, helping to fill the empty storefronts with posters of the area’s musical history, and is all too familiar with its fumbles. "The Redevelopment Agency just can’t get out of its own way — a disaster over and over again. Even the best intentions — for example, they hired me to do these names." She points to the monikers of local musicians like John Handy on the bricks of the sidewalk, running perpendicular to pedestrian traffic. "Why did they turn them this way? You put them the other way so people can read them as they’re walking, and then they’re so small nobody notices them!"
Still, she has her hopes, like everyone else who loves the Fillmore: "I want it so badly to succeed." The arrivals of Yoshi’s and 1300 on Fillmore are exciting, she agrees, though she wonders whether the old scene can truly be re-created. "One, when jazz was here in the ’40s and ’50s, it was superaffordable. Two, it was the music of the day, the rap music of the day, and all the people went out and danced," she explains. "It does worry me that everyone is pinning their hopes on this one corner to bring back everything else."
"Oddly enough, the Fillmore jazz district is probably more well-known in Europe among jazz collectors than in our own backyard," says Guardian contributor and cohost of KUSF’s Friday Night Session Tomas Palermo. He believes the area’s jazz history should be included as part of the core curriculum at SF public high schools, and he urges Yoshi’s San Francisco and other "jacket-and-tie" jazz outlets to "open up to new sounds," citing London’s Jazz Cafe, which books everyone from Roy Ayers to 4hero. He agrees with other watchers: the last parcel of land razed by the redevelopment wrecking crews shouldn’t become yet another exclusive club for the moneyed elite who roll down Fillmore from Pacific Heights and across the bridges. It has to be accessible to the community and the creatives who once made it what it was and what it could be, taking it even further from what Pettus once described as "Fillmo — no mo’." "Now," Pettus says, taking a break from cutting heads, "it’s ‘Fillmore — maybe!’"
OPINION Oct. 27 marks the first anniversary of the assassination of New York Indymedia photojournalist Brad Will by police in Oaxaca, Mexico, under the thumb of a corrupt and tyrannical governor.
Will was gunned down just outside Oaxaca City while filming a pitched battle between supporters of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and members of the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO). Will, 36 at the time of the killing, was the only American among 26 victims shot by Ruiz’s police and paramilitary operatives during protests in that state in 2006. No one has been held accountable for any of these murders.
A year after Will’s death, those who killed him are walking the streets. No charges have been filed against them, despite graphic evidence of their culpability. Will, true to his profession, never let go of his camera; he inadvertently filmed his murder, and photos of five cops firing their weapons at him appeared in major Mexican newspapers the day after the killing.
Indeed, the Guardian and 25 other member newspapers of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies published a startling photograph of his killers on their front pages Aug. 8 along with a 5,000-word investigative report I wrote probing the circumstances of the independent journalist’s death.
Yet although there have been repeated public denunciations of the killing by such international human rights watchdogs as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, neither the Mexican government nor, more pertinently, the US State Department has demanded justice for Will. The case now molders in the cold-case file, and despite street protests on both sides of the border, a barrage of e-mails to both governments demanding a thorough investigation of the murder, and even a visit to Oaxaca by his bereaved family, no authority has been animated to revisit this travesty.
The failure of the US government to demand accountability from Mexican president Felipe Calderón and Governor Ruiz is appalling. During the past year the US embassy in Mexico City under the direction of George W. Bush crony Tony Garza has been conspicuously silent about Will’s killing. In fact, the embassy’s only response to this murder since last Oct. 27 has been to warn American tourists about visiting Oaxaca.
The night Will was killed, Garza used the opportunity to condemn the popular movement in Oaxaca, thereby green-lighting then–Mexican president Vicente Fox to send in federal troops to crush the rebellion.
Will was one of 20 journalists working in Mexico to have disappeared or been killed since 2000. According to a count kept by Reporters Without Borders, 81 journalists were killed worldwide in 2006. Murdering the messenger continues to be the modus operandi of repressive governments and their security forces.
Will did not work for the New York Times. He was an independent voice on the front line of social protest in Latin America, and he paid a terrible price for his valiant and necessary reportage. In Mexico and elsewhere, when those who work for social change are so martyred, we do not concede their deaths, because their work is always with us. A year after his as-yet unresolved murder, Will is still present.
"Brad Will, presente!"
John Ross
John Ross has been the Guardian‘s correspondent in Mexico for the past 22 years.
Did Cruising director William Friedkin cruise the gay community without taking responsibility for the consequences? Was he cruising for a bruising, or careless about his film’s impact on gay men’s safety? (Is it a double standard when sexualized slasher-movie killings of gay men draw protests, but the same acts done to women on screen are treated as par for the course?) Friedkin the man may have been ignored while filming a scene from the movie at a bar’s jockstrap night, but Friedkin the director’s 1980 look through — or is it at? — a sexual underground hasn’t gotten the blind-eye from gay men, then or now. In this week’s Guardian and on this blog, you’ll find critical writing and specific history on the subject, some of it scathing.
William Friedkin circa 1970s
Cruising is not a perfect movie, or Friedkin’s best movie. It has ridiculous moments. The faux-Freudian explanation at the end parrots Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as routinely as any Brian DePalma imitation of Hitch. But I’ve been fascinated by it since an era when it was reviled and hard to find on VHS tape. And I like it. I like Cruising‘s ambivalence and its ambiguity, which could be viewed as prophetic in a societal sense and influential in a stylistic sense. (In comparison, a lot of New Queer Cinema still seems rather, um, safe.) I like the movie’s gorgeous but scary shots of Central Park at night. I like its soundtrack. I think it’s interesting that the “killer”‘s disembodied voice — a quality that takes on new meaning the more you consider the story — might very well be the influence behind the killer’s voice in gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s Scream series. Today, Cruising seems most interesting to me as a movie that critiques (hyper)masculinity, straight and gay, as the boundaries between them blur.
I had a 20-minute block of time to talk with Friedkin when he came through town recently in conjunction with Cruising‘s upcoming run at the Castro Theatre and DVD release. Here’s what he had to say about Cruising — and about Mercedes McCambridge being tied to a chair, knocking back hard liquor and swallowing raw eggs for The Exorcist. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Guardian:The Roxie Cinema here in San Francisco has had a role in the changing reputation of Cruising, so I want to ask you about your relationship with them. William Friedkin: I don’t know if Elliot [Lavine] and Bill [Banning] are still running [the Roxie], but they always ran films that I made, and I came up [from L.A.] whenever I could to answer questions from the audience. I loved what they were doing.
Now it seems the DVD is the true cinematheque.
There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.
The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.
Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.
"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.
While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.
"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.
For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."
As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."
Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.
1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS
The Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.
The law allows the president to designate any person an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.
Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."
The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, "this law does not apply to American citizens."
Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific "alien unlawful enemy combatant" to the vague "any person subject to this chapter."
"Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?" Parry wrote. "Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?"
Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the "any person" terminology is troubling. "It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted," Parry said.
Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.
Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006
2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU
The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.
Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.
The Warner act defines a public emergency as a "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States" and extends its provisions to any place where "the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to "suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."
So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.
The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.
Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006
3. AFRICOM
President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent "vital interest" in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick "vital interest."
The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.
Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. "A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it," Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."
Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."
As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.
At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.
In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.
Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements "competitive liberalization," and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.
But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. "The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets," states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.
Part of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.
Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."
These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.
The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, "No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site."
Source: "A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy," David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006
6. FALCON’S TALONS
Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.
The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."
However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.
Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.
What about the other 7,481 people? "Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?" Whitney asked.
The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).
As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.
Sources: "Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State," Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006
7. BLACKWATER
The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.
Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.
"It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror," author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.
A March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.
The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.
Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.
Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.
Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.
Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.
In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.
Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.
But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.
As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, "the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected."
The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.
Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.
Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.
Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that "the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington."
With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.
FILM William Friedkin, like it or not, has contributed so much to mainstream queer cinema that it’s remarkable his name primarily calls up images of projectile vomiting and Gene Hackman running a lot. The Boys in the Band (1970) and the more high-profile Cruising (1980) are bookends to a decade of comparatively unencumbered gay sex that is legendary to gay men of my generation (I was alive for a gloriously unencumbered two months of it), yet there was almost no mainstream representation of gay men in pop culture between the two films that didn’t involve guest spots on Match Game or The Hollywood Squares.
Last year’s excellent Friedkin offering, Bug, spent its first 15 minutes or so, gratuitously but innocuously, within a lesbian community. And let’s not forget Father Dyer’s gayer-than-gay proclamation in The Exorcist (1973) that “My idea of heaven is a solid white nightclub with me as a headliner for all eternity, and they love me.” Friedkin’s representations of queer people are hardly consistent in their degrees of sophistication, but the venom he’s inspired in so many activists is certainly excessive and arguably not worth the energy. If he can be accused of exploitation, what he’s exploiting is of no mere passing fascination to him. For some reason the man, whether or not he’s welcome, has clearly thrown in his lot with the queers.
Cruising — let’s just get it out of the way — is a pretty terrible movie in most of the major categories: dialogue, acting, and plot all add up to a big fat blecch, and the restored version playing at the Castro Theatre beginning Sept. 7 in anticipation of the DVD release does nothing to remedy the narrative inertia. The murder mystery it purports to be — regarding an undercover cop’s pursuit of a serial killer in the West Village’s leather-clad S-M scene — is a murky and parenthetical excuse for a series of Boschian tableaux of boot licking, fist fucking, and ass ramming. But beyond a frustrating mess of implications about the scene’s negative influence on Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), Friedkin isn’t guilty of much beyond overexuberance.
The initial vitriolic reaction to Cruising, it seems, had more to do with its depiction, embellished a touch, of a significant chunk of the gay world with its legs up in the air. The flatteringly concentrated sexual activity in the bar scenes may be less of an issue nowadays because of the growing number of politically engaged queer people, unconcerned with assimilation and happy to sign off on anything that makes jittery straight people uncomfortable. But does this say enough about the movie’s sexual proclivities? There isn’t much talk about Cruising as a pageant of eroticized violence or as a film eager in its bloodiness for the titillated approval of its viewers. Were Friedkin’s murder scenes — overt visual associations of anal and violent penetration, blood sprayed across the screen in a porn booth — intended as an extension of his conception of S-M play? Would it be wrong for him to do so, or for the audience to be duly turned on?
I’ve always taken for granted that Cruising‘s two major scenes of police harassment were your garden-variety (though highly effective) critiques of injustice, a risk-minimizing way of approaching an unfamiliar culture. But now I’m wondering if these scenes were intended as an indictment of the police at all (was the unnecessarily long, squirm-inducing raid on an all-black bar in The French Connection intended as an indictment?) or if they were simply elaborate fetish scenarios, artistic expansions of the imagery and dynamics already well integrated into the S-M scene? Mr. Friedkin, are you trying to get us off? ——————- ——————-
Stormy Leather by Matt Sussman
When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder.
In a December 1979 Oakland Tribune article, Konstantin Berlandt, a member of the group Stop the Movie Cruising and perhaps the film’s most vociferous adversary in local gay rags, called Cruising “a genocidal attack on gay people.” Two months later, the STMC helped organize a demonstration at the Transamerica Pyramid, protesting one of Transamerica’s subsidiaries — the film’s distributor, United Artists. On opening day hundreds of protesters picketed the St. Francis Theatre.
“I don’t remember what I thought of the whole thing other than it was kind of stupid and annoying,” recalls Marc Huestis, one of the cofounders of the city’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now the SF International LGBT Film Festival). “As long as I’ve been here, there has always been the battle between the respectable gays and the fringe gays,” Huestis continues. “The respectable gays — many of whom I will say probably went to the leather bars to cruise after their protests — were all into showing a positive face.”
The issue of positive representation — and whether or not Cruising‘s problematic yoking of gay sadomasochism and serial murder warranted merely protest or outright censorship — was at the core of much of the debate. One reader wrote to San Francisco’s Sentinel, “It is ironic that we who have long been victims of prejudice and censorship should attempt to use these weapons of oppression against the movie.” In a February 1980 cover story, “The Men of Cruising,” in Mandate (the gay “international magazine of entertainment and Eros”), Rod Morgan, one of the gay extras in the film’s bar scenes, commented, “If the protesters want progay propaganda, let them get the money together and make their own movie.”
“The stakes of gay representation were very different at the time,” reflects Michael Lumpkin, artistic director of LGBT media nonprofit Frameline. “They were much higher because it was, like, ‘Hollywood hasn’t given us anything, and then they give us this?’ ” However, critic Scottie Ferguson, writing in the Advocate in April 1980, found a thrilling frisson in Cruising‘s portrayal of gay men and asked readers, “What Hollywood film has made the sexual electricity of the gay male seem so vibrant and visceral and unnerving?”
By 1995, when the Roxie Film Center revived Cruising, Ferguson’s observations had been somewhat vindicated. Mainstream LGBT film was taking off, and thanks to the risky work of directors like Gregg Araki and Tom Kalin, new queer cinema had confronted audiences with visceral and unnerving representations of violence-prone gay men.
In contrast to the largely positive reevaluations in the local press, David Ehrenstein implied in the Bay Area Reporter that the Roxie’s revival was tantamount to screening the notorious anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew (1940). Representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation showed up to hand out protest literature. “It was hilarious,” former Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine recalls. “There was a line around the block, and 90 percent of those waiting were in the leather crowd, and these GLAAD folks are trying to persuade them not to see the movie.”
Cruising has, to some extent, been defanged by the passage of time, its campier moments and macho signifiers embraced by a younger generation of queers. Clearly, though, the film still touches nerves: flame wars are being ignited as fast as they are being put out on Craigslist.com. And even for this gay fan of slasher movies, the film’s murder scenes are incomparably unsettling.
After a recent local media screening of the restored movie’s DVD release — at which director William Friedkin was present — DJ Bus Station John, whose clubs Tubesteak Connection and the Rod evoke the milieu of gay nightlife at the time Cruising was made, commented in an e-mail that “Friedkin’s present claim that contemporary audiences are more ‘sophisticated’ and therefore more receptive to Cruising, if not more friendly [to the film], doesn’t mitigate the damage done to our community at the time [of its release].”
SONIC REDUCER As the summer squeezes out its last warmish days, we can safely say that we’re glad for one thing: that with the end of the season comes those last nagging reminders of the Summer of Love, all that was great and good about hippie Frisky, the perpetually remarketable, oh-so-remarkable boomer musical legacy, and how radical it was that so many acolytes drifted here four decades ago to gobble acid and find themselves. Yet are we in the clear to say that we’re all a bit weary of the free-floating miasma of hype? By Jerry’s beard, it happens only every five to 10 years, when the once anti-establishment boomer establishment turns on, tunes in, and pats itself on the back yet again as the 25th, 30th, or 45th anniversaries roll around. I know an overweening sense of self-importance seems to be an intrinsic part of one’s duty as an American citizen, but has there ever been a more self-congratulatory generation than the one that birthed the Summer of Love? Can we now unofficially rename it the Summer of Self-Love? Can I be excused from the creaky, walker-bound group grope that will accompany the big five-oh?
Yep, hippie-bashing, at this queasy, war-wracked juncture, is a tired, predictable, oft-rightie-instigated contact sport that’s far too easy to indulge in. Still, has there ever been a wave of so-called progressives so determined to look back, so intent in repackaging their relics for resale? You can stuff mewling protests against ageism in your tie-dyed Depends. Boomer rockers have been so busy crowing from the rooftops about their accomplishments for so many years that they’ve failed to notice how incredibly bored youngsters — and even not-so-young ‘uns — have become with Grandpappy’s zillionth sing-along to "Love Me Do." Indeedy, nothing can ever compare to your old-time rock ‘n’ roll, your first trip, orgy, no-nukes protest, Jell-O wrasslin’ bout, ad infinitum. But must we still hear about it? This from the same gen, captains helming a capsizing music industry, that turned the phrase “classic rock,” that has insisted on recognizing every anniversary of ’60s-era recording classics, from the Beatles to Sly Stone to Jefferson Airplane to brrrzzzzzzz …
Grrrzzzdhoooh-ha! Oh, were you saying? By the way, when the music’s over — turn off the light, OK? I know hippies weren’t the ones to self-aggrandizingly dub themselves the Greatest Generation. And perhaps we’ve all come to expect far too much from our self-promoting, self-obsessed, yet always self-critical forebears. Yet when word of bickering between competing SF Summer of Love events in August began drifting hither — rumors that Summer of Love 40th Anniversary producer Boots Hughston tells me are simply that: rumors (“We’d been promoting Summer of Love for a year and a half. They had been working on the Hope and Beyond AIDS project in other countries, but this year they decided to change the name of the event — we have a lot of respect for them”) — it seemed like a little peace was in order. After all, the entire purpose behind the Sept. 2 event, Hughston explains, is to “remind people there are other things rather than taking over other countries and going to war over oil — like compassion and understanding. Why not remind people where it all began in 1967?” That’s why Hughston says Country Joe McDonald, Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others are performing free, in between the spiritual and political speakers.
Good intentions go far with even crankaholics like yours truly. But how did the event — which could have used some younger, relevant artists indebted to the San Francisco Sound in its lineup (look for a sampling at this weekend’s Ben Lomond Indian Summer Music Festival) — come to fall on the very day most of its younger demographic might be burning elsewhere? “There is a strong synergy between us and Burning Man, you’re right,” Hughston says. “But you can always go to Burning Man, and you can’t always go to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.” He believes some burners will be leaving early to return for his 40th event. Smokin’.
One of the most seriously wonderful folk-rock LPs to come down the pike of late has to be Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird on the Water, out last year on UK’s Peace Frog label and recently picked up for US distribution by Kemado. It’s anything but a purist artifact — "The reverb probably gives it that haunting quality. It’s something I’ve always used in abundance on my voice to many people’s distaste," Nadler, 26, says with a laugh, speaking from outside Boston.
Alas, Nadler has often struggled with intense shyness in presenting her creations. "Maybe it’s a masochistic thing that I want to put myself through the pain of performing," the songwriter says. "But at no point is the first song easy." Ever considered Blues Brothers–style shades? "I’ve definitely thought about it," she confesses.
Is this where today’s summer lovers are really headed? Bay Area and Los Angeles creatives like Entrance, Paula Frazer, and Mammatus converge. Fri/31–Sun/2, $12–$18 per show; $40–$45 three-day pass. Henfling’s Tavern, 9450 Hwy. 9, Ben Lomond. www.myspace.com/benlomondindiansummer
Sweetwater stemmed? The Bay Area singer-songwriter bids farewell to the historic club with its last show, the day before it shutters due to a drastic rent increase. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $15. Sweetwater Saloon, 153 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. www.ticketweb.com.
POLAR GOLDIE CATS
Paws for LA’s feral chamber post-punkers. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com.
So the members of Rage Against the Machine are having themselves a little reunion outing, eh? What a great reason for a massive flock of shirtless, chest-bumping frat boys to jump in place with middle fingers extended while screaming, "Fuck you — I won’t do what you tell me!"
It should come as no surprise that the politically charged rap-rock foursome caved in for a supposed one-off performance — their first in almost seven years — at the recent Coachella Festival. Since 2001 the festival’s organizers have been shelling out the bling for such iconic alt-rockers as Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stooges, and the Pixies to kiss and make up for one stifling day in the desert. Now Rage-oholics have a machine to rail along with again — at least until October.
So far the group has only committed to a string of scattered festival appearances around the country, including four dates headlining the "Rock the Bells" tour, the annual hip-hop festival including performances from the Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Nas, Mos Def, and EPMD. According to RATM, there are no plans for a new album; guitarist Tom Morello stated in a May Blabbermouth.net interview that recording a follow-up to their last studio disc, Renegades (Epic, 2000), would be "a whole other ball of wax right there" and "writing and recording albums is a whole different thing than getting back on the bike and playing these songs."
But why play these songs now? Is it only a coincidence that the RATM realliance followed the dissolution of Audioslave in February? Morello confirmed this with Billboard.com in March, revealing that "the Rage rebirth occurred last fall when it was clear that there was not going to be any Audioslave touring in the immediate future." In addition, sources for the Los Angeles Times disclosed that Coachella’s quick sellout and the ticket scalping that followed factored into the band’s decision to add more dates after that appearance.
RATM, however, have spun their reunion to NME.com as a response to the "right-wing purgatory" that this country has "slid into" under the George W. Bush administration since the group’s demise in 2000. As Morello additionally told Billboard.com, "These times, I think, demand a voice like Rage Against the Machine to return" and "the seven years that Rage was away the country went to hell. So I think it’s overdue that we’re back."
So what took RATM so long, and why listen to a leftist band that’s earned its salary from a subsidiary of a corporate media conglomerate, namely Sony Records? And who’s willing to listen — the decider in chief? Efforts ranging from the worldwide protests against US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to legislation to cut off war funding crafted by the Democratic-led Congress have failed to move the Bush camp. It’s doubtful that a band known for its aversion to both the Democratic and Republican parties is going to have any impact.
Since RATM’s so-called "Dixie Chicks moment" at Coachella, corporate media has definitely scrutinized the group’s defiance of the Bush regime. During a performance of "Wake Up," Zach de la Rocha made a speech stressing that the current administration "should be hung and tried and shot." The band members quickly came under fire, and on a segment of Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes pegged them as "anarchists," while Sean Hannity suggested that they should be investigated by the Secret Service. Guest Ann Coulter scoffed, "They’re losers, their fans are losers, and there’s a lot of violence coming from the left wing." In rebuttal, de la Rocha deemed the three "fascist motherfuckers" and reiterated that the band believes Bush "should be brought to trial as a war criminal," then "hung and shot." Thanks for clearing that up, Zach.
RATM’s songs have more significance today then they did 10 years ago, but if RATM choose to have a voice now, will their cause be served come November should they dissolve again? It’s likely de la Rocha would retreat to the rock he’s been hiding under for the past seven years if the band decides to part ways a second time. Even if the rap-rock pioneers’ material is tagged as anarchist propaganda for the masses, they definitely have something more to offer listeners than does, say, a Smashing Pumpkins reunion. A reassembled RATM couldn’t come at a better time — and these songs are meant to be played and heard now. Perhaps this time we’re ready to listen and stand up with them. *
Oaxaca, Mexico — Those of us who report from the front lines of the social-justice movement in Latin America share an understanding that there’s always a bullet out there with our name on it. Brad Will traveled 2,500 miles, from New York to this violence-torn Mexican town, to find his.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2006, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was on fire. Death squads, the pistoleros of a despised governor, rolled through the cobblestoned streets of this colonial capital, peppering with automatic weapon fire the flimsy barricades erected by masked rebels. Hundreds were killed, wounded, or imprisoned.
Will, a New York Indymedia videojournalist, felt he had to be there. Xenophobia was palpable on the ground when Will touched down. Foreign journalists were attacked as terrorists by the governor’s sycophants in the media: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" the radio chattered — if you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!
For much of the afternoon of Oct. 27, Will had been filming armed confrontations on the barricades just outside the city. He was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots boomed all around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot.
And he found it: on his final bits of tape, two clearly identifiable killers are perfectly framed, their guns firing. You hear the fatal shot and experience Brad’s shudder of dismay as the camera finally tumbles from his hands and bounces along the sidewalk.
By all visible evidence, Brad Will filmed his own murder. But this is Mexico, where justice is spelled impunity — and Will’s apparent killers continue to ride the streets of Oaxaca, free and, it seems, untouchable.
Curiously, this egregious murder of a US reporter in Mexico has drawn minimal response from US Ambassador Tony Garza, an old crony of President George W. Bush. Why this lack of interest? Can it be that Washington has another agenda that conflicts with justice for Will — the impending privatization of Mexican oil?
HEADING SOUTH
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whether perched atop the Fifth Street squat where he had lived for years and waving his long arms like Big Bird as the wrecking ball swung in, or being dragged out of City Hall dressed as a sunflower while trying to rescue the neighborhood’s community gardens, this child of privilege from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore was a legitimate street hero in the years before the World Trade Center towers collapsed and the social-change movement in New York City went into deep freeze.
Will hosted an incendiary weekly show on the New York pirate station Steal This Radio and was an early part of Indymedia, the Web publishing experiment born during the "Battle of Seattle," the World Trade Organization protests that rocked that city in 1999.
With his long hair neatly tied back and parted down the middle, with his granny glasses and fringe beard, and with his fierce commitment to building community, Will seemed to have emerged whole from a more utopian time in America.
He was an independent journalist, one of the growing number of people, such as Josh Wolf in San Francisco, who use the Internet and their video cameras to track and report on social moments and injustice. He wore no credential from any major news organization. But using outlets like Indymedia, he — like Wolf, who spent seven months in prison to avoid giving the police a copy of his video outtakes — represented part of the future of journalism.
Will’s journey to the land where he would die began right after Sept. 11, 2001. Dyan Neary, then a neophyte journalist, met Will in a South Street skyscraper elevator coming down from the WBAI studios from which Amy Goodman broadcast soon after the terrorist attacks.
"We walked down the piles. They were still smoking," Neary remembered in a phone call from Humboldt County. "We were both really scared. We thought this was not going to be resolved soon. Maybe never. So we thought we should go to Latin America, where people were still fighting."
Will and Neary spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming the bubbling social landscape of Latin America. In Fortaleza, Brazil, they confronted the director of the Inter-American Development Bank during riotous street protests. They journeyed to Bolivia too and interviewed Evo Morales, not yet the president. They traveled in the Chapare rainforest province with members of the coca growers’ federation. They hung out in Cochabamba with Oscar Olivera, the hero of the battle to keep Bechtel Corp. from taking over that city’s water system. Everywhere they went, they sought out pirate radio projects and offered their support.
In February 2005, Will was in Brazil, in the thick of social upheaval, filming the resistance of 12,000 squatters at a camp near the city of Goiânia in Pernambuco state, when the military police swept in, killing two and jailing hundreds. On his videos, you can hear the shots zinging all around him as he captured the carnage. Will was savagely beaten and held by the police. Only his US passport saved him.
Undaunted by his close call, Will picked up his camera and soldiered back through Peru and Bolivia, and when the money ran out, he flew back to New York to figure out how to raise enough for the next trip south. He was hooked. In early 2006, drawn like a moth to flame, he was back, tracking Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign through the Mayan villages on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
In the spring of 2006, Will was back in New York as he tracked the Other Campaign and the incipient rebellion in Oaxaca on the Internet from his room in Williamsburg. (The rent gougers had forced him out of the Lower East Side.) He was poised to jump south again, friends say, but was worried that he would just be one more white guy getting in the way.
In the end, the lure of the action in Oaxaca pulled him in. He bought a 30-day ticket, caught the airport shuttle from Brooklyn to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and flew south Sept. 29. His return was set for Oct. 28. He never made that flight.
THE COMMUNE OF OAXACA
A mountainous southern Mexican state traversed by seven serious sierras, Oaxaca is at the top of most of the nation’s poverty indicators — infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment, and illiteracy. Human rights violations are rife. It’s also Mexico’s most indigenous state, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising and repression.
The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, ruled Mexico from 1928 to 2000, the longest-running political dynasty in the world. The corrupt organization was dethroned by the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca Cola México.
But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While voters were throwing off the PRI yoke all over the rest of the country, in Oaxaca one PRI governor had followed another for 75 years. The latest, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a protégé of party strongman and future presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, won a fraud-marred election over a right-left coalition in 2004.
In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz proved spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for social justice. When, on May 15, 2006, National Teachers Day, a maverick, militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as Section 22 presented its contract demands, Ruiz turned a deaf ear. Then, on May 22, tens of thousands of teachers took the plaza and 52 surrounding blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning the maestros would march out of their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon smeared with anti-Ruiz slogans.
Ruiz retaliated before dawn June 14, sending 1,000 heavily armed police officers into the plaza to evict the teachers. Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. Ruiz’s police took up positions in the colonial hotels that surround the plaza and tossed down concussion grenades from the balconies. Radio Plantón, the maestros’ pirate radio station, was demolished and the tent city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city.
Four hours later a spontaneous outburst by Oaxaca’s very active community, combined with the force of the striking teachers and armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and sent Ruiz’s cops packing. No uniformed officers would be seen on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to repudiate the governor’s "hard hand." The megamarch was said to extend 10 kilometers.
John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising as a human-rights fellow for Global Exchange, wrote that the surge of the rebels June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly, or APPO, was formally constituted June 21. The APPO had no leaders but many spokespeople, and all decisions had to be made in assemblies.
A CITY PARALYZED
For the next weeks, the actions of the APPO and Section 22 paralyzed Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead, the nation was hypnotized by the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election in which a right-wing PAN-ista, Felipe Calderón, had been awarded a narrow victory over leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of a coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution. López Obrador was quick to cry fraud, pulling millions into the streets in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican history. Oaxaca still seemed like small potatoes.
But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination, and the APPO and Section 22 protests had closed down the tourist infrastructure, blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to shutter their doors. On July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an indigenous dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s premiere tourist attraction, after roaming bands of rebels destroyed the scenery and blockaded access to the city.
Ruiz began to fight back. By the first weeks of August, the governor launched what came to be known as the Caravan of Death — a train of 30 or 40 private and government vehicles rolling nightly, firing on the protesters. Ruiz’s gunmen were drawn from the ranks of the city police and the state ministerial police.
To keep the Caravan of Death from moving freely through Oaxaca, the APPO and the union threw up barricades; 1,000 were built in the working-class colonies throughout the city and its suburbs. The rebels piled up dead trees, old tires, and burned-out cars and buses to create the barricades, which soon took on a life of their own; murals were painted using the ashes of the bonfires that burned all night on the barriers. Indeed, the barricades gave the Oaxaca struggle the romantic aura of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and attracted droves of dreadlocked anarchists to the city.
An uneasy lull in the action gripped Oaxaca on Oct. 1, when Will arrived at the bus terminal, then found himself a cheap room for the night. The break wouldn’t last long.
ON THE BARRICADES
Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves as independent reporters, Will had no Mexican media credential and therefore was in the country illegally, working on a tourist visa and susceptible to deportation. To have some credential other than his Indymedia press card to hang around his neck, he got himself accredited with Section 22 and wore the rebel ID assiduously.
On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García Hernández was cut down at a barricade near Símbolos Patrios, a downtown plaza. Will joined an angry procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken.
In the last dispatch he filed from Oaxaca, on Oct. 16, Will caught this very Mexican whiff of death: "Now [García Hernández lies] waiting for November when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song … one more death — one more martyr in a dirty war — one more time to cry and hurt — one more time to know power and its ugly head — one more bullet cracks the night."
The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten "sketchy," Will wrote to Neary. Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried amid charges of sellout and payoffs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’s gunmen. But backing down was not in the assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO voted to ratchet up the lucha (struggle) and make Oaxaca really ungovernable.
Mobile brigades were formed — young toughs armed with lead pipes and nail-studded boards who hijacked buses still running in the city, forced the passengers off, and rode around looking for action. Later the buses would be set afire. Charred hulks blossomed on the streets of the old colonial city. The barricades were reinforced to shut down the capital beginning Oct. 27.
The escalation proved to be a terrible miscalculation. In Mexico City the postelectoral turmoil had finally subsided, and PAN was ready to deal with the PRI; bailing out the governor of Oaxaca was the PRI’s price of admission.
It wasn’t a good time for inexperienced foreigners. Ruiz’s people were checking the guest lists at the hostels for "inconvenient" internationals. Immigration authorities threatened extranjeros with deportation if they joined the protests. The local US consul, Mark Leyes, warned Americans that he would not be able to help them if they got caught up in the maelstrom.
Adding to this malevolent ambiance, a new pirate station popped up Oct. 26. Radio Ciudadana (Citizens’ radio) announced it was broadcasting "to bring peace to Oaxaca" and to celebrate the honor of "our macho, very macho governor." The announcers seemed to have Mexico City accents. Wherever they had been sent from, they let loose with a torrent of vitriolic shit — stuff like "We have to kill the mugrosos [dirty ones] on the barricades." The extranjeros, the radio said, were stirring up all the trouble: "They pretend to be journalists, but they have come to teach terrorism classes."
More frightening was this admonition: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" — "If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!"
This poison spewed out of local radios all day Oct. 26 and 27, but whether Will heard the warnings — and if he did, whether knew what they meant — is unclear. He didn’t speak much Spanish.
SHOT IN THE CHEST
On Oct. 27, Will went out to do interviews on the barricade at Santa María Coyotepec, about 20 kilometers from the city. The three barricades at Coyotepec, Cal y Canto, and La Experimental were crucial to closing down Oaxaca the next day. The broad Railroad Avenue where the barricade was stacked was empty. Nothing was moving. Will walked on to the next barricade at La Experimental to check out the action.
Soon after the Indymedia reporter left, all hell broke loose at Cal y Canto. A mob of about 150 Ruiz supporters stormed down Railroad Avenue, led by what witnesses thought was a Chevy Blazer. The vehicle was moving very fast. "We thought it would try and crash through the barricade," Miguel Cruz, an activist and witness, recalled. But the SUV stopped short, and several men jumped out with guns blazing. The APPO people hunkered down behind the makeshift barrier and moved the women and kids who were with them into a nearby house. Then they went on the counterattack with Molotov cocktails, homemade bazookas that fired bottle rockets, and slingshots. Most of the mob had melted away, and with the gunmen retreating, the rebels torched their vehicle.
Will heard about the gunfire and hurried back to Cal y Canto with a handful of other reporters. They arrived a little after 3 p.m.
Will climbed under a parked trailer to film the shooters. He focused on a man in a white shirt. When an APPO activist (who is not seen on the videotape) came running by, Will indicated the shooter — "Camisa blanca." While all this was going on, the camera captured a bicyclist peddling dreamily through the intersection. Soon after, a large dump truck appeared on the scene, and the group on the barricade used it as a mobile shield as they chased the gunmen down the avenue.
Suddenly, the pistoleros veered down a narrow side street, Benito Juárez, and took refuge in a windowless, one-story building on the second block. The only access to the building was through a large metal garage door, and the reporters followed the APPO militants, many of whom were masked, as they tried to force their way in. Will stood to one side of the door for a minute, poised for the money shot. Then the compas tried unsuccessfully to bust down the big door by ramming the dump truck into it.
In the midst of this frenzy, five men in civilian dress — two in red shirts (the governor’s color) and the others in white — appeared at the head of Benito Juárez, about 30 meters away, and began shooting at the rebels.
Two of the gunmen were later identified by Mexican news media as Pedro Carmona, a cop and local PRI political fixer, and police commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. One of those in the white shirts, crouched behind Carmona, was Abel Santiago Zárate, a.k.a. El Chino. Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were reported to be the personal bodyguards of municipal president Manuel Martínez Feria of the PRI. The other two would later be fingered as Juan Carlos Soriano, a.k.a. El Chapulín (the grasshopper), and Juan Sumano, both Santa Lucía del Camino police officers. All five are eminently identifiable in the film Will shot just moments before the bullets hit him.
When the shooting erupted, Will took cover on the opposite side of the narrow street from the rest of the media. He was crouched against a lime green wall when the first bullet came. On the video soundtrack, you can hear both the shot and Will’s cries of dismay as it tore through his Indymedia T-shirt and smashed into his heart. A second shot caught him in the right side and destroyed his innards. There was little blood spilled, the first slug having stopped his heart.
In footage that witness Gustavo Vilchis and others filmed, the entrance wound of the first shot looks like a deep bruise. The second shot was not recorded on the soundtrack and may have been fired simultaneously with the first.
Others were shot in the pandemonium. Oswaldo Ramírez, filming for the daily Milenio, was grazed. Lucio David Cruz, described as a bystander, was hit in the neck and died four months later.
As Will slid down the wall into a sitting position, Vilchis and activist Leonardo Ortiz ran to him. Will’s Section 22 credential had flown off, and no one there knew his name. With bullets whizzing by, the compas picked Will up and dragged him out of the line of fire and around the corner to Árboles Street, about 35 paces away. Along the way, his pants fell off.
"Ambulance! We need an ambulance! They’ve shot a journalist!" Vilchis, a tall young man with a face like an Italian comic actor’s, shouted desperately. Gualberto Francisco, another activist, had parked his vochito (Volkswagen Bug) on Árboles and pulled up alongside Will, who was laid out on the pavement in his black bikini underwear.
Ortiz and Vilchis loaded the dying Will into the back seat. They thought he was still breathing, and Vilchis applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "You’re going to make it … you’re all right," they kept telling him. But Will’s eyes had already turned up — he was perdido (lost), as they say in Mexico.
The vochito ran out of gas, and while the frantic young men ferrying Will were stuck in the middle of the Cinco Señores crossroad, it began to rain hard. They tried to stop a taxi to take them to the Red Cross, but the driver supported the government and wanted to argue. Finally, they flagged down a pickup truck and laid Will out in the bed. He was dead when he arrived at the hospital, according to the report by the coroner, Dr. Luis Mendoza.
THE OUTRAGE BEGINS
Oct. 27 was the bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising. Four people were killed besides Will: Emilio Alonso Fabián, Esteban Ruiz, Esteban López Zurita, and Audacia Olivera Díaz.
Unlike their murders, Will’s death triggered international outrage. Because he was so connected — and because much of the episode was recorded on film —the shot of the mortally wounded Indymedia reporter lying in the middle of a Oaxaca street went worldwide on the Web in a matter of minutes.
There were instant vigils on both coasts of the United States. On Oct. 30, 11 of Will’s friends were busted trying to lock down at the Mexican consulate off Manhattan’s Park Avenue, where graffiti still read "Avenge Brad!" in December. Anarchists splattered the San Francisco consulate with red paint. Subcomandante Marcos sent his condolences and called for international protests. Goodman did an hour-long memorial.
On March 16, 2007, at its midyear meeting in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the Inter-American Press Association, an organization devoted to freedom of speech and the press in the Americas, passed a resolution calling for action on the Will case.
"The investigation into the killing has been plagued by irregularities and inconsistencies, and no arrests have been made," the group said in a statement. IAPA called for the federal attorney general to take over the investigation, "in view of the lack of confidence in state authorities and the lack of progress in the case, so that it may apprehend the culprits, who, according to one theory of the investigation, may be indirectly linked to state authorities."
The official reaction to Will’s death was more cautious. "It is unfortunate when peaceful demonstrations get out of hand and result in violence," a US spokesperson told the media, seeming to blame the APPO for Will’s killing. After once again warning Americans that they traveled to Oaxaca "at their own risk," Ambassador Garza commented on the "senseless death of Brad Will" and how it "underscores the need for a return to the rule of law and order."
"For months," he said, "violence and disorder in Oaxaca have worsened. Teachers, students, and other groups have been involved in increasingly violent demonstrations."
Garza’s statement sent Fox the signal he had been waiting for. Now that a gringo had been killed, it was time to act. The next morning, Oct. 28, 4,500 officers from the Federal Preventative Police, an elite force drawn from the military, were sent into Oaxaca — not to return the state to a place where human rights, dignity, and a free media are respected but to break the back of the people’s rebellion and keep Ruiz in power.
On Oct. 29 the troops pushed their way into the plaza despite massive but passive resistance by activists, tore down the barricades, and drove the commune of Oaxaca back into the shadows.
In Mexico the dead are buried quickly. After the obligatory autopsy, Brad’s body was crated up for shipment to his parents, who now live south of Milwaukee. After a private viewing, the family had him cremated.
SHAM ACCOUNTABILITY
Killing a gringo reporter in plain view of the cameras (one of which was his own) requires a little sham accountability. On Oct. 29 the state prosecutor, Lizbeth Caña Cadeza, announced that arrest warrants were being sworn out for Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello, two of the five cops caught on film gunning Will down, and they were subsequently taken into custody.
The scam lost currency two weeks later when, on Nov. 15, Caña Cadeza dropped a bombshell at an evening news conference: the cops hadn’t killed Will, she said; he was shot by the rebels.
Will’s death, she insisted, had been "a deceitful confabulation to internationalize the conflict" and was, in fact, "the product of a concerted premeditated action." The mortal shot had been fired from less than two and a half meters away, Caña Cadeza said — although there is nothing in the coroner’s report to indicate this. The real killers, she said, were "the same group [Will] was accompanying."
In the state prosecutor’s scenario, the order of the shots was reversed: first Will had been shot in the side on the street, then rematado (finished off) with a slug to the heart on the way to the hospital in Francisco’s vochito.
The prosecutor’s plot was immediately challenged by the APPO. "The killers are those who are shown in the film," Florentino López, the assembly’s main spokesperson, asserted at a meeting that night.
And in fact our detailed investigation shows that there is very little evidence to support Caña Cadeza’s theory. Photos from the scene, some published in the Mexican media, show Will’s body with a bloody hole in his chest on the street near where he fell — indicating that his fatal heart wound occurred well before he was dragged into the car where he was supposedly shot.
There’s another problem with the prosecutor’s suggestion: nobody on the scene saw any APPO members, or anyone except the authorities, carrying guns. This reporter has talked to numerous eyewitnesses, and all told the same tale: the rebels at the barricade that day had no firearms with which they could have shot Will.
Miguel Cruz, who spent much of Oct. 27 with Will, first at the Council of Indigenous People of Oaxaca, of which he is a member, and then on the barricade at Cal y Canto and on Juárez Street, is a soft-spoken young Zapotec Indian, but he pounded vehemently on the kitchen table when he addressed Caña Cadeza’s allegations.
"The compañeros had no guns. What gun is she talking about? They had slingshots and Molotovs but no guns. The PRI-istas and the cops had their .38s, and they were shooting at us," he said. "We were trying to save Brad Will’s life, not to kill him."
And if Caña Cadeza had any proof of her allegations, she likely would have filed charges. But none of the protesters or Will’s companions has been formally charged with the killing. Prosecutors have never publicly presented the alleged murder weapon.
But by the time Caña Cadeza told her story, of course, the only way to determine for sure the order of the bullets and the distance from which they had been fired would have been to exhume Will’s body. And there was no body; he had been cremated the week before.
On Nov. 28, Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were released from custody by Judge Victoriano Barroso because of "insufficient evidence," with the stipulation that they could not be rearrested without the presentation of new evidence.
Caña Cadeza, who is now running as a PRI candidate for the state legislature, collaborated closely on the case with Oaxaca secretary of citizen protection Lino Celaya. Both reported to Ruiz’s secretary of government, Heliodoro Díaz, who in turn reported directly to the governor. There seems little doubt that the prosecutor’s accusations of murder against Will’s comrades — and the determination of innocence for the apparent killers — came straight from the top.
ON THE EVIDENCE TRAIL
Dr. Mendoza was occupied when I stopped by the Oaxaca city morgue to ask for a copy of the autopsy report on which the state has based its allegations.
"Will died eight months ago," Mendoza complained testily. "Do you know how many others have died since? How many autopsies I’ve performed?" He gestured to a morgue room where cadavers were piled up.
The coroner was scrunched over his desk, filling out the paperwork for one of the dead. He didn’t have any time to look for the autopsy report. I was not the first reporter to ask him about the document. "What paper are you from anyway?" he asked suspiciously, and when I showed him my media card, he told me that it didn’t sound like a real newspaper to him. "I know what I’m doing. I worked as a coroner in your country," he snapped defensively and waved me out of the office.
But Mendoza might not be quite as cocksure as he sounded. A senior agent for the US government in Oaxaca, who asked not to be named in this article, told me later that Mendoza confided to him that he was no ballistics expert, nor could he determine from how far away the bullets were fired.
I walked into the police commissary under the first-floor stairs of the Santa Lucía del Camino Municipal Palace. The small room was crowded with cops and cigarette smoke. Three of the officers were in full battle gear, and the rest were plainclothes. I had been warned not to ask for Carmona, the most prominent red shirt on Will’s film. Carmona is described as a prepotente — i.e., a thug with an attitude who is always packing.
Instead, I asked the desk clerk if I could get a few minutes with Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello. For all I knew, the two were sitting in the room behind me. The desk clerk studied my card. "Qué lástima!" he exclaimed — what a shame. Santiago Zárate had just left and wouldn’t be back until after six. Aguilar Coello was off that day. When I called back after six, Santiago Zárate was still not available. Nor were he and Aguilar Coello ever available the dozen or so times I called back.
This sort of stonewalling is not terribly unusual for Mexico, where killer cops often sell their services to local caciques (political bosses) and go back to work as if nothing had happened. Those who direct this sort of mayhem from their desks in the statehouses and municipal palaces — the "intellectual assassins," as they are called — are never held accountable for their crimes.
A VISIT FROM HOME
In March, Brad’s parents, Kathy and Howard Will, and his older brother and sister paid a sad, inconclusive visit to Oaxaca. They had hired Miguel Ángel de los Santos Cruz, a crackerjack human rights lawyer who has often defended Zapatista communities in Chiapas. Gibler, the Global Exchange human-rights fellow, was the translator.
The Wills, upper-middle-class Americans, had little experience with the kind of evil that lurks inside the Mexican justice system; the trip was a traumatic, eye-opening experience.
The federal Attorney General’s Office had taken over the case from the state in December, but rather than investigating police complicity and culpability, it was pursuing Caña Cadeza’s dubious allegation blaming Will’s companions for his killing.
Gustavo Vilchis, Gualberto Francisco, Leonardo Ortiz, and Miguel Cruz were summoned to give testimony, with the Wills in attendance. Testifying was a risky venture, as the witnesses could have been charged with the murder at any moment, but out of respect for the family, the compas agreed to tell their story to the federal investigators. During the hearing they were repeatedly questioned about and asked to identify not the cops who appear on Will’s film but their own compañeros, some masked, who appeared on tape shot by Televisa, the Mexican TV giant. They refused.
When Los Santos accompanied the Wills to a meeting with Caña Cadeza, she touted her investigation and promised them a copy of its results. But she refused to allow the family to view Will’s Indymedia T-shirt and the two bullets taken from his body. They were, she explained, under the control of Barroso — the judge who had cut loose the cops.
THE POLITICS OF OIL
There are larger geopolitics at work here.
The US Department of State has a certain conflict of interest in trying to push first-year Mexican president Calderón to collar Will’s killers. The crackdown in Oaxaca was all about a political deal between Calderón’s PAN and Ruiz’s PRI: if PAN saved the governor’s ass, the PRI would support the president’s legislative package.
Indeed, the PRI’s 100 votes in the lower house of the Mexican Congress guarantee Calderón the two-thirds majority he needs to alter the constitution and effect the change that’s at the top of his legislative agenda — opening up Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, the nationalized petroleum corporation and a symbol of Mexico’s national revolution, to private investment, a gambit that requires a constitutional amendment.
Since then-president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Mexico’s petroleum industry from Anglo and American owners and nationalized it in 1938, the United States has been trying to take it back. "Transnational pressure to reprivatize PEMEX has been brutal," observed John Saxe Fernandez, a professor of strategic resource studies at Mexico’s autonomous university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
During the run-up to the hotly contested 2006 presidential elections, candidates Calderón and López Obrador debated the privatization of Mexico’s national oil corporation before the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City; former US ambassador Jeffrey Davidow moderated the debate. When the leftist López Obrador insisted that he would never privatize what belonged to all Mexicans, the business leaders stared in stony silence. The conservative Calderón’s pledge to open PEMEX to private investment drew wild applause. Calderón was, of course, Washington’s horse in the fraud-marred election.
In order to accommodate Washington, Calderón needs a two-thirds majority in the congress — and the PRI’s votes in the lower house are crucial to guaranteeing passage of a constitutional amendment. "Without the PRI’s votes, PEMEX will not be privatized. That is why Calderón has granted Ruiz impunity," Saxe Fernandez concluded.
Washington is eager to see PEMEX privatized, which would create an opportunity for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Halliburton (now PEMEX’s largest subcontractor) to walk off with a big chunk of the world’s eighth-largest oil company. Pushing Calderón too hard to do justice for Will could disaffect the PRI and put a kibosh on the deal.
It is not easy to imagine Brad Will as a pawn in anyone’s power game, but as the months tick by and his killing and killers sink into the morass of memory, that is exactly what he is becoming. 2
John Ross is the Guardian‘s Mexico City correspondent. This story was comissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and is running in about 20 alternative papers this week.
It’s Pride, and I’m going to shamelessly plug something. ‘Tis the season for shameless plugging! Whatever your orientation, take a break from strutting your sizzling stuff soon and visit the GLBT Historical Society on Mission Street (www.glbthistory.org). The archives are a treasure trove, and "Out Ranks," the current exhibition displaying the effects of queer soldiers from World War II through Iraq, is a must-see.
To my mind, the only place gays in the military belong is on a porn DVD — definitely not on an aircraft carrier deployed to Kuwait. But there are incredible personal stories in "Out Ranks," scattered among the crisp dress uniforms and bright blue dishonorable discharge papers, many faded to a trendy shade of robin’s egg.
Stories like that of Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman drafted in 1967 who fought police at Stonewall. Or Helen Harder, a Women’s Army Air Corps member who signed up during WWII with her girlfriend (how hot is that?). The show also contains relics of queer antiwar protests, including a poster of a hunky, half-naked Jesus screaming, "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" Yummy.
Recently, board member Gerard Koskovich gave me a tour of the society’s archives, the largest collection of queer historiana in existence. He showed me underground newsletters for queeny World War I GIs and photo albums of ’70s lesbian weddings. There were boxes of flyers for ancient gay bars like the Anxious Asp and Fickle Pickle, Super 8 reels of street riots and disco dance floors — and a container holding Harvey Milk’s bullet-riddled clothing.
"Here’s a gown the first Gay Empress, José Sarria, wore," Gerard said, unfurling a brittle re-creation of Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot ensemble from My Fair Lady. Tears sprang to my eyes. "And that," he said, pointing to a nondescript sewing machine, "is what Gilbert Baker sewed the first Pride flag on."
I lost it. All that fabulousness up close was just too much. I bent down quickly, pretending to tie my shoelaces to hide my exploding sobs.
It was then that I realized I was wearing pumps.
Sequined pumps. Purple sequined pumps. I stared down in astonishment. A pair of leopard-print hose raced up my legs, blooming at my upper thighs into a dazzling Lycra minidress. Enormous pads sprouted from my shoulders, and my hair kinked out into a frizzy bleached mullet. Good lord, I was becoming Sylvester. I was riding a giant mirror ball through space. "Yooou make me feel!<\!s>/ Mii-ighty real!"
It was all a hallucination, of course. Family can make you do that, hallucinate. Love is a drug indeed. And the glittery fabric of history, despite its many bullet holes, still connects us all.*
There’s a section in Josh Kornbluth’s new show wherein the veteran (but weirdly ageless) monologist, waxing on admiringly about Sheldon S. Wolin, notes his old Princeton political science prof’s capacity for turning a student’s half-baked ideas into $10 notions. It reminded me of a professor I knew who was adept at the same thing. I’ve forgotten the exact metaphor Kornbluth employs to describe this pedagogical magic act, but I used to liken it to pushing a battered old Dodge across the seminar table and having the professor transform it into a Rolls Royce before sending it gliding back with your name on the license plate.
Of course, as anyone who knows his style will attest, the same might be said of writer-performer Kornbluth — or Citizen Josh, as his solo play premiering at the Magic Theatre has him. Kornbluth, though, works his similar magic with his own thoughts, the detritus of a quick but wandering mind: the memories, spontaneous associations, and clumsy social encounters of daily life. He manages to swirl these together, with plenty of humor, into a big, inquisitive stew, until they coalesce into a solution to the problem he has set for himself and his audience, whether it’s growing up in (and out of) a red diaper, negotiating the nightmare that is the federal tax system, or, in the present case, coming to terms with the meaning of democracy in the United States.
It’s in keeping with Kornbluth’s at once self-deprecating and knowing humor that this exploration of the American institution takes place on a stage efficiently made up to suggest a classroom. He and director-collaborator David Dower (along with production designer Alexander V. Nichols) proffer a short bookcase, an American flag on a freestanding pole, and a slide projector and screen. But Kornbluth stands there as teacher and student, we soon realize, and we’re merely along for the ride.
The spark sending him back to civics class comes from his frustrated disillusionment following the 2004 election, a response challenged by his Berkeley neighbor — an old-school chum and political scientist — as not in keeping with a democratic ethos. (You too may be wondering exactly how democracy fits into national elections these days. But as our guide suggests, for the purposes of this exercise, "Let’s just say it’s not passé.") Before giving up on democracy altogether, Kornbluth agrees to do some digging into the subject. (There’s a more fundamental incentive than saving face with his neighbor: Kornbluth’s son, while not a very detailed or developed character in the show, nonetheless provides his father with a certain critical perspective throughout. Fatherly instincts demand he do something to save the world his child will inherit.) The research sends him bouncing across a lot of time and territory, including his first year at Princeton, his graduation day four years later (when the desultory student did not officially graduate but rather began a 27-year incomplete that he finally decided to remedy by contacting senior thesis adviser Wolin), and even 1957 Little Rock, Ark.
In this last instance (a particularly well-written and engaging passage), he unpacks the image of the famous photograph depicting African American high school student Elizabeth Eckford — one of the Little Rock Nine, who tried to enter a previously all-white school — and the white woman spewing racial epithets behind her, one Hazel Bryan, whose democratic skills were none too desirable. Since Kornbluth catches himself "going Hazel" in a playground dispute (literally) with another Berkeley neighbor, this is also a self-effacing and humanizing reference that eschews simple dichotomies of good and evil in the name of the hard, imperfect work of talking to, rather than past, one another. (Much of Kornbluth’s monologue takes place, figuratively speaking, in Berkeley’s Ohlone Park, known as People’s Park Annex during the student protests of the late 1960s and still host to the lumpy lattice dome welded together there by protesters, which the unsuspecting Kornbluth uses as a cell phone reception platform and refers to in aesthetic horror as "the structure.")
It’s a bumpy ride, all said, for this self-fashioned Don Quixote of democracy. The first 15 minutes or so feel almost too neat, too presentational or precious. Then, as Kornbluth relates the story of his brother’s troubled beginning as an extremely premature newborn — and his (by now famous) nonconformist father’s startling intervention to save the baby — the performance moves suddenly to a new and altogether gripping register. Although it’s not entirely sustained afterward, the next hour proves an engaging one. At the same time, the show ends on an upbeat note of liberal defiance and optimism that is hard to credit in an era when even Wolin can write, in 2003, that "a kind of fascism is replacing our democracy." The show’s overt politics is less satisfying than the nuance and complexity that emerge from the more personal and idiosyncratic passages. Citizen Josh is at its most charming and compelling when the accent falls on the second half of that moniker. *
CITIZEN JOSH
Through June 17
Tues.–Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 and 7 p.m.; $20–$45
Patrick Moore’s presentation isn’t as slick as Al Gore’s. The slides he shows lack a certain visual panache and don’t compare to the ones in An Inconvenient Truth. Moore himself seems a little frumpy, particularly as he peers out across the audience recently gathered in the Warnors Theatre in Fresno.
But attendees paid $20 to hear the former Greenpeace leader extol the benefits of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, reliable, economic, and — perhaps most important to the current political and media focus on global warming — emissions-free source of power.
It’s hard to imagine Moore at the helm of an inflatable boat steering into the line of a whaling ship’s fire, but that iconic Greenpeace image is exactly what he wants you to associate with him. The Vancouver, British Columbia, native is quick to tell you he’s a former leader of one of the most effective international activist organizations ever. But he said he’s older now and wants to be for things instead of against them.
What’s Moore for? Warding off the warming of the world. What does he think will do it? More nuclear power plants.
If there’s any great and unifying issue thrumming through the national psyche, defying political party lines and flooding the media filters these days, it’s global warming. While leaders argue left and right about nearly every issue that comes before them, there is at least consensus that something must be done about climate change.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped on that bandwagon last September when he signed into law Assembly Bill 32, mandating a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020.
Thirty-one states recently agreed to join a voluntary greenhouse gas emissions registry similar to California’s, 10 northeastern states are creating a cap-and-trade market, and already half the country has laws requiring that a certain percentage of local power portfolios come from renewable energy.
The alternative-energy troops who’ve long been waiting in the trenches have stepped up to fight, armed with the tools they’ve been honing for years: solar panels, wind turbines, tidal power, and biofuels. They say new options and innovations abound for weaning the country off its fossil fuel habit.
But there are already critics who say those approaches aren’t going to be enough — and that we need to go nuclear against this planetary threat. And now they have some unlikely new allies.
Maybe you’ve seen the headlines touting the new nuclear push, running in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and all the daily syndicates. They all claim the same questionable facts: Nuclear power is clean and emissions free. It’s safe, reliable, and cost-effective. It isn’t contributing to global warming — and these days even the environmentalists like it.
James Lovelock, the renowned Gaia theorist, thinks nuclear energy will be essential to power the developing world. On a Sept. 13, 2006, airing of KQED’s Forum, he told host Michael Krasny, "I would welcome high-level nuclear waste in my backyard."
During the hour-long program he said the dangers of radiation were exaggerated; there wasn’t that much waste generated; and in order to mitigate the increasing effects of climate change, we should "look at nuclear as a kind of medicine we have to take."
Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, thinks nothing is more doomsday than global warming and told the Guardian he advised Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to start touting nuclear power as a solution.
"The nuclear industry needs a new green generation," he told us. "My fellow environmentalists ought to be grateful to the nuclear industry for supplying 20 percent of our electricity."
And then there’s Moore, the 15-year Greenpeace veteran who once put his body in the way of a seal hunter’s club and wrote in an April 16, 2006, Washington Post op-ed, "My views have changed and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
"Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely."
The bio for the Post piece identifies Moore as cochair of "a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports the use of nuclear energy."
It’s one of the few articles that make such a disclosure, although more probably should. A survey by Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, came across 302 recent articles mentioning Moore and nuclear power as a possible option for mitigating the effects of global warming.
Only 37 — a mere 12 percent — said he’s being paid to support nuclear power by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuke industries that’s hired Moore to front its nuclear renaissance.
Only the Columbia Journalism Review has drawn the further connection that Hill and Knowlton has been paid $8 million to help the NEI spread the word that the nukies have the silver bullet for solving global warming.
Hill and Knowlton knows a little something about pushing dangerous products. The company created the tobacco industry’s decades-long disinformation campaign about the effects of smoking. Veterans of that campaign then helped ExxonMobil try to bury the truth about global warming.
Before laughing these folks out of the reactor room, consider this: Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, who’ve been against nukes in the past, are now suggesting nuclear energy needs to be considered in light of global warming.
Al Gore and Hillary Clinton have also made similar recent murmurings. Of all the major 2008 presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have offered up energy plans that don’t include more nukes.
Eight states are working on pro-nuclear legislation, and although a bill to lift the moratorium on new plants in California was shot down in the Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources, its sponsor, Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), told us he intends to introduce it again and again until it passes.
In the meantime a private group of Fresno investors has signed a letter of intent with a nuclear power company to put a 1,600-megawatt nuclear plant in the San Joaquin Valley. So far the only thing stopping the group is the state’s 30-year-old moratorium, which says no new nuclear power plants may be built in California until a permanent solution to the waste is established. The investors are already working on a November 2008 ballot measure to end the ban and allow new nuclear plants.
A new nuclear plant hasn’t been built in the United States since 1978, when concerns about safety, cost, and the long-term waste management challenge (nuclear rods will still be deadly hundreds of thousands of years from now) overwhelmed the industry.
But if there were ever an opportunity for a nuclear renaissance, the threat of climate change has created one. And the poster child is Moore, a relatively innocuous Greenpeace exile who’s traveling around the country with a B-movie version of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, speaking to communities and drumming up what he calls a grassroots coalition of mayors, business leaders, and community activists. He’s steadily convincing them we need more nuclear power by trading the classic doomsday scenario of a massive radioactive explosion for the creeping killer global warming.
"I’m aghast," Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian who helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility and is one of the most prominent international critics of the dangers of nuclear energy, told us.
Caldicott, who’s authored several books on the subject, most recently Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (2006), said, "I’ve never seen a propaganda exercise which is so fallacious. Both the politicians and the media are buying it."
She and other nuclear watchdogs who’ve been patrolling the industry for more than 30 years say it’s anything but a safe, reliable, economic, and emissions-free silver bullet.
Let’s look at the facts.
SAFETY
When it comes to safety, Moore told us, "US nuclear power plant employees enjoy the so-called healthy worker effect: people employed at the plants have lower mortality rates from cancer, heart disease, or other causes and are likely to live longer than the general population."
To support this claim, he cited a 2004 Radiation Research Society study of 53,000 workers. After reviewing it, Caldicott said, "I’m very suspect. There’s nothing here about people who are living with cancer."
Caldicott admits there’s a void of data about the health of nuclear workers and people who live near plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t mandate baseline studies of cancer rates in areas surrounding the sites of nuclear facilities.
But people living near Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania plant that came within minutes of a catastrophic meltdown in 1979, demanded studies, which found evidence of increases in thyroid cancer in the region. And Caldicott, in her recent book, pointed out that there are a number of things the government doesn’t want to admit. "To this day there is no available information about which specific isotopes escaped nor the actual quantity of radiation that was released," she wrote, going on to detail how, for lack of sufficient data about the distance the radiation may have spread, scientists studied the rates in the livestock of nearby fields and found supporting evidence that the plume of poison spread as far as 150 miles away.
And of course, there’s Chernobyl, where a 1986 nuclear-plant disaster caused lasting health problems and contaminated a huge swath of what was then the Soviet Union.
The unavoidable fact is that the industry thus far has had two terrible, nightmarish accidents, one of which was catastrophic and the other very nearly so.
And every part of the nuclear-power cycle involves serious health risks.
"You want to get really sad?" asked Molly Johnson, a lifelong environmental justice activist and San Luis Obispo County resident. "Go to New Mexico, go to Arizona, see the families that are dying because of the uranium mining. Their water is irradiated from the uranium tailings that are still there…. Why would we continue that?"
These days intentional attacks are even more of a concern. But Moore isn’t sweating. He said he thinks a plane colliding with a power plant is unlikely, even though the 9/11 Commission Report found that al-Qaeda operatives at one point considered aiming for the Indian Point reactor in New York.
Even if a jet hit a plant, Moore insists, the plant would be strong enough to withstand a collision. "If you drove an airplane into that, it would just be one messed-up airplane you’d have to deal with," he said.
Not exactly, say the critics.
"He is just dead wrong about reactor security. Breathtakingly misinformed," said Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a public interest group that’s been studying nuclear power and proliferation issues for nearly four decades. "Virtually no reactor containment in the US was designed to withstand a hit by a jumbo jet. Significant parts of the plant essential to preventing a meltdown are outside containment anyway."
Hirsch is speaking of power lines, which transmit electricity from the plant and also carry electricity to it — power that’s used to keep dangerous components cool and safe. If that power were cut off for any length of time, a meltdown could occur in the pools where explosive spent fuel is kept.
These spent-fuel storage areas — essentially big swimming pools where radioactive waste is kept underwater until a long-term storage facility is built — rely on a steady pumping of water to cool the superheated waste. All you’d have to do is stop that water pump, and there’d be a meltdown. And the storage areas don’t necessarily have the same fortified structures as the reactors.
Hirsch said, "A successful attack on a nuclear plant or, even worse, a spent-fuel pool would be the worst terrorist event to ever occur on earth by far, capable of killing over 100,000 people immediately and hundreds of thousands of latent cancers thereafter, contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania for generations."
There’s no immediate solution in sight for long-term storage, so these pools of deadly waste will likely remain on reactor sites for many years.
San Luis Obispo County’s Mothers for Peace recently sued the NRC over the newly established laws regarding protection against terrorist attacks, which only require plants to be able to ward off five potential external terrorists on the ground. It took 19 people to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that power plant operators must also consider the possibility of an air attack when designing spent-fuel storage tanks.
Mothers for Peace is fond of noting that existing security measures aren’t what you’d call foolproof. During a recent earthquake, 56 of 131 sirens in the San Luis Obispo area — designed to alert residents of a possible accident at the plant — didn’t go off because the power was out and they aren’t backed up by generators or batteries.
When Mothers for Peace and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility brought the failure to the attention of the NRC, the agency said that nothing is perfect and that the sirens over the course of 1,000 hours worked 99 percent of the time.
"Except the five hours you’d actually want them to work," David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility said.
Nuclear power is either a creeping killer or a sitting bomb. Wind farms and solar-panel arrays are not leaching poisons into the environment. They’re not direct targets for terrorist attacks, and if they were, the result wouldn’t be all that horrible. Imagine cleaning up a bombed wind farm versus a nuclear power plant.
"Wind farms are on nobody’s list of targets," Weisman added. "If a windmill falls and there’s no one there to hear it, do you need an emergency evacuation plan?"
RELIABILITY
A centerpiece of the pro-nuke argument is that nuclear power is a baseload source, meaning it can generate energy all day, every day. Solar and wind, of course, rely on the cruel (and unpredictable) forces of nature to generate power.
But one could argue the same about nuclear power plants. They’re run by people — and the record of those operators isn’t encouraging.
Moore expressed great confidence in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: "They have very, very stringent requirements and regulations. It’s all there for anybody to see. All of these reactors are inspected regularly. There is no reason in my estimation to suspect the NRC of anything other than being a responsible watchdog agency. If you want to take the time to dig into it, you can find out what’s going on."
David Lochbaum does take that time — and he’s found out a lot. After working for 17 years as a consultant to the NRC, he joined the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) as a nuclear-safety engineer. He spends his days combing NRC reports and documents and compiling studies on the safety of the industry. His experience and research have caused him to conclude that the commission can’t stay on top of the 103 plants in the country.
"We get a lot of calls from workers in the plants, and NRC employees that have safety issues they’re afraid to raise," he said. "We had three calls last week. That’s a little more than usual, but we usually get 50 to 60 whistleblower calls a year." He said sometimes the workers have already raised the issue internally but need an ally to force a remedy at the plant. Other times they’re afraid to speak about what they’ve seen without fear of retaliation.
Lochbaum authored a September 2006 study for the UCS titled "Walking the Nuclear Tightrope" on the issues of safety and reliability. It’s a chilling read; it carefully outlines how regulators have been complicit in allowing plants to operate far longer than they should and how these overstressed plants eventually have to be shut down for years to restore safety standards. He found that in the last 40 years plants have ground to a halt for a year or more on 51 occasions. In most cases it wasn’t a spontaneous incident but an overall decaying of conditions that compromised safety.
"Some observers have argued that the fact no US nuclear power reactor has experienced a meltdown since 1979 (during which time 45 year-plus outages have occurred) demonstrates the status quo is working successfully," Lochbaum wrote. "That’s as fallacious as arguing that the levees protecting New Orleans were fully adequate prior to Hurricane Katrina by pointing to the absence of similar disasters between 1980 and 2004."
One of the most recent and chilling examples is the 2002 outage of the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, where a hole the size of a football was discovered in the vessel reactor head. Only a half inch of steel remained to prevent a massive nuclear meltdown. The plant was overdue for a shutdown and an inspection and had been granted the extension by the NRC.
When asked what he thought about that close call, Moore said, "I didn’t think it was a close call. I thought it was a mechanical failure that should have been caught sooner. It was caught long before it became an accident or anything like that."
"When you say close call, that means that nothing actually happened," he concluded.
But when there’s a facility where an accident could lead to mass deaths, even close calls are grounds for concern. That’s why we have to hold nuclear plants to such high standards. And the fact that plants have to close so often to avoid disastrous accidents doesn’t say much for the reliability argument.
EMISSIONS
This may be the issue on which the pro-nukers make the most headway. Moore cites a number of international studies, posted on the NEI’s Web site, that show nuclear plants competing only with hydropower when it comes to emitting the lowest level of carbon dioxide. Even solar panels and wind turbines, when one factors in the entire energy process, emit more greenhouse gases, according to these studies, though all these power sources release significantly less than burning coal or natural gas.
The anti-nuke crowd says a true study has never been completed that quantifies the CO2 emissions from mining uranium and turning it into usable nuclear fuel. Both are heavily energy intensive. Additionally, they argue that transporting waste will incur even more CO2 emissions, whether it’s shipped across the sea for reprocessing in Europe or trucked across the country for burial in Yucca Mountain.
But the waste itself is also a huge issue. Although nuclear power plants don’t have bad breath, they do emit toxins — and it’s an unresolved issue as to where to put them. The current forecast for opening the Yucca Mountain repository is 2021. Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada opposes building the facility, and he’s pushing a bill that would require plants to keep the crud in their backyards.
"They’ve had 50 years to work on the waste issue," Weisman said. "And the best solution they’ve come up with is, who do we not like enough to send it to?"
Either way, Moore thinks waste is not a problem. If anything, it should be reprocessed — he likes to call it "recycling." Under that process, spent fuel is bathed in acid to separate out the usable plutonium. That can be followed by vitrification — a complex, energy-intensive process of suspending the highly radioactive and corrosive acid in glass, which is then sealed in expensive trash cans of steel and concrete and buried underground for at least 300 years, after which point he predicts it should no longer be a problem.
"It makes more fuel," he said.
Actually, Hirsch said, "it makes more weapons-grade plutonium." He argues that the last thing the nation should do is allow nuclear-plant operators to separate the plutonium and put it on the market, where it can be leaked for bomb making.
Additionally, there are a number of waste sites around the country that are slowly emitting what they’ve been designed — or not designed in some cases — to contain.
The worst is probably in Hanford, Wash., where decades’ worth of reprocessed spent radioactive fuel pushed the area beyond Superfund status into a "national nuclear waste sacrifice zone.
"Hanford is the most contaminated site in North America and one of the most significant long-term threats facing the Columbia River," Greg deBruler, of Columbia Riverkeeper, wrote in the Fall 2006 issue of Waterkeeper, the group’s quarterly journal. "It’s difficult to comprehend the reality of Hanford’s 150 square miles of highly contaminated groundwater or its 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste sitting in 45-year-old rotting steel tanks."
Much of that waste includes leftover reprocessed spent uranium fuel, which ate through its casks and poisoned the community’s drinking water.
Moore said, "It’s not as if everyone is dead. The nuclear waste has been contained."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
ECONOMICS
"The economics of nuclear power are well proven around the world. It is one of the most cost-effective forms of energy," Moore said.
Just check the record. Of the 103 reactors that were built in the United States, 75 ran a total of $100 billion over budget. India more recently went 300 percent over budget on its 10 reactors. Finland is already 18 months behind and $1 billion over on a reactor.
Given this track record, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration "Annual Energy Outlook 2005" reported that "new plants are not expected to be economical." They’re so risky, in fact, that not a single plant could have been built without the 1957 Price-Anderson act, which moves the liability for a nuke plant off its owners and onto US taxpayers. "If they were really economical, they’d be able to get insurance," Weisman said. The bill was recently renewed.
The nuclear industry forges on unperturbed, claiming that new plants have been streamlined for easier construction. Additionally, the siting and licensing laws for plants have been changed to speed up the process by precluding public input. (Given the industry’s safety record so far, that’s not comforting.) Experts predict it will now take 10 years to build a new nuclear plant. Thirty-four licenses are currently pending at the NRC as utility companies race to secure the $8 billion the federal government set aside for subsidies.
"Imagine how many wind turbines that could buy," said Harvey Wasserman, a longtime anti-nuke activist who recently authored the book Solartopia, which outlines a plan for completely renewable energy by 2030. In fact, renewables are far cheaper. Building the facilities to create one gigawatt of wind power costs about $1.5 billion; about two gigawatts could replace the Diablo Canyon Power Plant.
THE BOTTOM LINE
In the end, it comes down to money, and that’s where nuclear power may be the most vulnerable.
Sam Blakeslee, a Republican Assembly member from San Luis Obispo, introduced a bill last year that calls on the California Energy Commission (CEC) to conduct an in-depth study of the true costs of nuclear power to assess its viability as part of California’s future energy plans. The bill passed unanimously, and Schwarzenegger signed it.
"This will be cradle to grave," said Weisman, of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, which has focused its scrutiny on the industry’s costs.
The group has long been suspicious of PG&E’s financial woes, which came to a head this past March when the California Public Utilities Commission allowed the company to use $16.8 million from ratepayers to fund its in-house study of relicensing its two nuclear plants. "The licenses won’t be up until 2023 and 2025, so why are they looking at relicensing now — and why does it cost $16.8 million when the state’s study is projected to cost $800,000?" Weisman asked.
Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) is introducing a bill this year that will undercut PG&E’s study before the CEC’s analysis is completed, which is expected to occur around November 2008.
"Our very simple idea here is that before any relicensing of our aging nuclear power plants can proceed, the CEC study be completed," Leno said. "Clearly, PG&E is very eager to move forward its relicensing process. They have many years to accomplish that task."
Leno said the stakes are too high and the inherent risks of the toxins already accumulated in seismic zones along the coast need to be carefully weighed against the prospects of generating even more waste. "We should proceed with absolute caution, forethought, and consideration."
NOWHERE TO RUN
Those risks, that caution, are something that never leaves the minds of the people who live in the plants’ fallout zones, areas as vast as a steady breeze or trickling flow of water can make them. That’s really the problem with nuclear power plants. After 50 years there are still too many unknowns. In Moore’s lectures and during interviews and debates, the former Greenpeace activist likes to say more people are killed by car accidents and machetes than by nuclear power plants, but that mocks the magnitude of a meltdown.
A car accident kills at most a few people. A machete attack might kill one person. A nuclear accident has the potential to inflict casualties in the tens of thousands, maybe even millions, and to render entire cities uninhabitable. And while most of the time, most of the plants may be perfectly problem free, it only takes one accident to wreak environmental havoc.
These days opposition to nuclear energy isn’t about mass protests in the streets. "When KQED calls and asks for the sounds of a protest, I say that’s not how it happens," Weisman said while showing a DVD of a Jan. 31 San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission meeting that droned on for more than 12 hours. The meeting ultimately resulted in what he’d hoped for: a continuing delay of PG&E’s permit to site new dry-cask storage tanks for thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumuutf8g at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. He and Rochelle Becker, the group’s director, sat through the whole thing. "That’s what protesting is now," he said.
Becker, a pert, soft-spoken woman with the aging visage of the youngest grandmother in the room, said correctness is crucial. "Never, ever exaggerate. When they want to talk about safety issues and isotopes, we refer them to someone else because we don’t have that expertise. All we have is our credibility, and if we lose our credibility, we don’t have anything."
THE PLUTONIUM PAYCHECK
Which makes what Moore is doing look like such a travesty.
"Maybe we should hire Hill and Knowlton," joked James Riccio, Greenpeace’s nuclear-policy analyst in Washington, DC, on thinking about gearing up for a new wave of anti-nuke activism.
To Riccio, Wasserman, Weisman, Hirsch, Caldicott, and many others who spoke with the Guardian, Moore is nothing but a dangerous distraction who’s getting the wrong kind of attention. Wasserman disputed Moore’s credentials as a Greenpeace founder in the Burlington Free Press article "The Sham of Patrick Moore."
When questioned by the Guardian, Moore called Wasserman a jerk. Moore said he’s still an activist — and in addition to parroting for the nuclear industry, he runs a sustainability consulting company, Greenspirit Strategies, which advises industries on controversial subjects like genetically modifying organisms, clear-cutting, and fish farming. His clients include hazardous waste, timber, biotech, aquaculture, and chemical companies, in addition to conventional utilities that process nuclear power and natural gas.
Moore insists he’s not hiding anything. "In every interview I do the reporter already knows that I’m cochair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and that I work for the nuclear industry," he told us.
But Moore did not identify himself as such during a lengthy interview with us until we asked. The disclosure was also missing during the long biographical presentation given to the folks in Fresno on Feb. 22, which did include pictures of his Rainbow Warrior days. Again, on May 24, Moore didn’t mention his plutonium paycheck during a radio debate on KZYX. Neither did the moderator, and it was only when Hirsch, his debating partner, got a moment to speak that it was revealed. "Let’s be clear here, Patrick," Hirsch said. "You’re being paid by the industry." *
Joseph Plaster, Andrew Oliver, and Sam Draisin helped research this story.
TECHSPLOITATION I have a number, and therefore I am a free person. That’s the message more than a million protesters across the Internet have been broadcasting throughout the month of May as they publish the 128-bit number familiarly known as 09 F9. Why would so many people create MySpace accounts using this number, devote a Wikipedia entry to it, post it thousands of times on news-finding site Digg, share pictures of it on photo site Flickr, and emblazon it on T-shirts?
They’re doing it to protest kids being threatened with jail by entertainment companies. They’re doing it to protest bad art, bad business, and bad uses of good technology. They’re doing it because they want to watch Spider-Man 3 on their Linux machines.
In case you don’t know, 09 F9 is part of a key that unlocks the encryption codes on HD-DVD and Blu-ray DVDs. Only a handful of DVD players are authorized to play these discs, and if you don’t own one of them, you can’t watch Spidey in high definition — even if you purchase the DVD lawfully and aren’t doing any copying. For many in the tech community, this encryption scheme, known as the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), felt like a final slap in the face from an entertainment industry whose recording branch sues kids for downloading music and whose movie branch makes crappy sequels that you can’t even watch on your good Linux computer (you guessed it — not authorized).
When a person going by the screen name arnezami managed to uncover and publish the AACS key in February, other people immediately began reposting it. They did it because they’re media consumers angry about the AACS and they wanted Hollywood and the world to know that they don’t need no stinkin’ authorized players. That’s when the Motion Picture Association of America and the AACS Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) started sending out the cease and desist letters. Lawyers for the AACS LA argued that the number could be used to circumvent copy protection measures on DVDs and posting it was therefore a violation of the anticircumvention clauses in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They targeted blogs and social networks with cease and desists, even sending notice to Google that the search engine should stop returning results for people searching for the AACS key (as of this writing, Google returns nearly 1.5 million pages containing it).
While some individuals complied with the AACS LA, in many cases community sentiment was so overwhelming that it was impossible to quell the tide of hexadecimal madness. Popular news site Digg tried to take down articles containing the number, and for a while it appeased the AACS LA. But Digg is a social network whose content is determined by millions of people, and as soon as Digg staffers took down one number, it would pop up in hundreds of other places. At last Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, gave up and told the community that if Digg got sued, it’d go down fighting. Many other sites, such as Wikipedia and Wired.com, deliberately published the number in articles, daring the AACS LA to sue them. Sites like MySpace and LiveJournal are also rife with the number — like Digg, these sites are made up entirely of user content, and it would be practically impossible for administrators to scrub the number out.
The AACS key protests have become so popular because they reach far beyond the usual debates over copyright infringement. This isn’t about my right to copy movies — it’s about my right to play movies on whatever machine I want to. The AACS scheme is the perfect planned obsolescence generator. It will absolutely force people to upgrade their existing DVD players because soon they won’t be authorized to play new DVDs. Even worse, the AACS scheme allows movie companies to revoke authorized status for players. Already, the AACS LA has revoked the authorized status of the WinDVD media player, so anybody who invested in WinDVD will have to reinvest in a new player — at least, until that player’s authorized status is revoked too.
The AACS, more than any other digital rights management scheme, has revealed that the Hollywood studios have formed a cartel with electronics manufacturers who will do anything to suck more money out of the public. If you want to watch lawfully purchased movies, the only sane thing to do is post the number. Stand up and be counted. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who can’t help but notice that you’re reading this column on a nonauthorized device.
It wasn’t going well for Ted Strawser, predictably. The alternative transportation activist faced an uphill battle March 14 trying to convince a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce committee to endorse Healthy Saturdays, a plan to ban cars from part of Golden Gate Park.
Representatives of the park’s museums and Richmond District homeowners had just argued their case against the measure. “Visitors want access to our front door, and we want to give it to them,” Pat Kilduff, communications director for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indignantly told the group of two dozen business leaders gathered around a large conference table.
Strawser gave it his best shot: he talked about following the lead of other great cities to create car-free spaces; he said, “Golden Gate Park is one of the best parks in the nation, if not the world”; and he made a detailed case for closure. But around the table there were scowls, eye rolls, and other obvious signs that Strawser was being tolerated, not welcomed. Some — including chamber vice president Jim Lazarus — even started to interrupt and argue with him.
Then the man sitting next to Strawser spoke up. “I don’t think this is fair,” he said. And suddenly, everyone in the room shaped up. Strawser’s ally — his only supporter in the room — was somebody no chamber member could or would dismiss. Warren Hellman doesn’t shout or bang the table — but when he speaks, downtown pays attention.
Hellman, a prominent investment banker, told the committee members that he expected them to show the same respect for Strawser that they had for the previous two speakers. The nonsense ended, immediately.
And by the time Strawser turned the floor over to Hellman, the mood had changed. The group listened raptly, smiled, and nodded as Hellman spoke in his usual folksy, familiar, disarming style.
“It’s not a lot of fun when friends fall out,” he began, “because the previous speakers and many of you all agreed on the necessity of the garage [that was built in Golden Gate Park], and we worked together.”
He pointed out that many in the group had promised during the fall 2000 election to support Healthy Saturdays once the garage was built, although Hellman was now the only member of the coalition honoring that commitment. But he didn’t chide or shame his colleagues. That isn’t Hellman’s style.
Instead, he spoke their language. The garage has never been full and needs the money it can charge for parking to repay the bonds. This isn’t a fight that’s going away, since “part of the conflict is because this park is everybody’s park.” But there are “about 100 compromises not acceptable to either side that would move this forward.” And if a solution can’t be found, there will probably be an expensive ballot fight that nobody wants.
“My conclusion is we should attempt this test,” Hellman told the group. Ultimately, when the vote was later taken in secret, the chamber didn’t agree, although it did vote to back a trial closure after the California Academy of Sciences reopens next year.
At the meeting, Hellman openly called for Mayor Gavin Newsom to get involved in seeking a compromise, something Hellman said he had also just requested of the mayor at a one-on-one breakfast meeting. A couple of weeks later Newsom — who had already indicated his intention of vetoing the measure — did broker a compromise that was then approved by the Board of Supervisors.
As usual, Hellman didn’t take credit, content to quietly play a role in making San Francisco a better place.
Healthy Saturdays isn’t the most important issue in local history — but the significance of Hellman’s involvement can’t be underestimated. His alliance with the environmentalists and park advocates might even signal a sea change in San Francisco politics.
Warren Hellman represents San Francisco’s political and economic past. And maybe — as his intriguing actions of recent years suggest — its future.
This guy is a rich (in all senses of the word) and compelling figure who stands alone in this town. And even though his leadership role in downtown political circles has often placed him at odds with the Guardian, Hellman consented to a series of in-depth interviews over the past six months.
“Our family has been here since early in the 19th century, so we had real roots here,” Hellman told us. His great-grandfather founded Wells Fargo and survived an assassination attempt on California Street by a man who yelled, “Mr. Hellman, you’ve ruined my life,” before shooting a pistol and barely missing.
The Hellman family has been solidly ruling class ever since, rich and Republican, producing a long line of investment bankers like Warren.
Yet the 72-year-old comes off as more iconoclast than patrician, at least partly because of the influence of his irreverent parents, particularly his mother, Ruth, who died in 1971 in a scuba-diving accident in Cozumel, Mexico, at the age of 59. “She was entirely nuts,” Hellman said, going on to describe her World War II stint as a military flier in the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots and other colorful pursuits. “She just loved people, a little like I do. She collected people.”
Hellman grew up wealthy and cultured, but he also attended public schools, including Grant Grammar School and Lowell High School. In between, the young troublemaker did a stint at San Rafael Military Academy — “reform school for the rich,” as he called it — for stunts such as riding his horse to Sacramento on a whim.
After doing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Hellman got his MBA from Harvard and went on to become, at the age of 26, the youngest partner ever at the prestigious Manhattan investment firm Lehman Bros. He developed into an übercapitalist in his own right and eventually returned home from New York and founded Hellman and Friedman LLC in San Francisco in 1984, establishing himself as the go-to financier for troubled corporations.
“He is really one of the pioneers of private equity,” said Mark Mosher, a longtime downtown political consultant and the executive director of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Commission on Jobs and Economic Growth, on which Hellman sits.
Hellman became what Business Week called “the Warren Buffett of the West Coast,” a man of extraordinary wealth and power. Among other accomplishments, Hellman took Levi Strauss private, recently made billions of dollars in profits selling DoubleClick to Google, and manages the assets of the California public employee retirement funds (CalPERS and CalSTRS), which are among the largest in the world.
Like many financial titans, Hellman has always been a generous philanthropist, giving to the arts, supporting schools in myriad ways, and funding the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Free Clinic (which his children run). He vigorously competes in marathons and endurance equestrian events, often winning in his age bracket. And he has his humanizing passions, such as playing the five-string banjo and creating the popular Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.
But he’s also been a prime facilitator of downtown’s political power, which regularly flexes its muscle against progressive causes and still holds sway in the Mayor’s Office and other city hall power centers.
Hellman founded, funds, and is a board member of the Committee on Jobs, which is perhaps the city’s most influential downtown advocacy organization. Hellman and his friends Don Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein also started SFSOS, which now wages the most vicious attacks on left-of-center candidates and causes.
When the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions were threatening to leave Golden Gate Park, Hellman almost single-handedly had an underground parking garage built for them, in the process destroying 100-year-old pedestrian tunnels and drawing scorn from the left. The Guardian called it “Hellman’s Hole.”
“We at the Bike Coalition very much started out on the opposite side of Warren Hellman,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum told us. “We couldn’t have been more like oil and water on the garage issue.”
But over the past two years or so, Hellman’s profile has started to change. He went on to become an essential ally of the SFBC and other environmentalists and alternative transportation advocates who want to kick cars off JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park on weekends, crossing the downtown crowd in the process. He has shared his wealth with progressive groups such as Livable City, which often fights downtown, and has stuck up for edgy fun seekers over more conservative NIMBY types. He has also publicly repudiated the attacks of SFSOS and its spokesperson, Wade Randlett, and withdrawn his support from the group.
Hellman is still a Republican, but a thoughtful and liberal-minded one who opposed the Iraq War and wrote an article for Salon.com in February titled “If the United States Were a Company, Would George Bush Be Our CEO?” (His answer: hell no.) And to top it all off, Hellman sports a few tattoos and even attended 2006’s Burning Man Festival and plans to return this year.
Unguarded and reflective, Hellman’s comments to the Guardian foreshadow the possible future of capitalism and influence in San Francisco and point to potential political pathways that are just now beginning to emerge.
Our first conversation took place at the Guardian office two weeks before the November 2006 election, when it was starting to look like Nancy Pelosi had a good shot at becoming speaker of the House of Representatives.
“I think this election in two weeks is going to be really interesting,” Hellman told us.
This Republican was cheering for the Democrats to win. “They aren’t my kind of Republicans,” he said of the people in power. Hellman didn’t support the war or approve of how the Bush administration sold it, and he wanted Pelosi and the Democrats to hold someone accountable.
“What I’d like her to do is admit that we can’t get out [of Iraq immediately], but start to talk about what the fallout has been. Discuss the enormous cost in human life as well as money, and how it’s possible the war united the Middle East against us,” Hellman said.
The one thing he can’t abide is disingenuousness. Hellman speaks plainly and honestly, and he asked us to keep particularly caustic comments off the record only a few times during almost six hours’ worth of interviews. He was self-effacing about his political knowledge and seemed most interested in working through the problems of the day with people of goodwill.
Asked what he values most in the people he deals with, Hellman said, “It’s authenticity. Do they believe things because they believe in them, or do they believe in things because they’re cynical or they’re just trying to gain something?”
Locally, Hellman has reached out to people with varying worldviews and come to count many friends among those who regularly battle against downtown.
“I love to know people,” he said. “That’s probably the single thing that motivates me. When someone says to me, ‘How can you be friends with [then–head of SEIU Local 790] Josie Mooney?’ I say, ‘Look, I want to know Josie Mooney. And if she’s awful, then we won’t be friends.’ I’m just fascinated by getting to know people. And virtually always, they’re a little like Wagner operas: they’re better than they sound.”
Hellman was the chair of the Committee on Jobs when he got to know Mooney, who chaired the San Francisco Labor Council and was a natural political adversary for the pro-business group, particularly when Hellman was leading the fight to do away with the city’s gross receipts tax, which has proved to be costly for the city and a boon for downtown.
But after that victory, Hellman turned around and cochaired a campaign with Mooney to retool and reinstate the gross receipts tax in a way that he believed was more fair and helped restore the lost revenue to the city.
“We lost, but he put $100,000 of his own money into that campaign,” Mooney told us, noting that the proposed tax would have cost Hellman and Friedman around $70,000 a year. “I think he just thought the city needed the money. It was a substantive point of view, not a political point of view.”
Mooney considers Hellman both a friend and “an extraordinary human being…. He has made a huge contribution to San Franciscans that doesn’t relate to ideological issues. A tremendous thing about Warren is he’s not ideological, even in his political point of view…. On politics, I’d say he is becoming more progressive as he understands the issues that confront ordinary people.”
Mooney is one of the people who have helped bring him that awareness. When they first met, Mooney said, Hellman told her, “You’re the first union boss I ever met.” That might have been an epithet coming from some CEOs, but Hellman had a genuine interest in understanding her perspective and working with her.
“In a sense, I think that was a very good era in terms of cooperation between the Committee on Jobs and other elements of the city,” Hellman said. “Josie and I had already met, and we’d established this kind of logic where 80 percent of what we both want for the city we agree on, and 20 percent [of the time, we agree to disagree].”
Committee on Jobs executive director Nathan Nayman — who called Hellman “one of my favorite people in the world” — told us that Hellman feels more free than many executives to be his own person.
“He’s not with a publicly held company, and he doesn’t have to answer to shareholders,” Nayman said. “He takes a position and lives by his word. You don’t see many people like him in his income bracket.”
Hellman has become a trusted hub for San Franciscans of all political persuasions, Nayman said, “because he’s very genuine. He’s fully transparent in a city that likes to praise itself for transparency. What you see is what you get.”
Hellman expects the same from others, which is why he walked away from SFSOS (and convinced Feinstein to bolt as well) in disgust over Randlett’s scorched-earth style. Among other efforts, SFSOS was responsible for below-the-belt attacks on Sups. Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval (whom a mailer inaccurately accused of anti-Semitism).
“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman said. “SFSOS started doing the opposite of what I thought they would be doing, so it was fairly easy for me to part company with them. What I thought we were doing is trying to figure out ways to make the city better, not just being an antagonistic, nay-saying attack organization. I’m not a huge fan of Gerardo Sandoval, but I thought the attacks on him were beyond anything I could imagine ever being in favor of myself. And it was a series of things like that, and I said I don’t want anything more to do with this.”
Downtown, they’re not always quite sure what to make of Hellman.
“Every once in a while, he does things that irritate people who are ideologically conservative,” Mosher said. “He took an immense amount of heat for supporting the Reiner initiative [which would have taxed the rich to fund universal preschool].”
He’s given countless hours and untold riches to public schools, doing everything from endowing programs to knocking on doors in support of bond measures and often pushing his colleagues to do the same.
“My connection to him has been through the school district, and he’s really been a prince,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said. “He has even stopped calling me antibusiness. He put a lot of his energy into improving public education, and so he shows it can be done.”
Progressives don’t always agree with Hellman, but they feel like they can trust him and even sometimes win him over. “If you get a relationship with him and you’re always honest about the facts and your own interests, he will listen, and that’s pretty remarkable,” Mooney said. “He shows a remarkable openness to people who have good ideas.”
His appreciation for people of all stripes often causes him to reject the conventional wisdom of his downtown allies, who viciously attacked the Green Party members of the Board of Education a few years ago.
“Everybody said, ‘Oh my god, Sarah Lipson, you know, she’s a Green Party member, she’s the furthest left-wing person on the board,’ blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And I phoned her up one day and said, ‘I’d really like to meet you.’ And she’s — leave aside the fact that I think she’s a very good person as a human being, but she’s a very thoughtful, analytic person. Listening to her opinions about things that are happening in the school district, I really respect that. I mean, what do I know about what’s going on in the school district? I know more now than I did then. But just getting to know people, and maybe get them to understand my point of view, which isn’t that penetrating.”
Many of his efforts have received little publicity, as when he saved the Great American Music Hall from closure by investing with Slim’s owner Boz Scaggs and helping him buy the troubled musical venue. “There are things that you and I don’t even have a clue that he has done,” Nayman said.
“He’s an interesting guy,” Mosher said. “He’s one of a dying breed, a liberal Republican. He has a social conscience and wants to use his money to do good.”
Actually, calling Hellman liberal might be going too far. In the end, he’s still very much a fiscal conservative. He doesn’t support rent control, district elections for the Board of Supervisors, taxing businesses to address social problems such as the lack of affordable health care, or limits on condo conversions.
He also opposes the requirement that employers provide health care coverage, which downtown entities are now suing the city to overturn, telling us, “In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea, because I’m still, even in my aging years, a believer that the marketplace works better than other things…. Universal health care I do believe in, but what I worry is that it’s going to be another damned bureaucracy and that it’s not going to work.”
Yet he doesn’t believe wealth is an indicator of worth, saying of his fortune, “It is luck. Most of what you do you aren’t better at than everyone.”
He doesn’t believe in the law of the jungle, in which the poor and weak must be sacrificed in the name of progress. In fact, he feels a strong obligation to the masses.
As he told us, “My mantra for capitalism — and I didn’t invent this, but I think it’s pretty good — is that capitalism won, and now we need to save the world from capitalism.”
Hellman looms large over downtown San Francisco. His Financial District office offers a panoramic view of the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, the Ferry Building, and the rest of the city’s waterfront. He likes to be personally involved with his city and the companies in which Hellman and Friedman invests.
“Usually I’m directly involved,” he told us in an interview earlier this year. “I’ve always said that I don’t like to go to the racetrack to just look at the horses. The fun of being a principal is that you’re standing at the track and not saying, ‘Gee, that’s a beautiful gray horse.’ You’re saying, ‘Come on, he’s got to win!’ So I’m almost always invariably invested in the companies that we work with, either individually or through the firm.”
Unlike many Wall Street barons who strive to control a company and bring in new executives, flip it for a quick profit, or liquidate it, Hellman said his firm tries to identify solid companies and help facilitate what they do. “We don’t usually take over companies. I always think that we provide a service to help the businesses,” he said. “Our job is kind of the opposite of owning a factory. Our job is to be sure the people who run the business feel like it’s their business.”
Similarly, he thinks capitalists need to feel a sense of ownership over society’s problems, something he thinks is taking root in San Francisco and other economic centers, particularly among the younger generations. “It’s about understanding how much suffering there is on the other side and trying to figure out how that suffering can be alleviated,” he said. “I think it’s partly good economics that as you bring people up, they’re able to do more for society. If nothing else, they’re able to buy more and shop at a Wal-Mart or something — probably someplace you would wildly disapprove of — and buy goods and services. But I don’t think it’s that narrow.”
Rather, he believes that everyone has a little progressive in them, a little desire to cooperatively solve our collective problems rather than pass them off to future generations. He sees a marked change from his days at Lehman Bros.
“Everybody was into making it,” he said, noting that many capitalists then did charity work as a means of attaining social status but focused mostly on the accumulation of wealth. But, he said, the new generation of capitalists seems genuinely interested in improving the world.
“The feeling for giving back in the next generation, in the now 25- to 35-year-olds, it’s just an order-of-magnitude difference than it was for people who are now in their 40s and early 50s,” Hellman said. “I’m very encouraged.”
Yet the flip side is that, in Hellman’s view, downtown doesn’t wield as much power as it once did. Low political contribution limits have made politicians less dependent on downtown money, creating fewer shot callers, while democratizing tools such as the Internet have broadened the political dialogue.
“For the last 30 years we have become an increasingly tolerant city, and that’s great,” he said. “In the old days, [the Guardian] complained about downtown, and yeah, no shit, downtown really did control the city. The benefit was as that slipped away, the city became fairer and more open to argument. So now downtown hardly has any power at all anymore. In a sense, that’s a good thing. Tolerance grew tremendously when the city wasn’t dictated to.”
That tolerance caused street fairs to pop up all over town and festivals such as Hellman’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass to blossom in Golden Gate Park. Bike lanes have taken space from cars, events such as Halloween in the Castro have gotten crazier, street protests have gotten bigger and more frequent, and people have felt more free to fly their freak flags. And all that freedom eventually triggered a backlash from groups of isolated NIMBYs who complain and often find sympathetic ears at city hall.
“Sometimes you get the feeling in this city that in the land of the tolerant, the intolerant are king,” said Hellman, whose festival has endured noise complaints even though the music is shut off by 7 p.m. “There is a continuing pressure to do away with fun, because fun is objectionable to someone, [but] we need to think about not creating a new dictatorship of a tiny group of people whose views are not in line with the opinion of most of the people of San Francisco…. You should try to balance the good of a lot of people versus the temporary annoyance of a few people.”
Preserving fun and a lively urban culture is a personal issue for Hellman, who plays the five-string banjo and calls his festival “the most enjoyable two days of the year for me.” He helps draw the biggest names in bluegrass music and acts like a kid in a candy shop during the event.
“I feel very strongly that an important part of our culture is built on the type of music and type of performance that goes on at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass,” Hellman said. From parables set to music to songs of struggle and the old union standards, “that kind of music is the conscience of our country.”
He considers bluegrass a vital and historically important form of political communication, more so than many of the upscale art forms that the rich tend to sponsor. “I’m glad that we have first-rate opera, but it’s equally important that we foster the kind of music, lyrics, etc., that support all this,” he said. “Somebody once said that most of the great Western philosophy is buried in the words of country songs. And that’s closer to the truth than most people think. A big passion of mine is to try to help — and people have defined it too narrowly — the kinds of music that I think have a hell of a lot to do with the good parts of our society.”
Perhaps surprisingly for a Republican venture capitalist from the older generation, Hellman also considers the countercultural freaks of San Francisco to be some of the “good parts of our society.” That’s why he attended Burning Man for the first time last year and why, he said, he loved it, as much for the culture and community as for the art.
“I went to Burning Man because as much as possible I want to experience everything,” he said. “I want to just see directly what it’s like. I knew I’d enjoy it. I never doubted that. But what really overwhelmed me is it was 40,000 people getting along with each other. I mean, it’s pretty intense. There were dust storms and the world’s most repulsive sight: nude men over 70 just dangling along. But I never saw an argument. It was 40,000 people just enjoying each other.”
It was most striking to Hellman because of the contrast with the rest of society. As he said, “I’ve never seen this country so divided.”
While Hellman supports Schwarzenegger — calling him “a good advertisement to California” — he has nothing good to say about his fellow Republican in the Oval Office. He calls Bush’s tenure “an absolute four-star disaster.” The invasion of Iraq is the most obvious problem, he said. “Our war policy has slowly veered from being ‘Don’t tread on me’ to we’re going to jump on your neck.”
But his antipathy to certain aspects of the Republican Party began even earlier, when the religious right began to take over.
“I thought we were not that polarized during the Clinton administration. I was somewhat encouraged,” Hellman said. “Maybe there was an undercurrent of strident religious behavior or strident conservatism, but not the conservatism that I think the Republican Party used to stand for, which was fiscal conservatism instead of social conservatism. Somehow, there was this angst in this country on the part of religious people who I guess felt this country was being taken away from them, and they were the kind of stalwart or underpinnings of society. And they took it back.”
But in the wake of that disaster, Hellman thinks, there is an opportunity for reasonable people of goodwill to set the future political course. As Nayman said of Hellman, “He does believe there is a middle way pretty much all the time.”
Politically, that’s why Hellman gravitates toward the moderates of both major parties, such as Schwarzenegger and Newsom. He looks for people who will marry his economic conservatism with a regard for things such as environmentalism and social justice.
“It’s very tough to be a big-city mayor,” Hellman said. “[Newsom is] probably the best mayor we’re entitled to. He’s got this fantastic balancing act.”
Hellman said downtown hasn’t been terribly happy with Newsom for supporting striking hotel workers, getting behind Ammiano’s health insurance mandate, supporting tax measures, and generally letting the Board of Supervisors set the city’s agenda for the past two years.
“Their measure is he has 80-percent-plus popularity, and he ought to spend some of it. Well, they might not agree with what he would spend it on. And he’s been unwilling to spend very much of it. In some parts of the business community there is disappointment with him, but I don’t think that’s right. He didn’t hide what he would be like.”
What Newsom said he would be — a big reason for his popularity — is a mayor for the new San Francisco, a place where the city’s traditional economic conservatism has been tempered by a greater democratization of power and an ascendant progressive movement that expects its issues to be addressed.
“I don’t like people who are intolerant,” Hellman said. “I don’t like people that are telling you something to get some outcome that, if you understood it, you probably wouldn’t want. I like people that are passionate.”
Asked, then, about Sup. Chris Daly, the nemesis of downtown and most definitely a man of strong political passions, he said, “I admire Chris Daly. I disagree with Chris on a lot of things he believes, but there are also probably a lot of things I would agree with Chris on. And I respect him.”
Hellman is the rare downtown power broker who wants to bridge the gap between Newsom — whom he calls a “moderate to conservative establishment person” — and progressives such as Daly, Mooney, and the Bicycle Coalition. The middle ground, he said, is often a very attractive place, as it was with Healthy Saturdays.
“I’m sure you spend time in the park on Sunday, and it’s a hell of a lot nicer in there on Sundays than Saturdays,” Hellman said. But even more important to him, this is about integrity and being true to what Golden Gate Park garage supporters promised back in 2000.
“They were proposing Saturday closing at that time, which I’ve always thought was a good idea,” he said. “And we made a commitment to them, or I thought we made a commitment to them, that let’s not have Saturday closure now, but as soon as the garage was done, we’d experiment with Saturday closure.”
We brought up what Fine Arts Museums board president Dede Wilsey has said of that pledge, that it was under different circumstances and that she never actually promised to support Saturday closure after the garage was completed.
“There’s a letter. She put it in writing,” he said of Wilsey. “She signed a letter on behalf of the museums saying that when the de Young is done, we should experiment with Saturday closings.”
The Bike Coalition’s Shahum said that even when Hellman was an enemy, he was a reasonable guy. But it’s in the past couple of years that she’s really come to appreciate the unique role he plays in San Francisco.
“He showed decency and respect toward us,” she said. “We never saw him as a villain, even though we disagreed completely. Later he really stepped up and has been a leader on Healthy Saturdays. And what I was most impressed with is that he was true to his word.”
Supervisor McGoldrick, who sponsored the measure, echoed the sentiment: “Hellman was certainly a man of his word who acted in a highly principled way.”
So why does Hellman now stand apart from the downtown crowd? Has he parted ways with the economic and cultural power brokers who were once his allies?
No, he said, “I think they parted ways with me.” *
For the owners of the Hole in the Wall Saloon, the plan was simple: move their popular South of Market gay bar out of its dingy and dilapidated quarters to a much better spot around the corner. With numerous bars and nightclubs already along the stretch once known as the gay miracle mile, they assumed their place would fit right in.
But SoMa is changing — and the bar’s new neighbors in the increasingly residential district are using every regulatory trick in the book to block the move. Another bar, they say, is one too many.
The Hole in the Wall’s current location on Eighth Street frequently lives up to the place’s modest-sounding name. The plumbing stops up. The patched floor sags in places. And the bar tilts at an unnatural angle. Co-owners Joe Banks and John Gardiner, who are life as well as business partners, spent years seeking a new space for their eclectic, art-filled taproom. Last year they thought they had found an ideal spot a block and a half away on Folsom, between Dore and 10th streets.
At today’s prices, the building was a bargain — only $1.2 million. After making sure that the space, a former dance studio, was zoned to allow for a bar, Banks and Gardiner hired a local design-build firm to renovate the building. They hoped to open the new location by April 15, the bar’s 13th anniversary.
Now they just hope to open.
In early December project manager Jeff Matt was working on the build-out of the new space when a man named Jim Meko stopped by and asked him to give a letter to the owners. The letter, obtained by the Guardian, is on letterhead for the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force. The task force, which Meko chairs, is advising the Planning Department on a new zoning plan for South of Market.
The letter was a copy of a five-month-old missive Meko had addressed to the real estate agent representing the building’s sellers. It warns that if the property were sold to someone who wanted to open a bar, the buyers could face "obstacles" such as protests to the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and petitions to the Planning Commission.
Silvana Messing, the agent to whom the letter is addressed, told us she never received it. The agent representing Gardiner and Banks as buyers, who asked not to be identified by name, claims he didn’t see the letter either. But if he had gotten it before the sale, he said, "I probably would have advised [Gardiner and Banks] not to buy the place."
Meko, who lives around the corner from the Hole in the Wall’s new location, told us Banks and Gardiner "tend to live right on the edge of the law" as bar owners. He charged that the place used DJs without the proper entertainment permits and that there have been reports of drug dealing and nudity on the bar’s premises.
Gardiner admitted that he and Banks have employed DJs in the past but says they did not know that a DJ requires a special permit: "We thought an entertainment license was for places with live bands…. When we found out, we stopped it." Banks and Gardiner denied that drug dealing takes place at the bar. As for nudity, several Hole in the Wall regulars recalled a time in the mid-’90s when patrons occasionally drank in the buff, but they told us such behavior died down long ago.
Officer Rose Meyer, the San Francisco Police Department’s permit officer at Southern Station, gave the bar and its owners glowing reviews. Referring to Gardiner in particular, Meyer told us, "Southern Station would have no objection to him operating [at the new location]. I don’t foresee there being any problems."
"He has always been responsible" in the past, she said.
Meko claims the letter wasn’t meant to stir up opposition to the bar’s move. Instead, he said, he was simply trying to warn Gardiner and Banks about the simmering antinightlife attitude among SoMa residents. "It’s real precarious," Meko said. "Neighbors just rise up. They become real irrational…. They can go crazy."
When 10th Street resident Damien Ochoa received notice from the Planning Department about the new bar in early January, he didn’t rise up — at least at first. But given that his bedroom window is less than 50 feet from the bar’s back smoking area, he was concerned. As a result, he said by phone, he "started to do a little bit of research about the owners." In the course of his research, he got in touch with Meko.
Ochoa said Meko informed him that "they’re potentially not good neighbors." After a neighborhood meeting, Ochoa, Meko, and several other residents pitched in money to file a petition in Ochoa’s name asking the Planning Commission to look at the project under its power of discretionary review. Other neighbors lodged protests with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Within weeks all of Meko’s warnings to the real estate agent had come true.
As a result, work on the new bar is at a standstill. It cannot begin again until the protests work their way through hearings and appeals. It could be many months until the outcome is decided. Banks and Gardiner say they have staked their financial future on the new bar, with tens of thousands of dollars in construction loans set to come due before the end of the year. Without any income from the new location, they might not be able to stay afloat.
Banks told us the opposition to the bar’s move came as a complete surprise. The Hole in the Wall, he said, is "a place where everybody’s welcome. It’s a gay bar, but everybody’s welcome." To try to resolve the dispute, Banks and Gardiner hired Jeremy Paul, an experienced permit expediter, to shepherd the project through the regulatory process and to negotiate with Meko and the neighbors. The two sides are currently in talks about enclosing the back smoking area, a change that could cost more than $100,000. Paul expressed guarded optimism that the project will eventually go forward, but he told us the rancor over the new saloon is an example of "the identity crisis" San Francisco is going through.
"The Hole in the Wall relocation is a case study in how dysfunctional this system is," Paul said. Zoning in the area allows for a bar, he said, "and if these people don’t want to live in a bar district, they should check the zoning where they’re buying a house or renting an apartment" before moving there.
Paul added that if the residents are dead set against any new bars on their block, they should work to change the zoning.
The task force Meko chairs is at work on a new zoning plan for the area, which it will eventually present to the Planning Department. Some nightlife supporters worry that the goal may be a more residential neighborhood with no room for more bars.
Meko and Ochoa strongly deny that Meko is behind the residents’ actions. "I’m a neighbor," Meko told us, claiming that he is simply working with other neighbors to prevent the noise, smoke, and litter that could accompany the bar. As for the task force’s work, Meko said he is actually trying to bring more nightlife into SoMa, but only in appropriate areas with adequate "buffers" for the residents.
"I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life trying to broker peace between" bar owners and neighbors, he asserted. He noted that the Entertainment Commission, on which he also sits, is working to clarify permit rules for clubs and bars.
John Wood, a member of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition, said the neighbors "have reasonable concerns" about the new bar but those concerns "are being overblown." Wood noted that the bar is only rated for 49 patrons at a time and that by agreeing to soundproof the building and possibly enclose the back patio, the owners have been very accommodating. "Even nightclubs don’t go through those kinds of measures," he said.
Banks told us he and Gardiner desperately want to resolve the situation. "We’re willing to do anything within our financial means," he said. "We want to save it. The Hole in the Wall is our baby." *
Sometimes you get lucky. Every week I have to find a picture to run in the club guide, and one week I picked Low Red Land. They later sent me a self-released 2006 CD titled The Weight of Nations. The disc stayed in my truck’s deck for a week.
The trio of 26-year-olds — Mark Devito on drums, Ben Thorne on bass, and Neil Thompson on guitar and vocals — is also no stranger to intuition. Having met at Hamilton College in New York, they’d originally been a four-piece called Great American with another college buddy, Matthew Stringer. After graduating, the four moved to Boston, where they put out a self-titled, self-released EP and album. When Stringer left to go to med school, the rest of the bandmates knew they wanted to continue playing and move to San Francisco. They renamed themselves Low Red Land after a lyric in a Larry Jon Wilson song, "Ohoopee River Bottom Land."
The moniker is fittingly evocative: it speaks of the sage-and-sand-filled expanses of their journey west, of red dirt cliffs and winding rivers. This unexpectedly rangy, Western feeling fills The Weight of Nations, though being from the "totally podunk" coal-mining town of Shickshinny, Pa., Thompson can assure you that the East can be just as country as anywhere else.
While the album is "intensely personal" for Thompson, it also contains subtly penned protest songs in the fine though rare tradition of Woody Guthrie’s "This Land Is Your Land." "You’re Alive" is about the death of Thompson’s childhood friend, Michael Cleary, a first lieutenant in the Army, in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. And for me, that’s the key to The Weight of Nations: the protests are personal, soaked in sadness, and set against the American tapestry in a way that calls to mind the poetic scope of Hart Crane’s The Bridge. It’s easy to see why the group has been likened to Crazy Horse, though I’d pick Creedence Clearwater Revival meets the Meat Puppets. "As long as the bands aren’t bad, I’m pretty psyched," Thompson says of these comparisons. "Somebody said we sound like the Dave Matthews Band. I was bummed out for the whole day." (Duncan Scott Davidson)
LOW RED LAND
Wed/11, 9 p.m., donation to AIDS Marathon accepted
SONIC REDUCER Whinny, moan, or emote weakly, if you will, at the prospect of so many bland acoustic guitars — singer-songwriters have it rough, warbling softly alone on a big stage, so often the first to get slapped with the "you suck" stick. The worst scenario is too easy to picture: cliché love ballads about the lady or lad up front with the wine spritzer, uncompelling bellyaching about dead pets, lame chord progressions, an unexamined affection for James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel. You’ve got a friend — who wears khakis. So consider it a good fight when singer-songwriters and those who love themwanna bust the stereotypically sensitive mold à la Jay Farrar, Britt Govea, and Marc Snegg. The last started Nevada City’s Grass Roots Records and is sincerely trying to shine a light on songsmiths succored by the rocky, roaring shores of the sweet South Yuba River with, this week, a traveling songwriters revue including Mariee Sioux, Lee Bob Watson, Alela Diane, and Casual Fog.
Can one expect thin song stylings from clotted brains? "That’s not what’s going to be going on at our show!" Snegg protests on the horn from up north. "Each of these songwriters has strong songs, though I guess singer-songwriters sort of get a bad rap.
"The original thing came up because I’m looking around and seeing what’s happening here, what people are doing anyways. I’m trying to congeal and coalesce it into a thing that’s a tour or a record, something that’s a lasting picture of a moment."
You can’t blame the dude, with all the talent pouring out around his hometown, from Joanna Newsom and Noah Georgeson to Hella and the Advantage, many of whom are not only solo artists but bandleaders as well, as Snegg puts it. The ex–UC Berkeley art major heads his own Sneggband, has already had Watson and Hella vocalist Aaron Ross into Dana Gumbiner’s Brighton Sound studio for new albums, and plans to pull in Sioux by April. His latest project: partnering with Nevada City promoters to bring touring and Bay Area bands to the town.
FOLK YOU Snegg isn’t the only wild-eyed seer bringing together two different NorCal scenes with, in his words, "musical momentum" and a few acoustic guitars. Folk Yeah Presents’ Govea has been putting on quiet and increasingly louder shows at Big Sur’s leafy Fernwood Resort and the woody Henry Miller Library for the past two years. The Crime in Choir performance on March 24 laid the heavy down at the first show of the ’07 season, continuing the move toward the harder psych-rock that closed the series last year. "I didn’t want to barge into Big Sur making a big ruckus, but as it turns out, the locals really like to head-bang," the Monterey promoter says as he hurtles down the coast, promising a pair of Chris Robinson shows and a big outdoors bash with as yet unnamed German electronic artists. He’s also folked up about a Mt. Tam performance around the time of Monterey Pop’s 40th anniversary, a very rad, free Earth Day concert at the Henry Miller Library on April 22, and more shows in "exotic" locales closer to San Francisco, including his first in the city with Howlin Rain and a Mission Creek Music Festival night that should have Red Hash heads humming.
"What keeps it unique is the marriage of LA and San Francisco that comes — an interesting mix. The metaphysical fight goes back to Laurel Canyon and Haight Ashbury, but once everyone gets to Big Sur, it’s nothing but hugs. And other things," Govea adds merrily before breaking up amid the pine needles.
FARRAR OUT Also unfurling a louder, prouder sound is Farrar, who’s been working the other side of the folk acoustic spectrum and mining a kind of Midwestern country-soul for years, in Uncle Tupelo and solo and now once again with Son Volt. The band he cultivated while former UT cosongwriter Jeff Tweedy nurtured his Wilco has birthed an admirably multitextured new CD, The Search (Sony/BMG), full of songs seeking insight amid post-9/11 wartime ("The Picture"), soullessness ("Automatic Society"), drugs ("Methamphetamine"), and other trad forms of escape ("Highways and Cigarettes").
"I probably read too much current events in the paper," Farrar, 40, says from St. Louis. "And some of those topical issues do find a way into the writing. ‘The Picture’ is a song like that. There’s a line — ‘War is profit / Profit is war,’ and that’s kind of being borne out by companies like Haliburton moving to the Middle East where the money is being made."
The title song seemed to best tie together his thoughts about this moment. "I mean, I didn’t want to call it Methamphetamine!" he says, gracefully allowing that, yup, Uncle Tupelo once lived together, subsisting on ramen, and contrary to rumor, their house did not have dirt floors.
Farrar isn’t working "Handy Man" territory yet, but it’s safe to say his partying days are behind him. He’s currently reading S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, about the band’s somewhat infamous 1972 tour, though not for inspiration for his own travels. "Heh-heh, it can definitely be used as a reference point. I think most people who have done as much touring as I have tend to get that out of the way the first couple years. Eventually, you find rhythm that works."
What’s working for him now is playing with a band, a new lineup that includes keyboardist Derry deBorja, who can replicate everything from a banjo to a flute. "I guess having a band," Farrar says with no little irony, "is the one true way to make sure that no one mistakes you for someone that came from American Idol." *
GRASS ROOTS RECORD CO. SONGWRITERS REVUE
Fri/30, 7 p.m., $5 suggested donation
Mama Buzz
2318 Telegraph, Oakl.
(510) 465-4073
DEAD MEADOW
With Spindrift and Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound
The Iraq War turned four years old March 19, but so did the antiwar movement, and thousands of people marked the event with protests, rallies, and direct actions around the Bay Area.
The largest event was the March 18 march on Market Street, led by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition, one of more than 1,000 rallies around the country. The protesters marched under a "No Blood for Oil" banner, "Impeach" signs donated by Working Assets, and Whole Earth flags that fluttered in the westerly wind funneling down San Francisco’s main drag. The Chronicle estimated the crowd at 3,000; ANSWER claimed it was 40,000. We estimated the march at 10,000 strong.
Education seemed to be the point protesters were driving home, as if the knowledge of the war’s injustices would reverberate like the chanting voices against the walls of the Financial District and into the minds of the children who wandered through the crowds of thousands.
"Will this stop the war May First?" Glenn Borchardt asked. "No, but it will stop it some day."
Sandee Dickson, a retired teacher, was with about 50 other purple-shirted Democrats of Napa Valley and said she was protesting "to keep it on the front page."
"There are all sorts of people here, from all walks of life, sending the message that American people say, ‘No more war.’ "
More than 40 cops watched the chanting crowd from their post, leaning against the front of the Westfield shopping center, guarding the commerce. "A couple of years ago a couple windows got smashed," one of the police officers said to the Guardian. "I guess they’re pretty expensive."
The crowd was pretty tame, though, and there were no arrests. There seemed to be just as many baby strollers in the crowd as people marching alongside them. Balloons bounced from the wrists of children, and a Girl Scout was making a killing selling cookies off the back of her Radio Flyer wagon for $3.50 a box.
Captain Denis O’Leary from Southern Station said there were about 270 officers on patrol, plus additional platoons of traffic and tactical officers, prepared for violence he wasn’t really anticipating.
"They might get arrested," he said, gesturing to some anarchists waving red and black flags at the edge of Larkin Street. A cop in this city for 25 years, O’Leary has responded to many demonstrations of all sizes and flavors and thinks they’ve changed a lot over the years. He mentioned the 1989 protest outside the Westin St. Francis against the first President George Bush. "That was an angry tone, it was massive, and there were arrests."
When asked if he looks at the crowd and worries about the safety of all the children who could get caught up in a sudden action, he said, "Yes, because my daughter is out there." He said she’s 15.
Sue Martin was marching with her son, Sean Martin-Hamburger. For his first protest, the eight-year-old had made a colorful cardboard sign that read, "Have some peace in your heart." He was too shy to say much to us, but his mom was less reticent: "We’re demonstrating because we don’t want to see any more violence, anywhere actually."
Though it was Sean’s first march on Market, his mother has been protesting for 35 years and agreed the age range was one of the big differences, as was the energy. "It feels more creative and less angry, like we’re starting to embody the peace and not respond to the violence with violence. It doesn’t feel vengeful, but maybe I’m just getting older."
On March 19, there were some people willing to face off with the police at a die-in. Hundreds of protesters lay down on the sidewalks and in the streets of downtown San Francisco, representing the 3,200 American soldiers and the estimated 160,000 Iraqi civilians who have died in the past four years. A helicopter whirring overhead and the corpses under blood-spattered sheets gave the direct action an eerie Vietnam feel, but there seemed to be more cops than corpses. They got something to do when 57 protesters became the walking dead, rising up from the sidewalk and dying again in Market Street traffic, disrupting the flow of daily life and garnering some misdemeanor charges.
Across the bay, 14 people also prepared for arrests, locking themselves into a human chain across the entrance to Chevron’s corporate headquarters in San Ramon. For the third time in four years, more than 100 representatives from Bay Rising, US Labor Against War, Amazon Watch, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered to speak against the other axis of evil: oil, profits, and war.
"Under the new Iraqi Oil Law, Chevron is standing to directly benefit from a law that comes from Bush. Two-thirds of [Iraq] oil will be owned by foreign companies," Sam Edmondson of Bay Rising said. "The fear is that US troops will be used to secure that oil."
Back in San Francisco, in front of the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, "Stop Funding the War" called on the woman who controls the purse strings to tighten them.
A few hundred people gathered outside the Federal Building to hear veterans, mothers of soldiers, local progressives, and city officials, such as Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who’s authored local resolutions against the war.
"I think [Pelosi] should be lining up votes to cut off funding for the war," former supervisor and 2003mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales said. "If they cut off money, there’d be an interesting crisis."
Former congressional candidate Krissy Keefer was there as well. When asked where she’d be if she’d been voted into Pelosi’s seat, she said, "I would be here to provide leadership to San Francisco. San Francisco is really, really important, and we need to constantly reinforce the position that we play. The middle-of-the-road position that Pelosi takes squashes the best intentions of the Democratic Party." *
Sam Devine and Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.
EDITORIAL On Jan. 12, a couple months shy of the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and put to rest any question of whether the conflict in that country can be declared a civil war:
"We face, in essence, four different wars," he said. "The war of Shia on Shia, principally in the south; sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad and the environs of Baghdad; third, a Baathist insurgency; and fourth, al-Qaeda."
The Pentagon made it official March 14, when a report declared that "in some ways" Iraq is in the throes of a civil war. The report also noted that October through December 2006 was the most violent three-month period since 2003.
The carnage is horrible: more than 3,000 US troops have been killed. The United Nations, according to Reuters, says some 34,500 civilians were killed in 2006 alone. About 2 million Iraqis have fled abroad, and another 1.7 million have moved elsewhere in Iraq to escape violence and sectarian cleansing.
The cost is spectacular and almost unfathomably tragic: more than $400 billion so far. The money that San Francisco alone has spent on the war could have paid for 12,000 affordable housing units, the National Priorities Project estimates. All of that money has come in special supplemental budget requests, so it hasn’t been a part of any rational budget discussion.
And yet while the Democrats have offered an alternative plan to withdraw from Iraq, party leaders are still refusing to do what Congress has every right to do: demand that no more money be spent on combat operations in Iraq, set a timetable for pulling out the last troops — and specify that not a single dollar will be spent on anything except safely removing US personnel.
Hillary Clinton, by many accounts the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, even said last week that she thinks the United States will have a military presence in Iraq for years to come.
The opposition party has to do better than that.
Seventy percent of Americans oppose the war. The allies are getting ready to bail: Prime Minister Tony Blair just announced the British have set a timetable for withdrawing troops. The protests in the streets during the past few days should be a signal to Rep. Nancy Pelosi: Congress can’t pass nonbinding resolutions and come up with plans that the president can simply veto. George W. Bush has no intention of listening to what the public wants. In a March 19 speech he proclaimed that "the fight is difficult, but it can be won." Translation: the war will continue as long as Bush is in office — unless Congress forces him to stop it. And the only way to do that is to cut off funding.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) has introduced legislation that would block further war spending but fully fund a deliberate withdrawal aimed at pulling the last US troops out by the end of this year. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) is a cosponsor. Pelosi needs to sign on and put the power of the new Democratic majority behind the only feasible plan to end what the New York Times is calling an "unnecessary, horribly botched and now unwinnable" war. *
Four years ago we shut down the city. None of us who were there will ever forget it: so many peaceful protesters showed up that the police had to close down Market Street. Mission Street was pretty much the same way. You couldn’t get anywhere downtown; nobody seemed to be at work. The police were, in more than a few instances, out of control — but there were no water cannons or rubber bullets, just a lot of arrests. Overall, it was a day of joy: the United States was going to war, and San Francisco would have no part of it.
The anniversary protests, while exuberant, weren’t quite that dramatic. I understand: it’s been a long, long war, and we’ve all be fighting for a long, long time, and things just seem to be getting worse. The antiwar movement, and the frustration of the nation at a conflict that has dragged on longer than US involvement in World War II, tossed the Republican majority out of both houses of Congress, but the Democrats are still talking about nonbinding resolutions and incremental plans that can’t be backed up. The war seems to be without end. Even the New York Times, that voice of mainstream moderation, is starting to sound pissed off: the March 18 lead editorial referred to "the unnecessary, horribly botched and now unwinnable war."
I know this doesn’t help the families of the more than 3,000 already dead soldiers or the tens of thousands more who are still stuck in a desert quagmire, but the good news is we’ve won the debate. Almost nobody running for president wants to say the war was a good idea, has been handled well, or ought to continue much longer. The only question on the table now is how best to get the hell out. And in the long term, this really has become the new Vietnam — just as the very name of that southeast Asian country struck fear in the hearts of American imperialists and military adventurists for a quarter century, the legacy of Iraq will almost certainly be stricter controls on the ability of rogue presidents to invade countries for their own geopolitical agendas.
So let’s keep the pressure on the likes of Nancy Pelosi (it’s so heartwarming to see protesters camped outside the house of the new House speaker — and it’s stunning that Pelosi has been such a jerk and refused to be civil to them). And take heart: we can still end this war — and go a long way toward preventing the next one.
And on a totally different note: I was somewhat amazed to see that the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group — the companies that own all the major newspapers in the central Bay Area — have come up with a new tactic to get rid of that pesky antitrust suit filed by Clint Reilly.
The suit charges that the deal giving two giant corporations control of so much of the region’s media will deprive readers of diverse viewpoints and advertisers of competitive alternatives. The evidence in favor of Reilly’s claim is pretty strong.
So now the newspaper barons are taking a new tack, arguing that Reilly has no standing to sue. He’s just one person; what’s the harm to him?
Well, gee, if one person who cares about the community has no standing to sue, who does? Hearst and MediaNews, I suspect, would like to leave that to the state and federal attorneys general. And look how that’s worked out. *
That’s the question ABC news is asking It’s always annoying when this sort of stuff comes from the mainstream media, which always tend to downplay the size of protests. (Note that the Chronicle ran a big story about pro-war demonstrators on Saturday).
But it’s absolutely true that there were fewer people on the streets this weekend than we saw four years ago, and that the crowd was mostly controlled and orderly. Even the die-in was fairly orderly, and the arrests went without incident.
I know there’s a lot of protest burnout going on, and people don’t feel like the White House cares. Which is absolutely true. But there’s also been a shift here: The battle has moved to Congress, and activists are putting pressure on everyone from Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership to the likes of Ellen Tauscher in the East Bay, who is almost certainly going to face a primary challenge over the war.
Remember: We have won the debate. Almost everyone agrees now that the war was a bad idea and has to end. Don’t get discouraged; keep up the pressure.
It was four years ago this March 19 that the United States invaded Iraq, triggering massive street protests in San Francisco and a widely criticized military occupation that has become one of the longest in US history.
The war has proved to be as bloody and shortsighted as its opponents always claimed it would be. More than 3,100 American soldiers have been killed, as have as many as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, with little hope of the violence abating anytime soon, despite President George W. Bush’s recent deployment of 21,500 more troops. The war has cost the United States about $400 billion so far, a price tag increasing by about $250 million every day of the occupation. And it has spurred anti-Americanism around the world.
Opinion polls show a strong majority in the United States favors immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a growing number of Democrats in Congress now appear to be moving in that direction. But antiwar activists are planning an escalation of their own, arguing that only through a ramped-up and more widely disseminated peace movement will this war come to an end.
To mark this inauspicious anniversary, United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest antiwar coalition, has issued a call for "a massive outpouring of opposition to the war in locally based, decentralized actions throughout the U.S." from March 17 to 19. It’s a clear departure from the peace movement’s norm of massive, centralized marches located in Washington, DC, New York, and San Francisco.
Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets of San Francisco on March 20, 2003, with more than 1,500 people arrested in civil disobedience actions that effectively shut down the city. Antiwar groups are still hoping for a big turnout in the city next week, even as they shift their strategy to include more of Middle America.
Instead of relying on charismatic visionaries, influential organizations, and hierarchical organizing in the big cities, the new strategy calls on citizens to take the initiative and organize — from Mobile, Ala., to Jonesboro, Ark., to Fayetteville, N.C. — and demonstrate a broad base of active opposition to the war.
"The resistance isn’t only in San Francisco," Jim Haber, a member of the steering committee for United for Peace and Justice Bay Area, told the Guardian. "Large demonstrations here get attributed to San Francisco being out of step with the rest of the country — although less so these days."
While it is important to have big showings, Haber said it’s also important to demonstrate that the opposition is widespread. "Rather than making people who want to protest come to us, we’re going to them — and they’re all over."
Several of the affinity groups that were instrumental in the shutdown of San Francisco four years ago are regrouping for a rally and nonviolent direct action at Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon.
"Four years ago we not only shut down San Francisco’s Financial District, we also shut down Chevron," Antonia Juhasz, one of the organizers and a Tarbell fellow with Oil Change International, told us. "Neither our message nor our tactics have changed."
The Iraqi parliament is set to pass a law that would transform Iraq’s nationalized oil system to a commercialized model, completely open to corporate pillaging, following the trail first blazed by the US-installed Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer. "The law is the brainchild of the Bush administration," Juhasz said. "Now is a particularly critical time to expose the oil agenda behind the war."
David Solnit, a longtime organizer and member of the Bay Rising affinity group, told us, "This is a similarly strategic moment for the antiwar movement to escalate. Hopes of getting the Democrats to do anything are fading. It’s up to us, and folks are hungry for taking direct action."
Just about everyone organizing for March 17 to 19 agrees that relying on the congressional Democrats to bring the troops home is an abysmal plan.
"We’re telling people to stop looking up and start looking around," Ben Rosen, youth organizer and media coordinator with World Can’t Wait, told us. "There is no Democratic savior here."
World Can’t Wait has allied with the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition to organize a massive march up Market Street to the Civic Center on March 18. ANSWER still favors centralized protests, including a massive march on the Pentagon.
"The real direction for this war is coming from the Pentagon," Richard Becker, ANSWER’s West Coast regional coordinator, told us. "A powerful march on the Pentagon would be the most significant thing that could happen right now."
Rosen agrees that centralized coordination is required to build a cohesive and powerful movement.
"They argue that marching in San Francisco is preaching to the choir," Rosen said. "But actually we’re setting an example for people in the middle of the country who look to San Francisco, New York, and DC as models."
Massive centralized marches have been the linchpin of this country’s peace movement, but many observers are questioning whether they are the most effective strategy.
"People say ‘the movement’s failed,’ " Becker said. "That’s an incorrect conclusion. Building a movement powerful enough to stop war when all the resources of the state are mobilized for it is very difficult."
Max Diorio, co–national coordinator of Not in Our Name, which has joined the ANSWER coalition organizing for March 18, agrees. "If San Francisco has a paltry march, what does that say about the rest of the country? It took 10 years from the first big mobilization against Vietnam to end that war. People are used to instant gratification in this country, but it takes a while. That’s why they call it a struggle."
On March 19 there will be a die-in on Market Street, also initiated by former members of Direct Action to Stop the War.
"The die-in will help to make personal the real cost of war in human lives," Suzanne Sam Joi, a coordinator for Codepink Bay Area, told us. "Too often we can forget that someone who was loved and treasured — a mother, a sister — their life has been destroyed."
In another national antiwar effort, UFPJ member group the Voices for Creative Nonviolence initiated the Occupation Project. Demonstrators have sat in at their legislators’ offices across the country, and 159 people have been arrested so far.
The shift in the UFPJ’s strategy — calling for decentralized, localized actions all over the country — is significant. Until Middle Americans stop looking east and west for models and start organizing themselves, their representatives can safely ignore calls to bring the troops home. *
Marisa Handler’s first book, Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist,chronicles her experiences in the global justice movement from Miami to Lima to Kathmandu.
