San Francisco Chronicle

What jobs?

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For all its shiny gadgets and gleaming new luxury condo towers, San Francisco nevertheless houses a huge demographic that lives at or below poverty.

Officially, it affects about 12 percent of the city’s population, according to the most recent US Census data. Experts from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality calculated an adjusted poverty figure to capture a more accurate portrait of economic disadvantage. According to that alternative yardstick, which factors in location-based costs such as the price of housing, a full 23.4 percent of San Franciscans live in poverty.

City agencies have documented ethnic identities, languages, neighborhoods of residence, and other data concerning poor people who seek assistance through city-administered services. But even though millions of dollars have flowed through city coffers to boost prospects for those who lack steady work, there’s scant documentation showing what this has actually achieved.

Despite budgeted expenditures totaling nearly $70 million for workforce development in 2013-14, not a single San Francisco city official can say how many individuals managed to rise above poverty as a result.

 

FIVE YEARS, NO IMPROVEMENT

At the behest of Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, the city’s Budget & Legislative Analyst recently analyzed the city’s myriad workforce development programs. It found that there is no standard measure to track the results of the programs, which are administered across 14 city departments.

The analysts recommended convening a committee to get a handle on it, “so there would be somebody accountable for compiling that information,” noted Severin Campbell, a principal at city budget analyst Harvey Rose Associates.

The analysis was a follow-up to a similar audit performed in 2007. The previous study concluded that the system to help struggling people obtain job skills and get hired “was fragmented, with inconsistent planning and coordination of resources and inadequate monitoring of programs to ensure that the programs’ goals and outcomes were achieved.”

Analysts who examined the workforce development system in 2007 discovered a lack of evidence that “individuals receiving services were eventually placed into jobs leading to economic self-sufficiency.”

To cure this dysfunction, the Board of Supervisors formulated a plan. In November 2007, it created Administrative Code Section 30, a new policy centralizing oversight of all workforce development initiatives under the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, overseen by the Mayor’s Office.

In 2007, OEWD’s annual budget for its workforce division was $547,841. By 2012-13, that amount had swelled to $19.3 million. The federal government contributes a lot, but citywide, about 65 percent of workforce development spending comes from local funds.

“Since 2007, the city has worked hard to incorporate the recommendations that came from the audit,” OEWD spokesperson Gloria Chan told the Bay Guardian earlier this year. She said the workforce division of OEWD “has made significant strides and progress to improve the city’s workforce system.”

But the latest Budget & Legislative Analyst report tells a different story. “The city continues to lack citywide policy and oversight of its workforce development system,” it notes. “Many of the key provisions of Administrative Code Section 30 have not been implemented.”

Five years have passed, and little seems to have changed. “We didn’t find a broken system,” Campbell said, “but it wasn’t what the city had envisioned.”

The report noted that the shortcomings could be partially attributed to constraints on funding provided by outside entities like the federal government, making collaboration among departments difficult.

Nevertheless, the lack of a cohesive citywide workforce development strategy coincided with one of the worst economic downturns in US history. While certain sectors have experienced recovery by now, many low-income San Franciscans are still grappling with losses sustained during the Great Recession.

A recent survey of panhandlers, commissioned by Union Square business owners, found that the majority were homeless individuals who said they didn’t have jobs, and thus couldn’t afford rent. Some apparently interpreted these findings as a revelation; the survey results were recently spotlighted on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

LOOKING FORWARD TO WHAT?

Tiffany Green is one of the 10,883 clients served by San Francisco’s workforce development system in 2012-13. She’d previously worked at the security desk of a Tenderloin services provider, but left that job because she couldn’t find anyone to look after her young son during her shifts — and the job didn’t pay enough to cover child care costs.

So she enrolled in CalWORKS, a state program administered by the city’s Human Services Agency, which offers subsidized child care, food stamps, and cash aid for low-income parents while they complete six-month job training gigs with employers who have partnerships with the city.

She was less than optimistic when asked if she thought it would lead to a steady job. “The outcome is going to be everybody else’s outcome, which is nothing to look forward to,” she said, adding that for all her friends and family members who’d completed similar six-month job training programs, she didn’t know of any who’d landed full-time jobs as a direct result.

Karl Kramer, director of the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition, said his organization has been working with city agencies to build pathways to help participants in the programs connect with opportunities for full-time employment in civil service positions.

His organization is pushing for legislation to reform one of those initiatives, the Community Jobs Program, “to make it a real job training program that fast tracks participants into available entry-level city jobs. The reports that we get is, for people who have been through the programs, it leads to very few full-time jobs,” Kramer said. So far, his group hasn’t gotten much traction with city officials.

Steve Arcelona, deputy director in charge of Economic Support and Self-Sufficiency at the Human Services Agency, didn’t respond to multiple voicemails seeking comment.

 

UNEVEN RECOVERY

The report comes at an odd time — in San Francisco’s current economic climate, new jobs are being created all the time, and the unemployment rate has declined. But experts note that recovery has been uneven, and only certain sectors have reason to be optimistic about the future.

“The San Francisco region is doing better than most,” Chris Haney, executive director of the California Budget Project, told us.

The city boasts a rise in “high-scale, high-production, better paying jobs” in the flourishing tech sector, accompanied by a rise in “lower-paying service jobs,” he said. “But we’re not seeing a tremendous amount of growth in the middle class, middle paying categories.”

The dilemma follows a broader trend of wage inequality that’s persisted over the last couple decades, he added, giving rise to what economists have dubbed the “missing middle.” A decline in the unemployment rate can mask this dysfunction, he said, because “you may have folks who are employed, but they’re employed at lower wages than before … What’s coming back isn’t as solid as it was previously.”

It’s against this precarious backdrop that, despite $70 million dedicated to connecting the low-income or disadvantaged with decent jobs over the past year, the city’s workforce development system appears to be plagued by dysfunction. Chiu recently introduced legislation to implement the Budget Analyst’s recommendations of undertaking yet another system overhaul.

But for many still struggling to get by, few short-term solutions are in sight. Ever-increasing housing costs make the “missing middle” phenomenon especially thorny in the Bay Area, Haney noted. “It’s harder and harder for low and middle income folks to live in the region,” he said. “They are being given clear signals that they need to move.”

Lessons of the BART standoff

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EDITORIAL BART and its unions reached a tentative deal on new contracts late Monday (10/21) night, the next day restoring service that had been disrupted by the second four-day strike this year. Now, it’s time for everyone to move on from this impasse — and the ugly demonization of workers that accompanied it — and try to heal the damage that was done.

Sadly, it appears to have taken the senseless deaths of two BART employees on Oct. 19 to reinforce the safety concerns that unions have raised from the beginning, undermine critics’ belittling claims that “the trains run themselves” and don’t need trained workers, and back the district down from its aggressive brinksmanship and preparations to run limited service during what could have been a long strike.

There are still many questions to be answered. Was the district forcing a strike with its “final offer” and last minute decision to seek more authority over work rules? Would it really have offered service to the public using scab drivers? Was the driver training that was happening on that ill-fated train a factor in the tragedy?

We may not have a definitive answer to that last question for quite awhile, but we already learned from the NTSB that BART officials were deceiving the general public when they claimed the train was simply on a maintenance run to remove graffiti and when they offered misleading answers to the Guardian’s direct questions about whether driver training was being done.

Unfortunately, that was just the latest example of a pattern of behavior unbefitting of officials in a public agency. It began with the decision to pay almost $400,000 to a notoriously anti-union contract negotiator. It continued through stall tactics and an aggressive public relations strategy. And it culminated with seeking sweeping authority over work rules at the 11th hour and following up with training new drivers as soon as a strike was underway, apparently hoping to run enough service that the unions would be forced to accept a bad contract.

None of that should have happened, and it was only possible because the financially healthy district played off of the conservative campaigns against public employee unions of recent years to undermine the public image of their workers and deny them reasonable raises and safety improvements.

The media is also culpable, particularly the editorial writers at the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area News Group, which ran vitriolic and false rants condemning workers and unions, even supporting Republican calls to outlaw strikes by transportation workers.

Only in the funhouse mirror they created was it possible to credibly push the ridiculous claim that unions were striking because they were afraid of using email. It’s not necessary to dehumanize and demean our adversaries. We in the progressive Bay Area are better than that, and maybe now we can act like it.

Tim’s San Francisco

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steve@sfbg.com

Longtime Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond, who left the paper in June, is launching a new media project, continuing more than 30 years of work as one of San Francisco’s premier progressive voices by starting an online publication under a new nonprofit organization.

The San Francisco Progressive Media Center promises to deliver original news, arts, and cultural reporting on a daily basis, differentiating itself from local blogs that serve mostly to aggregate stories written by other media outlets and offer commentary on that reporting.

“Democracy can’t survive without reporters and I want to have reporters out there covering the news everyday. San Francisco has always needed a liberal daily newspaper,” Redmond told us, predicting that online reporting outlets representing various perspectives will eventually rise to compete with the limited local coverage offered by the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner.

“I will focus on all the things I care about in San Francisco,” Redmond told us, listing land use issues, housing costs, and media criticism as some examples of his interests.

Redmond has remained remarkably upbeat and positive since his clash with the San Francisco Print Media Co. — whose purchase of the Guardian he engineered last year to save the financially troubled, locally owned newspaper — ended his long run with the Guardian (see “On Guard,” June 19).

“I’m just moving on and doing my own thing. I’m excited about my new project and I’m raising a lot of money for it,” Redmond said. “I’m getting a tremendous amount of community support. I hope to have 50-60 grand on hand by the end of the month.”

To help reach that goal, Redmond and his supporters will throw a fundraiser on Sept. 26 at the El Rio. Despite being a stalwart of the left, Redmond said he’s getting support from across the ideological spectrum. “I have spent 30 years building a reputation in town as someone who doesn’t take cheap shots and I’m fair,” was how Redmond explained his broad support.

Although he’s still awaiting IRS approval of his nonprofit status, Redmond has already assembled a board of notable progressive luminaries to help him, including Eric Weaver, Laura Fraser, Calvin Welch, Alicia Garza, Gen Fujioka, Gabriel Haaland, and Giuliana Milanese.

“I wanted a board that reflects the diversity of San Francisco’s left,” Redmond said, noting that board explicitly has no editorial control.

Haaland said that Redmond has long been an important progressive voice in San Francisco and he’s happy to see that voice continue, particularly under the new nonprofit model that he’s creating.

“Having an independent, progressive media is more important than ever, and being a nonprofit takes it to another level of independence,” Haaland told us.

Welch said the new publication is arriving just in time to help expose important issues that will affect the future of San Francisco.

“I think we’re at a critical point in this city’s history,” Welch told us, citing the growing public unease with intensified waterfront development and other economic and sociopolitical trends. “The timing is impeccable and people would be interested to read online what Tim and others’ takes are on what’s happening in the city.”

San Francisco Progressive Media Center will be the latest effort to expand the city’s media landscape amid the downsizing of the once-dominant Chronicle and Examiner (see “Media experiments,” 5/25/10). Those ventures have included the San Francisco Public Press, SF Appeal, and the Bay Citizen, which had a high-profile launch in 2009 followed by being folded into the Center for Investigative Reporting last year (see “Compressing the press,” 2/22/12).

Redmond is finalizing details of his new project and has yet to announce the name for his new publication, which he plan to launch next month. [UPDATE: At the Sept. 26 event, Redmond announced that his new publication will be called 48 Hills: The Secrets of San Francisco.” There are 47 named hills in San Francisco – and as those of us who have spent their lives fighting for social and economic justice know, there’s always one more hill to climb.“]

In the meantime, he’s been blogging at Tim’s San Francisco (timssanfrancisco.blogspot.com) and preparing to teach an investigative reporting class at City College of San Francisco. On the new site, Redmond plans to feature some video and other multimedia content, but he said “this is not a techie venture, this is a content-driven venture.” And while seeking to showcase a variety of voices, Redmond will set the tone for the publication, telling us, “I’m interested in working with anyone in this city, but I’m the editor.”

Redmond said he still supports the Guardian, even if he has concerns about its parent company’s growing list of media holdings, which also includes the San Francisco Examiner, SF Weekly, and a large share of the Bay Area Reporter. Redmond said that media consolidation works for the community only when there is a diversity of other voices.

“I’m glad Todd [Vogt, CEO of San Francisco Print Media Co.] bought the Guardian and kept it going, and I’m glad the Guardian is still alive,” Redmond said. “I’ve been working for someone else my whole life…and it’s time for me to move on and do something new.”

Press Up! San Francisco Progressive Media Center fundraiser and launch party. Fiery speeches, refreshments, music. Sept. 26, 6-9pm, El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. Donations of $25, $50, $100, or $250 can be made at the door or at tinyurl.com/SFPMCcontribute.

Pelosi defies history and her district

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OPINION How is it that, despite deep congressional opposition to an American-led war on Syria, the representative for one of the nation’s most progressive districts, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, has been among President Obama’s most ardent backers of war?

While Russia’s deal for Syria to turn over its chemical weapons offers a temporary pause in the march to war, the arrangement is fragile and Obama — with support from Pelosi — continues to threaten military action that could lead to a disastrous widening of bloodshed and chaos in Syria and beyond.

What’s particularly outrageous about the pro-war push from Pelosi and US Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, also from the Bay Area, is their willful dismissal of history. Did they somehow miss the well-documented memos on US wars and interventions? You know, the ones that list American lies on Iraq’s WMDs, provocations in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin, and the long, long list of CIA-backed coups of democratically elected leaders in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and beyond?

The nightmare in Syria needs an international solution—but given our ugly track record, how can anyone place faith in American-led military intervention?

This history offers a distressingly reliable prologue to the present. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US expended vast amounts of blood and treasure attacking brutal thugs it supported for years. How can we expect different results from the same military-security state apparatus that has, for decades, undermined democracies, aided thugs and dictators, and trumped up wars based on lies? How can anyone believe that the US military and security state complex has suddenly found a veracity and moral center it has always profoundly lacked?

There is no question that international pressure and diplomacy must be brought to bear on Bassar al-Assad’s sickening Syrian regime, and that chemical weapons, and nukes for that matter, must be wiped off the planet. But the US has an unrivaled record of using these tools of mass killing, and has zero credibility as a force for peacemaking.

The hypocrisies Pelosi chooses to ignore run deeper. The US refuses to enforce the chemical weapons ban on Israel, for instance. And remember the saber-rattling last year over Iran’s nuclear program? Not a word about Israel’s nukes, not to mention America’s. Yet both Israel and the US have a well-documented history of outright aggression, where Iran has none.

The San Francisco Chronicle explained Pelosi’s war support as part of her Democratic Party leadership duties, quoting UC Berkeley professor Eric Schickler: “One of the jobs of the party’s leader is to support the president of your party, except under the most extenuating circumstances. If she didn’t have such liberal credentials already, she would be in much more vulnerable position.”

While party leadership and allegiance may be a factor, consider also that Pelosi, Boxer, and Feinstein take in far more dollars from pro-Israel lobbies than do their counterparts (Boxer got more than twice the Senate average, and Pelosi roughly six times the congressional average, according to research by MapLight and Open Secrets).

Despite some loud and colorful protests by Code Pink and other groups, it’s sadly true that Pelosi hasn’t been very vulnerable: San Francisco’s political leadership has done little to let her know how deeply out of step she is with her district.

In years past, the Board of Supervisors has passed resolutions opposing US military interventions; now, they and the Democratic County Central Committee are silent. Where is the outrage and pushback within Pelosi’s district? Pelosi’s hawkish stance on Syria follows her lamentable defense in July of the NSA spying program. In both cases, these are policies that Pelosi opposed and so many progressives protested vigorously when they were enacted by President George W. Bush. Where is the mass outrage now?

Proposal to rename Bay Bridge draws controversy

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The proposal to rename the western span of the Bay Bridge after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown is generating more controversy as it hurtles through the approval process in Sacramento, where lawmakers are staring down a Sept. 13 deadline before the legislative session ends.

Gov. Jerry Brown has expressed opposition to the idea, and the proposed name change prompted yet another scathing editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle. Former Mayor Brown, who also served as Assembly Speaker, publishes a weekly column in the Chronicle.

Chronicle columnists Matier and Ross reported Sept. 10 that Gov. Brown had met with Alice Huffman, a key supporter of the proposal and president of the California NAACP, about the proposed name change.

The partial renaming of the 77-year-old Bay Bridge has seen very little opposition in the state legislature, and backing from the NAACP might be a key reason why there has been such broad support from lawmakers. As it happens, Huffman has long been described as a friend of Willie Brown’s – she briefly worked for him when he was Assembly Speaker and later served as a political advisor, according to Los Angeles Times coverage.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano opted to stay out of the fray and abstained from voting, a decision his spokesperson Carlos Alcalá explained by saying, “he’s hesitant to vote against it, because of course Willie Brown was a very important figure” in the California Legislature.

At the same time, Alcalá said Ammiano couldn’t support renaming the bridge, because “it has significant opposition,” and “he thought it was inappropriate to name it after a living person.”

Formal Assembly criteria states that clear community consensus must be in place when a major piece of public infrastructure is renamed. Yet in the case of the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge, no such consensus exists. 

On Aug. 29, former Board of Supervisors presidents Matt Gonzalez, Aaron Peskin and Quentin Kopp fired off an open letter to Senate pro Tem Darrell Steinberg in an attempt to halt the proposal from going any further. They urged him not to hear the resolution in the Senate Rules Committee, because the proposal appeared to conflict with Senate rules and “there exists significant concern in our community that naming the Bay Bridge for him is not appropriate.”

So far, the former elected officials haven’t gotten much in the way of a response.

“The state Senate has always been a club, and all those elected officials hope that someday things will be named after them,” Peskin told the Guardian. “I think they should name the old eastern span, that they’re demolishing, after him,” he added with a chuckle. “You know why? Because it’s old and crooked and a danger to society.”

A bridge so far

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By Steven T. Jones

steve@sfbg.com

Pedaling onto the Bay Bridge over the weekend, I was suspended between our industrial past and sleek present. But my ride into the future was abruptly stopped just before I reached the island.

All the experts say we should all just be happy with the world’s longest bike and pedestrian pier, and it certainly is a wondrous thing to behold, this spacious and beautiful two-mile path that pasted big grins on the dozens of faces that I rode past on its sunny first Friday in operation.

But just as the duality of riding between the old Bay Bridge and the new invoked myriad metaphors, so too did the fact that my fellow taxpayers and I just spent $6.4 billion on a bridge from Oakland to San Francisco built almost exclusively for the private automobile.

Is this the future we’ve embraced? Are global warming, economic equity, and collective responsibility such distant abstractions that we can fill this beautiful new bridge with people sitting alone in expensive, deadly, polluting, space-hogging machines?

I looked into their work-weary eyes as I rode my bicycle out from Oakland with a few of my friends during rush hour, on a path wide enough to facilitate conversations among a pair of cyclists in each direction and strolling pedestrians, six abreast. It was lovely, like we had finally arrived in the civilized, people-powered present that we Guardianistas have been working toward for decades.

And then it ended, a vivid reminder that we’re not there yet.

 

SHARING THE ROAD

The past is blocking our progress, literally and metaphorically, at least for now.

The old Bay Bridge stands between the stubbed-off end of the new bike/pedestrian path and its intended touchdown spot on natural Yerba Buena Island, the conjoined twin of the artificial Treasure Island, where developers dream of building high-rise condo towers buffered against the rising sea.

Officials tell the Guardian that the path will likely be completed in early 2015, after the old bridge comes down. Then, we’ll be able to ride our bikes onto the island and cruise our way to the west side, with its beautiful views of our beloved city, San Francisco, shimmering just out of reach.

Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission will release its latest study of how to complete the ride/walk, examining the placement of pathways balanced on either side of the Bay Bridge’s western span, their added weight compensated for with lighter decks for the cars, all at a cost approaching a billion bucks, with a capital B.

“Everything about this is going to be hard,” MTC spokesperson John Goodwin told me when I asked about allowing cyclists and pedestrians onto the Bay Bridge’s western span, citing an array of engineering, financial, and political obstacles.

“It’s a 10-year project even if a local billionaire decides to put up the money,” Goodwin said, noting that there is no public funding identified for the project except for maybe raising automobile tolls again, which would be a tough sell to voters for a bike and pedestrian project. “It’s an uphill climb and I’m not sure it will ever reach its intended goal.”

But completing this journey is really only as difficult as we make it. Just ask local activist/author Chris Carlsson, who says that he and some of his buddies could fix the problem in a day for a few thousand dollars. All we need to do it take the righthand lane, install some barriers, done.

“The bridge is more malleable than people treat it as and we need to have this discussion publicly,” Carlsson, a founder of Critical Mass and author of Nowtopia, told us. “Let’s solve this problem today. The idea that they would open this bridge without completing this path is insulting.”

To Carlsson and others of his radical ilk, this is an equity issue, and the opening of a car-only bridge is symbolic of our societal myopia. To believers in the automotive status quo, the idea of giving up one of five traffic lanes for the final, two-mile-long descent into San Francisco makes their heads explode.

“That’s just wildly unrealistic,” Goodwin said of Carlsson’s idea, even instituted on a temporary basis, noting that the Bay Bridge handles more than 270,000 cars per day, by far the busiest state-run bridge in California.

To many modern minds, automobiles are essential to our personal freedom and economic vitality — bikes are toys, public transit is for the poor, walking is what you do in your neighborhood or on the treadmill at the gym — but San Francisco is a voter-approved “transit-first” city that supposedly gives each of these modes priority over cars.

“The idea that the five lanes of automobile traffic is inviolable is ridiculous,” Carlsson said, calling it a relic from the days before the freeway revolts of the 1950s and ’60s, when San Franciscans rejected the conception of The City as just another stop along the fast and efficient interstate highway system.

In fact, it was that cars-first vision — before it was rejected by a populist revolt — that helped lead officials to remove the passenger trains that operated on the lower decks of this New Deal/WPA bridge for its first 17 years of life, turning the whole Bay Bridge over to cars, trucks, and the occasional bus.

The era of unfettered automobility had begun, and the idea that capitalism/industrialism and the health of our world might someday, somehow come into conflict with one another also seemed wildly unrealistic.

 

BRIDGING THE GAP

The Bay Bridge was my bridge growing up in the East Bay, our link to the big city that I traversed while safely cocooned in the backseat of my parents’ car, windows up, car filled with what we’d later call secondhand smoke, buffered against the wilds of West Oakland as we launched over the bay.

Today, my perspective has changed and so has my access through the old industrial waterfront, which has been opened up to all by a pair of new paths leading bikers and hikers to the bridge, both short rides from the West Oakland BART station.

One starts on Maritime Street, near the Port of Oakland and the remnants of the old railyard on what the Realtors have started calling Oakland Point; the other starts on Shellmound Street right across from Ikea, best accessed from West Oakland along 40th Street, where crews were in the process of placing tall cones to protect the bike lane as we rode past.

After the trails merge, it proceeds past the yards for the government agencies set up to serve the motoring public: CalTrans and its freeway maintenance facilities, and the California Highway Patrol, which has doubled its local bicycle brigade (which had worked just the Golden Gate Bridge) to police the new path.

“Best job in the world,” a smiling Officer Sean Wilkenfeld told me as he arrived at the end of the Bay Bridge path, where a couple dozen people stood watching the new Bay Bridge and the old, which took on a ghostly feel as we hovered next to its newfound lifelessness.

Personally, I really like the new Bay Bridge, with its elegant modern architecture and unobstructed bay views. But some of the friends and strangers that I chatted up there at the end of the line disagreed, singing the praises of the old, industrial, seismically unsound original.

“The new bridge is beautiful, but in some ways I like the old bridge better because you can see its functionality,” Joel Fajans, a physics professor at UC Berkeley, told me.

Conversation among the cyclists turned to our beautiful new path and its untimely end. “What a dream come true to have a bike path on the Bay Bridge. I already wrote to my representatives about completing the route to San Francisco,” said Kurt Vogler, a 47-year-old environmental consultant from Oakland who rode the bridge with Fajans.

That was the phrase that everyone used, this notion of completion, conveying the sense that we’re somehow stuck between where we were and where we should be, suspended between the old and the new, waiting to catch up.

“I think it’s beautiful. It’s an engineering marvel, a miracle,” Garris Shipon, a engineer from Berkeley, said halfway through his bike ride on the Bay Bridge. “I’m glad they launched with a bike path at all, and I hope they finish it because I’d love to ride all the way across.”

 

 

TWO BRIDGES

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges were built at the same time, started in 1933. But the Bay Bridge — the industrial, utilitarian bridge connecting The City to its biggest, most diverse nearby population centers — was done first. The tall, pretty one — with its Art Deco flourishes and tourist appeal — took longer.

On its opening day, the Golden Gate Bridge was filled with pedestrians, while the Bay Bridge hosted its first traffic jam as it was unveiled, “with every auto owner in the Bay Region, seemingly, trying to crowd his machine onto the great bridge,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

It’s been the same story ever since, with cyclists and walkers crowding onto the Golden Gate daily, salty winds howling through their hair, while travelers on the Bay are caged behind steel and glass.

But not anymore. In fact, it’s far more pleasant to ride on the Bay than the Golden Gate, where the bike path is narrow and cluttered. Now, it’s the golden one that seems to belong to another age, with the Bay Bridge designed to be personally experienced.

“It’s really a spectacular excursion,” Renee Rivera, executive director of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, told me. “I was taken by surprise by what fun it is to be on a bike on that bridge.”

But the stirring sensation of riding or walking the Bay Bridge only accentuates its main shortcoming; at least the noisy, harrowing Golden Gate Bridge goes all the way across.

“We just spent $6 billion on that,” Fajans said, gesturing to the new Bay Bridge, “and you’re saying we can’t spend a little more to complete the bike lane? That’s not fair.”

Goodwin and others say that motorists paid for the new Bay Bridge with their tolls, but Fajans calls bullshit, noting that BART passengers pay more than drivers for a round trip across the bay without buying exclusive access in the future.

In this age of austerity, with government funding for transportation projects drying up and people reluctant to raise their own tolls or taxes, it’s hard to do what’s needed. That’s one reason cycling advocates take what they can get, such as an expensive western span proposal with one of two paths reserved for maintenance vehicles to smooth the automotive flow.

“If we have to sell it to the public to increase tolls, we’ll have to show that it benefits everyone,” Rivera said.

Completing this path, somehow, is a top priority for the cyclists.

“It was a little tough to get people’s attention on the western span for the last couple years, but now is the time,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told us.

Neither director seems willing to embrace Carlsson’s radical approach of simply seizing a lane.

“Like Chris, we feel strongly about equity on the bridge,” Rivera said. “At the same time, it needs to function smoothly as a bridge and I would be concerned about it bottlenecking at Treasure Island.”

Carlsson rejects the neoliberal approach of begging for scraps as we ride into a future that simply can’t continue to be dominated by automobiles. He says the Bay Pier must not rest there for another decade.

“Both bike coalitions have a resistance to appearing anti-car,” Carlsson says, “so they aren’t willing to say the obvious thing.”

Carlsson talks about the Bay Bridge as part of the free Shaping San Francisco lecture series at 7:30pm, Sept. 11, Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Forget the Willie Brown Bay Bridge

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EDITORIAL As the California Legislature prepares to wrap up before fall recess, a resolution is working its way through the approval process to rename the western span of the Bay Bridge the “Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge.”

Brown, who formerly served as mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, is known for boasting about his hobnobbing with the rich and famous in his San Francisco Chronicle column, “Willie’s World.” But to longtime progressive San Franciscans who spent decades trying to stem the tide of gentrification, he was the powerful figure that rolled out the welcome mat for high-end developers and corporate interests, whose interests in San Francisco revolved around profit alone.

As mayor, Brown presided over land-use policies that resulted in high-end developments at a time when evictions were rampant, a trend that rings familiar in today’s tech-saturated San Francisco. Once, when pressed on the idea that his approach was making the city increasingly unaffordable, Brown’s famous retort was: “If you don’t make $50,000 a year in San Francisco, then you shouldn’t live here.”

It’s not just Brown’s insensitivity to struggling tenants, deep ties to corporate interests and high-end real-estate developers, or continued behind-the-scenes influence in San Francisco politics that cause us to squirm when we think about the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge bearing this politician’s name. There’s also the key question of whether Bay Area residents actually want to see this happen — and, given Brown’s historic role as a divisive figure, the idea that there is universal support for such an idea is laughable.

A legislative analysis presented to the Assembly Committee on Transportation a few weeks ago noted that lawmakers actually came up with ground rules for big decisions like whether a bridge ought to be named after someone, to “promote fairness.” The rules stipulate that such a proposal “must reflect a community consensus” — and guess what? Even Brown’s editors over at the Chronicle issued a June editorial opposing the idea.

Not only that, but proposals like this are only supposed to come from representatives of the district where the thing being renamed is located — yet this scheme came from Assemblymember Isadore Hall, a Democrat from Compton. But despite clear failure to adhere to these basic rules, only a single committee member voted against naming the bridge after Brown.

Interestingly enough, the bill even includes a request for Caltrans to determine the cost of posting signs commemorating Brown, which would evidently be funded by donations from unspecified private sources.

If the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is going to be named after anyone, we agree that the honor should be reserved for beloved 19th-century San Francisco eccentric Joshua Abraham Norton, the Scotsman who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1859 and printed his own currency.

So far, a Change.org petition calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to name it the Emperor Norton Bay Bridge has garnered 1,800 signatures. “He was a champion of racial and religious unity, an advocate for women’s suffrage [and] a defender of the people,” the petition notes. That sounds more like something motorists can be proud of when they drive back and forth across the bay.

 

Changing the narrative

45

news@sfbg.com

Three distinct players with three distinct strategies for saving City College of San Francisco showed their hands last week, all centered around the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges, which plans to revoke City College’s accreditation in less than a year.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed a lawsuit against the ACCJC, state lawmakers are revving up to investigate it, and City College Super Trustee Bob Agrella is doing his best to quietly meet the accreditor’s standards.

Whether any of the approaches will save the school is anyone’s guess, but one thing’s for sure: In the process of saving City College, its accreditation agency has gone from an unknown bureaucracy to a polarizing political punching bag.

 

HERRERA FILES SUIT

Herrera threw a right hook at the ACCJC on Aug. 22, announcing his lawsuit to stop them from closing City College. It offers a scathing critique of the accreditation agency and those whose agenda it is pushing.

The ACCJC said City College failed to meet certain standards by its deadline last July, leading the agency to order its closure in exactly one year. Since then, enrollment at the college of 85,000 students plummeted and the school is fighting for its very existence. Now Herrera is saying that closure action was improper, unwarranted, and out of line with the agency’s prior actions.

Herrera’s suit alleges the ACCJC unlawfully allowed its advocacy and political bias to prejudice its evaluation of college accreditation standards. “It is a matter of public record that the ACCJC has been an advocate to reshape the mission of California community colleges,” Herrera said at a press conference.

The agenda he said it was advocating for is the completion agenda, which was the focus of our July 9 cover story, “Who Killed City College?” Essentially, it’s the move to force community colleges to focus on only two-year transfer students at the expense of so-called “non-credit” classes, which can be lifelong learning skills or English as Second Language classes.

“There’s a reason judges aren’t advocates and advocates aren’t judges,” Herrera said. “We should have a problem when an entity charged with evaluation engages in political advocacy.”

 

City College avoided those reform efforts from the state for years, and Herrera alleges that the ACCJC tried to sanction City College because of that resistance.

ACCJC President Barbara Beno was not available for comment. In a statement, the agency said it was surprised to learn Herrera filed a suit against the ACCJC, and that the suit appears to be “without merit” and an attempt to “politicize and interfere with the ongoing accreditation review process.”

Herrera may be playing cowboy, guns aimed right at the ACCJC, but he also said he doesn’t want the agency to close, just to clean up its act and be accountable. But on the other side of the OK Corral, an investigation by the California Legislature is under way — and it may be sizing up a coffin for the ACCJC.

 

JLAC VS. ACCJC

Just a day before Herrera announced his lawsuit, the California Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted to investigate the accrediting commission. The audit committee is a legislative fact-finding body usually staffed by former investigative journalists, and the senators who asked for the hearing were out for the ACCJC’s blood.

“The stakes are high and the commission’s power is absolute,” Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, told the audit committee. He then outlined the danger of losing community colleges that faced closure at the hand of the ACCJC.

Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, was much more direct. “Sen. Beall and I met with (ACCJC) President Barbara Beno in my office,” he said. “In all my career, in my thousands of meetings with agency individuals, representatives, secretaries, etcetera, I have never met with such an arrogant, condescending individual in her response to Sen. Beall and I. That attitude reflected in such a senior person raised huge red flags for me.”

 

In public comment, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, D-SF, noted that recently the U.S. Department of Education upheld the California Federation of Teachers’ complaints that the ACCJC process “is guilty of no transparency, little accountability, and conflict of interest.”

Then it was the ACCJC’s turn to defend itself. Beno was unable to attend, but ACCJC Vice President Krista Johns and Commissioner Frank Gornick were there instead.

Gornick defended the accrediting commission, saying it was “rigorously” evaluated every six years. Ultimately, the committee voted 10-1 to investigate a number of mysteries regarding the ACCJC: how it stacks up to the five other accrediting bodies nationwide, determining the ACCJC’s compliance with open meeting laws (it denied public access to a recent “public meeting,” also barring a San Francisco Chronicle reporter), and an evaluation of the fairness in how the agency issues sanctions.

 

MEET THE NEW BOSS

Amid the state and city level battles over City College, one key player prefers to work quietly. Super Trustee Bob Agrella, tasked by the state to take over the power of City College’s Board of Trustees and save the college, feels his hands are tied.

“My job is to play within the rules and regulations of the ACCJC,” Agrella told the Guardian. Sitting in his office at City College’s Ocean Campus, he pointed out that the accreditation agency actually has a rule that says colleges have to be on amicable terms with the ACCJC — or else.

“One of the eligibility requirements is the college maintains good relationship with the commission,” Agrella said. Notably, if City College fails to meet its requirements, it won’t be able to keep its accreditation in its evaluation next July.

So while Herrera and JLAC can blast the ACCJC, Agrella feels like he needs to remain neutral or he could blow City College’s chances at staying open.

If he were to try battling the commission on its rules, Agrella told us, he would do it within the framework of the ACCJC’s own policies. But it’s exactly those policies that Herrera said the ACCJC is violating.

The lawsuit from Herrera’s office alleges, among other things, that the evaluating team that ACCJC sent to review City College was stacked with the school’s political enemies from a body called the California Community College Student Success Task Force, which City College loudly and publicly opposed (full disclosure: as a former City College student, I spoke against the Task Force at a hearing in January 2012, and that public testimony is cited in Herrera’s lawsuit).

The ACCJC’s president, Beno, wrote multiple letters to state agencies in support of the Task Force’s recommendations, the suit alleges. This action contradicts the ACCJC’s conflict of interest policy, according to the suit, which defines a conflict as including “any personal or professional connections that would create either a conflict or the appearance of conflict of interest.”

So if the ACCJC won’t play by the rules, shouldn’t Agrella support the actions of Herrera and JLAC to resist the ACCJC’s decree?

“In fairness to the people taking these actions, they feel time is of the essence,” Agrella said. “I just happen to, respectfully, disagree with it, because my job is not to push the (ACCJC). My job is to try to retain accreditation.”

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the ACCJC may not be the only body that will decide the fate of City College.

North Beach conflict-of-interest zone

It’s been over a year since North Beach’s Piazza Market closed its doors – but nothing has come along to take its place. The property, boasting 12,000 square feet at $4 per square foot, has attracted plenty of interest yet still remains empty.

“There’s been strong activity on the space – we’ve had several offers,” notes realtor Jeremy Blateis. “If there were less restrictions this place would have been sold already.”

According to Blateis, the place has not been leased to prospective renters because of zoning issues. Though the ad for the building says that it’s zoned for retail and restaurant use, potential owners would have to go through “lots of red tape” to have it used as a restaurant – which North Beach doesn’t have a shortage of.

This is where Claudine Cheng, recently resigned member of the Treasure Island Authority Board, comes in. According to a San Francisco Chronicle report, as a public figure she was paid money to influence decisions of city officers. And a company by the name of 627 Vallejo LLC – the owners of 627 Vallejo – paid Cheng $10,000 in hopes that she would smooth out the zoning situation.

According to the same report, she had been emailing Board of Supervisors President David Chiu seeking amendments to existing legislation in order to change the zoning of the area. Former Board President Aaron Peskin authored that legislation to prevent North Beach retail stores from being transformed into restaurants and chain stores.

Asked whether Chiu would have been open to a possible legislative amendment, legislative aide Judson True responded, “Supervisor Chiu would be open to making legislative changes that have community support,” but added that “the issue was whether or not Claudine Cheng was a lobbyist.” Judson noted that Chiu “also understands that there are laws that should match particular circumstances in neighborhoods like North Beach.”

Peskin, who filed complaints against her with the Ethics Commission and Fair Political Practices Commission, didn’t mince words.

“What she did was illegal,” Peskin said of Cheng’s decision to accept the $10,000. “What should fill 627 Vallejo is something that would further serve the community. Not another restaurant.”

Chronicle: Don’t question the City College takeover, just submit to the flawed ACCJC

71

I have very low expectations from editorials in the San Francisco Chronicle, which generally share a worldview with the Chamber of Commerce and carry water for some powerful Establishment figure or another. But today’s editorial on City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit defending City College is so bad and illogical that it reads like an Onion parody of a Chronicle editorial.

Clearly put up to it by some of the most reactionary figures in the Mayor’s Office, Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz or one his lackeys parrot the submissive stance that Mayor Ed Lee has taken toward outsiders with corporatist agenda that have seized control of City College and sought to make a high-profile example of it.

“The city’s leaders should be calling for tough love, not coddling dysfunction. Fortunately, Mayor Ed Lee has done just that – but, regrettably, the city attorney is going in the opposite direct [sic],” the Chronicle wrote.

And by “tough love,” they apparently mean obedient and unquestioning compliance with an obscure accrediting agency’s demand that City College slash community-based curriculum; close facilities relied on by both students and local nonprofit groups; rip up contracts with faculty and force instructors to live on part-time wages; distill course offerings down to just what serve corporations, universities, and banking interests; and other aspects of an educational agenda that hasn’t been properly vetted in public hearings or approved by any elected body.

Herrera is to be applauded for pointing out the overreach and conflicts-of-interest on the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges, which were also recently criticized by the US Department of Education. And we’re excited to see what Herrera uncovers during the discovery process in his lawsuit against a secretive, corporate-connected, document-shredding agency that broke its own internal rules in its treatment of City College.

The Chronicle graciously refers to these unavoidable facts in a brief paragraph, writing that the ACCJC “is not without flaws. It’s secretive, and its internal policies drew a rebuke from the U.S. Department of Education after City College faculty filed complaints about its conduct.”

But then it dimisses that and shows a suspicious incuriosity about why the ACCJC is being so secretive and what its agenda might be, instead doubling down on criticizing City College in a way that is so over-the-top that this fine institution is unrecognizable to anyone who is actually familiar with it, which Diaz and company clearly aren’t.   

“The needed changes include hiring a comptroller to organize financial controls, making sure students pay for classes, and overhauling a loose-fit governance system that puts faculty, students and staff in charge of operations with inadequate administrative controls. Lee has strongly endorsed an overhaul of City College’s ramshackle operations,” the Chronicle writes.

Unlike us here at the Guardian, where I’ve written two recent editorials in support of democracy and local control and critical of Lee and others who have been too quick to cooperate with the toppling of the locally elected Board of Trustees, the Chronicle apparently believe in more authoritarian methods of governance.

“The first repairs are now under way. The powers of the elected community college board are on hold, and a special trustee dispatched by state Community College Chancellor Brice Harris is in charge,” the Chronicle writes.

And as we report in our upcoming issue, that special trustee also has no interest in questioning the ACCJC’s process or methods or even allowing the public to review internal communications. It’s a shame that bootlickers like Lee and the Chronicle have sold out such an important local institution to their corporate masters, but luckily for San Francisco, Herrera, the California Federation of Teachers, the Guardian, other progressive media voices, and hundreds of our community partners aren’t giving up so easily, instead pushing for an open, truthful, democratic, and transparent discussion about City College’s mission and its future.

Protect local power and control

30

EDITORIAL There’s a growing stench of political corruption — or, at the very least, hidden agendas aimed at subverting popular will in favor of entrenched corporate interests — emanating from the Mayor’s Office these days. And it’s undermining projects and institutions that are vital to the future of San Francisco.

In the last week, a pair of important developments illuminated the shady way business gets done in San Francisco. The first instance concerned City College of San Francisco, which had its accreditation rashly revoked last month, prompting Mayor Ed Lee to enthusiastically support the disbanding of the locally elected Board of Trustees and the takeover of City College by state-appointed outsiders bent on shutting down community-based facilities and classes.

While Lee and the San Francisco Chronicle have been cheerleading this loss of local control and the corporatist agenda behind it — CCSF was criticized for resisting the narrowing of its mission to focus on job training and college prep — we at the Guardian have questioned this process and the motives behind it.

In a cover story (“Who killed City College?” July 9), editorial (“Why democracy matters,” July 23), and other coverage, we’ve highlighted how the attack on CCSF is part of national movement to focus schools on job training rather than broad-based education, and questioned the haste with which CCSF’s local leadership was usurped.

Critics mocked these concerns, as they did those of the California Federation of Teachers, which formally challenged the actions by the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges, with Lee and others saying that we need to just accept the death threats against CCSF and do whatever these outsiders are asking.

So on Aug. 13, when the US Department of Education sustained the CFT appeal and found the ACCJC in violation of federal regulations and its own internal standards in its approach to City College, it validated our concerns and called into question Lee’s hair-trigger abandonment of City College’s local leaders.

Frankly, we’re puzzled by Lee’s approach to City College — from his appointment of right-wing ideologue Rodrigo Santos as a trustee last year (who subsequently got trounced in the election) to his resistance to helping the college before the state takeover — but we suspect it’s connected to Lee’s focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs” to the exclusion of other issues and values.

But Lee only counts private sector jobs, not those created to serve the public interest like the thousands of jobs that would be created by CleanPowerSF, a program that Lee opposes and that his appointees to the SF Public Utilities Commission are actively subverting.

As we report in this issue, CleanPowerSF is a renewable energy program approved last year by a veto-proof majority on the Board of Supervisors, but it’s being blocked by the SFPUC’s refusal to approve the rates and sign the contracts, with commissioners raising concerns that go well beyond their purview at this point.

It’s time for Mayor Lee to start serving the people of San Francisco instead of the corporate titans and political benefactors who elevated this loyal career bureaucrat into the big chair in Room 200.

 

Alerts: August 21 – 27, 2013

0

WEDNESDAY 21

Breaking News: The future of open news and local storytelling Hub Media Lab, The San Francisco Chronicle Building, 925 Mission, SF. Hubmedialabsf.com. 6:30pm, $15. Local news outlets and mobile app founders will discuss the future of news distribution in the Bay Area in the context of maintaining an informed citizenry. Panelists will include Lydia Chavez, Founder of Mission Local; Laura Ramos, Executive Producer of The Bold Italic; Michael Coren, Co-founder of Publet and Burt Herman, Co-Founder of Storify.

FRIDAY 23

Egypt: A revolution in crisis 2969 Mission, SF. www.answersf.org. 7pm, $5–$10. Since the Egyptian Revolution began in January 2011, hundreds have been killed and thousands more wounded. The Egyptian military seized power on July 3, following massive protests against the government of Mohammad Morsi. What do these developments mean for the future of Egypt and the broader region? What is the role of the U.S.? Panelists include Omar Ali, an Egyptian-American activist with ANSWER, and Mazda Majidi, co-author of Socialists & War.

SATURDAY 24

Women’s Rights Day: A tribute to immigrant women New Valencia Hall, 747 Polk, SF. www.radicalwomen.org. 7:30-9:30pm, $3. This tribute to immigrant women will feature a screening of the documentary “Rape in the Fields,” unmasking the sexual violence against female agricultural workers. Hear from guest speaker, former farm worker and Los Angeles Radical Women member Yolanda Alaniz, co-author of Viva La Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance. Arrive at 6:30pm for dinner, which will be available for a donation of $8.50.

 

Rally for civil rights Steps of San Francisco City Hall, SF. bayardrustincoalition.com. 3:30-5:30pm, free. The Bayard Rustin LGBT Coalition is organizing this civil rights rally to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his famed “I have a dream” speech. The event will also honor the memory of Bayard Rustin, a gay man who was a prominent strategist of this historic event.

“Greyhound therapy” is wrong for Nevada, and San Francisco

22

It’s horribly inhumane and indefensible for Nevada to ship its mentally ill homeless to San Francisco, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera is right to go after that state with a lawsuit aimed at changing that policy and recovering the city’s costs, which he discussed today in a press release and San Francisco Chronicle article.

But San Francisco should have greater moral authority to make this stand than it does, thanks to the Homeward Bound program started by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and continued by Mayor Ed Lee, a program that gives local homeless individuals a one-way bus ticket out of town.

The Chronicle took pains to say how different San Francisco’s exportation of its homeless is from Nevada’s, noting that we make sure our homeless are stable enough to travel alone and that there’s someone waiting for them on the other side before we send them to the bus station.

Sure, that’s better, but the basic concept is the same and it’s consistent with San Francisco basic approach toward much of its homeless population, for whom the city intentionally limits shelter beds and makes it difficult to get one and treats the resulting street population as a law enforcement issue.

Newsom was elected on his Care Not Cash promise to provide shelter and social services to the homeless, and it certainly did get many people who needed it into supportive housing. But the actual homeless problem is far worse and more systemic than that program (or feel-good gimmicks like Project Homeless Connect) can really address.

San Francisco should be leading the way in calling for this country to address the root causes of homelessness, as well as the related problems of poverty, exploitation of workers and natural resources, and a wasteful economic system that is cooking the planet and its biodiversity.

Instead, we’re leading the way in pushing unsustainable, technology-fueled economic growth with no regard for the byproducts of wealth generation by the privileged few, whether it be giving our homeless one-way bus tickets out of town, forcing our workers and nonprofits to seek reasonable rents elsewhere, undermining hard-won social compromises, or missing our own greenhouse gas reduction goals (today’s Examiner cover story).

We can — and we should — take greater responsibility for our city’s policies and prejudices and work to regain  the moral authority that we need to be an example for other cities and begin to advocate for needed reforms on the national and international levels.  

Yahoo and other tech companies are squeezing the Chronicle’s newsroom

17

With high demand for office space in San Francisco these days — thanks largely to the latest technology bubble, Mayor Ed Lee’s economic development focus, and its amplification by the San Francisco Chronicle — Hearst Corp., which owns both the paper and the Chronicle Building, seems to be more focused on property management than journalism these days.

Following up on blogs that broke the story, Chronicle Technology Columnist James Temple today reported that Yahoo is negotiating with Hearst to move its headquarters into the Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission streets. What Temple didn’t say — and what sources at the Chronicle confirmed to the Guardian, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet been announced to Chronicle staff — is that the third floor newsroom will soon be relocated while the space undergoes a renovation.

It’s not clear whether the two pieces of news are related, and we’re still waiting for a response to our questions on the subject from Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee. But it certainly seems true that Hearst and the Chronicle are doing everything they can to profit from the commercial real estate market that they have helped to heat up while operating a newspaper that has struggled to become profitable in recent years.

Valued at more than $30 million and covering nearly a full city block in the heart of the city, the Chronicle Building has been steadily taken over by outside companies in recent years, many of them technology corporations such as Square, the online payment company. The newsroom that used to occupy the second and third floors has already been squeezed onto the third, and now even that space is getting an overhaul.

Meanwhile, Hearst has been working with Forest City and Strada Investment Group on a plan to redevelop the property, reportedly replacing the old Hearst headquarters and other buildings that share the block with an office and residential tower and trying to win historic landmark status for the Chronicle Building itself.

Chronicle staffers tell the Guardian that they were surprised to hear about the newsroom relocation last week and they don’t have many details, except that they will remain in the building. And given how valuable it has become, they say they’re just happy to not be totally squeezed out by the tech boom.

Glamour revival

0

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM The 18th San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens with Augusto Genino’s 1930 Prix de Beauté, literally translated as “beauty prize” but more often referred to in English as Miss Europe. Memo to all wannabe pageant queens: you might as well shuffle off the stage when Louise Brooks — flawless features, perfect hair, sparkling smile, star quality oozing from every pore — shows up to compete.

Though she knows her jealous boyfriend will disapprove, vivacious typist Lucienne (Brooks) impulsively enters herself into the Miss France contest; after she wins, she advances to Miss Europe, where she’s also victorious. (Apparently Miss Universe hadn’t been invented yet, because obviously she’d take that title, too.) When her sourpuss love orders her home, she mourns her lost-and-found glamorous life while confined to their small apartment, where she’s kept company by a caged bird and a cuckoo clock. Amid all this dreary symbolism, a movie contract (offered by a worldly, dandy prince who’d pursued her at the beauty pageant) seems just the ticket to a better life — but as any Brooks fan can tell you, happy endings were not exactly her specialty.

Scripted by frequent Brooks collaborator G.W. Pabst (with René Clair, director of 1924’s Entr’acte), Prix de Beauté was the Hollywood rebel’s last major starring role; though it was shot as a very early sound film, Brooks’ part was dubbed, and it’ll be shown at the Silent Film Festival in traditional silent form. Look forward to a gorgeous print, thanks to a full restoration done last year by Italian film archive Cineteca di Bologna, and accompaniment by seasoned silent film pianist Stephen Horne.

More movie-star charisma comes courtesy of the oft-misunderstood Marion Davies, who gets a chance to display her considerable comedic talents in King Vidor’s 1928 The Patsy. Modern audiences remember Davies for her long association with William Randolph Hearst; some assume she was more or less exactly like the shrill Susan Alexander character in 1941 roman à clef Citizen Kane. And while Hearst did manipulate her career, he was said to prefer her in costume dramas, like 1922’s When Knighthood Was in Flower, in which she played Mary Tudor — hardly similar to The Patsy‘s goofy heroine, sort of a proto-Greta Gerwig type.

The Silent Film Festival’s description of the film attributes The Patsy‘s existence to star director Vidor’s “Hollywood clout.” But its enduring popularity (it closed the 2008 fest) is surely due to Davies’ performance, which famously includes her dead-on impressions of fellow silent stars Mae Murray, Lillian Gish, and Pola Negri. Living in the shadow of her elegant older sister, Grace (Jane Winton), awkward Pat (Davies) is forever stumbling and messy-haired. (“I wish I were beautiful and seductive, like a stocking advertisement,” she says, in one of the play-turned-film’s many hilarious intertitles.)

Pat pines for Grace’s nerdy beau, Tony — but even when Grace starts sneaking around with a local bad boy, Tony doesn’t notice Pat, despite her attempts to get his attention via some silly self-improvement efforts. Blustering on the sidelines is stage and screen legend Marie Dressler, a 1930 Best Actress Oscar winner for Min and Bill, who plays the sisters’ comedically overbearing mother. The Library of Congress supplies The Patsy on 35mm, with live accompaniment by the five-piece Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Also a tale of two siblings, Henri de la Falaise’s Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935) — a two-strip Technicolor fable shot on location in Bali — is rapturously described by the Silent Film Festival program as “the delineation of Balinese culture … an absorbing and mesmerizing quasi-documentary.” That may be so, but one suspects neither its cultural content, nor its love-triangle story (comely temple dancer falls for the new gamelan musician in town, and he’s OK with that — until he decides he prefers her younger sis), were what lured audiences in 1935. Rather, the sight of “Balinese beauties bathing in all their native glory,” as one poster trumpeted at the time (that’s code for “topless women”), was likely the main draw.

Decades later, however, Legong‘s more exploitative elements feel pretty tame, and the film remains most interesting for its fairly respectful depictions of what was considered an outrageously “exotic” way of life at the time. The Silent Film Festival screens the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s restored 35mm print; a sure highlight will be Legong‘s live score, a collaboration between Bay Area-based ensembles Gamelan Sekar Jaya and Club Foot Orchestra.

Additional highlights include the premiere screening of the meticulously-restored The Last Edition (1925) — a newspaper yarn about a San Francisco Chronicle press worker, complete with thrilling Market Street scenes; Tokyo Chorus (1931), an early entry from the highly influential Yasujiro Ozu; “Winsor McCay: His Life and Art,” biographer John Canemaker’s tribute to the Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) animator; Douglas Fairbanks as the titular outcast in Alan Dwan’s newly-restored 1916 The Half-Breed; and closing-night crowd-pleaser Safety Last (1923), which contains one of silent film’s most famous scenes: comedian Harold Lloyd scaling a multi-story building and dangling from a clock face. *

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Thu/18-Sun/21, most shows $15

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.silentfilm.org

 

Giraudo (and activists) close CPMC deal

18

The takeaway message from a July 11 press conference held in the Mayor’s Office touting legislation authorizing California Pacific Medical Center’s construction of two new San Francisco hospitals was seemingly this: Everyone hearts Lou Giraudo.

A part owner of Boudin Bakery and former president of the San Francisco Police Commission, Giraudo was called in last year to help mediate a deal that seemed doomed when CPMC, city officials, and a coalition of labor and community organizations were unable to hash out an agreement that was acceptable to all sides.

Negotiations have been contentious over the past year due to early indications that CPMC would not guarantee that St. Luke’s, a health care facility relied upon by many low-income San Franciscans, would keep its doors open as a condition of moving forward with the new Cathedral Hill facility, a centerpiece of CPMC’s $2.5 billion project.

Enter Giraudo, who was, according to a not-so-subtle hint dropped by former Mayor Willie Brown in his San Francisco Chronicle column last year, “quietly brought in” by the mayor’s office to fix the half-baked mess that the CPMC deal had evidently devolved into.

Sup. David Campos sang Giraudo’s praises, saying, “I have yet to meet a finer public servant,” and calling Giraudo “a real hero of mine.”

Giraudo himself told the Guardian that his strategy was “to de-politicize the process and get people to think about the community.”

Board President David Chiu, who worked closely with Campos and Sup. Mark Farrell to negotiate with CPMC and other parties on behalf of the Board, went so far as to compare Giraudo to Batman. He even joked that he was going to shine a bat signal the next time a negotiator was needed, in hopes that Giraudo would save the day.

Yet while Giraudo may have provided the catalyst needed for a deal, it was community advocates who ensured that the public at large benefited from the CPMC plan more than they would have otherwise — since the mayor’s office seemed willing to go along with the health care giant’s original terms.

Long before Giraudo’s involvement, a coalition of labor and community organizations waged a campaign to rebuild CPMC “the right way,” holding strong on the issue of St. Lukes and refusing to agree to anything that would leave open the possibility that the hospital, a critically important facility for low-income patients, would be shuttered. “That coalition has been working for quite some time … to save St. Lukes,” Campos said of the diverse coalition of community and labor leaders, who formed under the name San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice. “It kept working for many years.” Under the terms of the agreement that was ultimately agreed upon, St. Luke’s will have a number of specified services to ensure it remains a full-service hospital, and CPMC will commit to providing services to 30,000 charity care patients and 5,400 Medi-Cal managed care patients per year. CPMC will also contribute $36.5 million to the city’s affordable housing fund, and it will pay $4.1 million to replace the homes it displaces on Cathedral Hill. While many advocates for San Francisco’s most vulnerable populations heralded the deal, some were disheartened that it did not dedicate space for psychiatric care.

A community-based coalition, a trio of supervisors and a very special mediator helped seal CPMC deal

The takeaway message from a July 11 press conference held in the Mayor’s office touting legislation authorizing California Pacific Medical Center’s construction of two new San Francisco hospitals was seemingly this: Everyone hearts Lou Giraudo.

A part owner of Boudin Bakery and former president of the San Francisco Police Commission, Giraudo was called in last year to help mediate a deal that seemed doomed when CPMC, city officials, and a coalition of labor and community organizations were unable to hash out an agreement that was acceptable to all sides.

Negotiations have been contentious over the past year due to early indications that CPMC would not guarantee that St. Luke’s, a health care facility relied upon by many low-income San Franciscans, would keep its doors open as a condition of moving forward with the new Cathedral Hill facility, a centerpiece of CPMC’s $2.5 billion project.

Enter Lou Giraudo, everybody’s favorite public servant who was, according to a not-so-subtle hint dropped by former Mayor Willie Brown in his San Francisco Chronicle column last year, “quietly brought in” by the mayor’s office to fix the half-baked mess that the CPMC deal had evidently devolved into.

“He’s often said he’s just a businessman. A baker, if you will,” Lee said during yesterday’s press conference. But Giraudo came to the table with the right “recipe” and the “main ingredients” for a successful deal, Lee added.

Sup. David Campos also sang Giraudo’s praises, saying, “I have yet to meet a finer public servant,” and calling Giraudo “a real hero of mine.” 

Giraudo himself told the Guardian that his strategy was “to de-politicize the process and get people to think about the community.”

Board President David Chiu, who worked closely with Sups. David Campos and Mark Farrell to negotiate with CPMC and other parties on behalf of the Board, went so far as to compare Giraudo to Batman. He even joked that he was going to shine a bat signal the next time a negotiator was needed, in hopes that Giraudo would save the day.

Presumably, when this happens, Giraudo will dust the flour off his apron after toiling away at some sourdough bread shaped like an alligator, duck into a Boudin Bakery bathroom to squeeze into a superhero costume, strap on his jet pack and take off for the gold-capped dome.

Giraudo may have provided the catalyst needed for a deal, but it was community advocates who ensured that the public at large benefitted from the CPMC plan more than they would have otherwise – since the mayor’s office seemed willing to go along with the health care giant’s original terms.

Long before Giraudo’s involvement, a coalition of labor and community organizations waged a campaign to rebuild CPMC “the right way,” holding strong on the issue of St. Lukes and refusing to agree to anything that would leave open the possibility that the hospital, a critically important facility for low-income patients, would be shuttered.

“That coalition has been working for quite some time … to save St. Lukes,” Campos said yesterday. The diverse coalition of community and labor leaders, who formed under the name San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice, commissioned studies on the need for health care services for low-income populations, studied housing and transportation impacts, and developed a broad base of support for a better deal than what was originally floated by the healthcare giant. “It kept working for many years,” Campos noted.

Under the terms of the agreement that was ultimately agreed upon, St. Luke’s will have a number of specified services to ensure it remains a full-service hospital, and CPMC will commit to providing services to 30,000 charity care patients and 5,400 Medi-Cal managed care patients per year. CPMC will also contribute $36.5 million to the city’s affordable housing fund, and it will pay $4.1 million to replace the homes it displaces on Cathedral Hill.

But wait, one last thing we’ve just learned about Giraudo: Did you know he also served as chairman at Pabst Brewing Company? The next time you get drunk off PBR while gorging yourself on sourdough baked into the shape of a teddy bear, or for that matter receive emergency medical care at St. Luke’s after an unsuccessful attempt at building a DIY jetpack, you’ll know who to thank.

Celebrating independence, embracing wage slavery

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On the eve of Independence Day, too many San Franciscans seem eager to give up on the very idea of independence, instead willingly buying into the divide and conquer strategies of those who seek to control and exploit us. Just consider the big news of the day.

On Day Three of the BART strike, mainstream and social media are once again awash with angry anti-union diatribes by people who are resentful of the fact that some workers in this society still manage to earn the pensions and decent salaries that most of us wage slaves are being denied.

Pensions are the one thing that allows the working class some degree of independence during its twilight years. And the average BART salary of $72,000 annually shouldn’t be considered excessive in an expensive city that will chew up at least a third of that in housing costs.

But they are each more than most of us are getting, so it’s easy to turn many people against their fellow workers, even though the real targets of our ire should be the bosses and economic system that are denying us our independence and the means to pursue our happiness.

It’s a similar story with the breaking news of the day: City College of San Francisco losing its accreditation and being turned over to state control. While there are some reasons to criticize how this important institution has been managed over the years, it was still being managed by locally elected trustees who made the best decisions they could under bad circumstances.

They made decisions to maintain a broad-based curriculum that this community wanted and needed, and to avoid exploiting the faculty like so many other educational institutions are doing, in the process taking a gamble with lower reserves than may be needed. And the voters of San Francisco stepped up to support CCSF with a parcel tax that was helping to ease it away from the brink, acting as a proud and independent community does during troubled times.

But a commission of unelected bureaucrats on a ideological mission to transform educational institutions into something less than the broad-based community resources that CCSF has strived to be decided to make an example of San Francisco. And they did so with the full support of Mayor Ed Lee, who issued a statement today criticizing local officials for not embracing even harsher austerity measures than they did, and saying “I fully support” the state takeover.

Lee’s hand-picked panel recommending reforms of the Housing Authority is also proposing to sacrifice the independence of poor San Franciscans in favor of ever-more subsidies to real estate developers, according to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Among the “reforms” is a proposal to divert federal money from the Section 8 program that offers rent-subsidies to the poor, as Chron reporter John Cote described like this: “A terribly run program that provides low-income residents with vouchers for private housing would be administered by the city, rather than the federally funded public housing agency. The vouchers would be prioritized for certain affordable housing projects, creating dedicated revenue to help secure loans to build them.”

So the vouchers that allow low-income people some independence — rather than living in squalid, chronically mismanaged public housing projects in San Francisco — will instead subsidize development projects. Yes, we do need to subsidize affordable housing development, which this city is underfunding, but we shouldn’t be taking the meager resources of society’s least fortunate families to do so.  

I have no doubts that Lee will jump at this suggestion (although its unlikely to be so eagerly embraced by federal regulators at HUD) given his penchant for shady real estate schemes that line the pockets of the powerful, like the one that the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered this week.

CIR reported that the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Center — a for-profit company connected to Willie Brown that is arranging immigration visas for Chinese nationals who invest in Lennar’s Hunters Point housing development — is getting key help from Lee and members of his staff.

This project was already looking like a bait-and-switch scam, as we also reported this week, with Lennar being guaranteed profits without even putting up its own money, thanks to Lee’s willingness to use the power of his office to solicit funds on behalf of the country’s biggest residential developer.

If Lennar wasn’t going to build the affordable housing we need on the front end, or put up the money itself, why didn’t the city just administer this project and give the work to local contractors? What exactly is this Florida-based corporation doing in exchange for being handed some of the most valuable real estate in the city, except for helping its powerful local friends who pulled strings on its behalf?

What’s motivating Lee these days? Well, considering that Brown and other power brokers placed him in the Mayor’s Office after a career at City Hall doing their bidding — a role he seems to be still playing today in his powerful new role — I’d say it was a lack of independence.

It’s all pretty depressing, but at least we have a holiday tomorrow to celebrate our independence. Happy Fourth of July, comrades.  

Examiner sues Chronicle, alleging predatory ad-pricing scheme

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Today the San Francisco Newspaper Company, which owns the Bay Guardian, announced it was suing the Chronicle, accusing it of below-cost competition. You can read the story, by Joe Eskenazi, below. –Ed.

The parent company of the San Francisco Examiner sued the Hearst Corporation Tuesday, accusing its San Francisco Chronicle of illegally targeting Examiner advertisers with secret, below-cost rates in an attempt to bleed the smaller paper.

The San Francisco Newspaper Company, which owns the Examiner, SF Weekly, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, alleges that the Chronicle offered ad space to advertisers for a fraction of its cost on the condition that the advertisers not buy ads in the Examiner

“Hearst has demanded and obtained agreements from key advertising customers, which preclude those customers from purchasing any advertising space from the Examiner for a period of a year or more,” the suit said. “In many cases, these discounts were specifically conditioned on the advertiser agreeing to purchase advertising services exclusively from Hearst and requiring it to stop doing business with the Examiner. The suit calls for an injunction prohibiting the Chronicle from selling below-cost ads. The suit also requests financial damages “in an amount to be proven at trial.” Per the law, that dollar figure could then be tripled.

The California Unfair Practices Act limits a business’ ability to sell goods or advertising below cost. It also prohibits secretly offering varying rates to different customers for the same services, or doling out “loss leaders. A loss leader is a giveaway or deep discount on additional services used as an incentive to sweeten a separate deal. In one such instance, the suit says the Chronicle threw in $200,000 worth of free ad space in a deal with one advertiser.

The Examiner claims that Hearst engaged in all three of these activities, which are proscribed by the state’s Unfair Practices Act.

This is the same state law that SF Weekly’s former owner, New Times, was found to have violated in selling ads below cost with a purported intent to sink the then-independent Bay Guardian. The Guardian ultimately was awarded $15.6 million — though later accepted a much smaller, undisclosed settlement. Ironically, both the Weekly and Guardian were subsequently obtained by the San Francisco Newspaper Company.

The allegations against the Chronicle are reminiscent of those made against New Times: The larger company is accused of using profits from its other cash-generating properties to subsidize below-cost competition against the Examiner, which lacks similar resources. Some of the players are even the same: The Examiner’s lead counsel Ralph Alldredge helmed the Guardian’s successful case.

Greg Gilchrist, another Examiner attorney, claims the paper can produce material evidence proving the Chronicle not only targeted Examiner advertisers with deep discounts — as low as $1,000 “or even less” for full-page ads listed at between $59,000 and $92,000 on the Chronicle’s advertising rate card — but, on occasion, demanded exclusivity in return for secret and preferential rates.

“We believe they are backing up their below-cost pricing with exclusivity obligations — and that makes it very hard to compete,” Gilchrist said. Who’s getting a deal and who’s paying retail isn’t coincidental, the suit alleges. “We believe when discriminating and charging secretly low prices, they were particularly apt to do that when they were identifying past, current, or prospective Examiner advertisers,” Gilchrist said.

When advertisers purportedly informed Examiner executives that they’d received Chronicle offers too good to refuse — and they could no longer work with the Examiner — management at the papers started talking. Examiner President Todd Vogt met with the Chronicle’s Frank Vega, Mark Adkins, and Jeff Bergin. The suit claims that the Chronicle executives professed ignorance of the alleged scheme.

In mid-May, Adkins, the Chronicle’s former president, was transferred to Hearst’s paper in Beaumont, Texas. This move was characterized as a “promotion” by Vega, the paper’s publisher — who abruptly retired one week later. Bergin remains the paper’s vice president of advertising. All three are named as co-defendants in the case.


‘Money is a tool’

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Jack Abramoff says “legalized bribery” is corrupting our political system, and as a lobbyist who went to prison for taking the practice of buying favors from Congress to obscene new depths, he should know. But if we’re relying on him to help reform that system, a cause he’s now taken up, we could be in real trouble.

Watching Abramoff address “public ethics” at a University of San Francisco class of aspiring political professionals on June 6 was a little surreal. Part charming rogue, part penitent reformer, Abramoff told inside tales of how easily money corrupts even well-intended people who work in Congress.

“I didn’t create a new way of lobbying, I just did more of it,” Abramoff told the students, noting that while some lobbyists had a few good tickets to Washington Redskins or Wizards games to give away to members of Congress, he had 72 of them. And while some lobbyists would take members golfing, “I would put them on a Gulfstream and fly them to Scotland. What’s the difference? It’s still playing golf.”

It was particularly strange for someone of Abramoff’s obviously questionable moral fiber to be addressing political students at this Jesuit-run academic institution, whose local advertising slogans include “How to succeed in business and still go to heaven” and “Wicked smart without the wicked part.”

Yet forgiveness is supposed to be divine, and the instructor who lured Abramoff to speak with his class, local lobbyist and political consultant Alex Clemens, was certainly pleased to attract someone with Abramoff’s inside knowledge, avoiding Abramoff’s usual speaking fees of up to $20,000 by piggybacking on a Southern California speech he gave and paying only his airfare.

I was a bit more skeptical of a guy who equates political donations with bribery while hawking a book and narrow reform proposal — while at the same time soliciting corporate lobbying clients and telling the San Francisco Chronicle that Silicon Valley should be spending far more money to influence politicians.

“It needs a much bigger view of political involvement,” Abramoff told the Chron. “It should be spending much more. They’re not playing as smart as they should, and they could lose big.”

That’s part of the muddle of contradictions that defines Abramoff and his advocacy today, which is consistent with the anti-government, wealth-worshipping conservatism he has pushed with missionary zeal since his college days, along with pals Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, who still play key roles in keeping religious fundamentalists and the rich in the Republican Party fold.

“I’m not against money in the system, I’m against money being used the wrong way in the system,” Abramoff told me after the talk, as I probed the contradictions in his statements and views. My efforts to pin him down caused him to scornfully brand me a “socialist,” the old bully replacing the affable face he showed the students.

“Money is a tool,” Abramoff told me.

Abramoff is also a tool, I decided as I listened to him, although it’s still tough to discern who is wielding him now and where this effort may be headed.

LESSON FOR STUDENTS

Abramoff told the students that even after he got busted in 2005, for a long time he indignantly wondered why he was being prosecuted for the same sorts of actions that were endemic to Washington DC. Eventually, he began to realize he had done something wrong.

“I thought maybe some of this [the charges against him] is right,” he said. “I decided to be honest with myself. Am I the saint I always thought I’d been, or the devil they said I was?”

Yet in the end, Abramoff never did really rethink his own worldview and history — from his early days of shilling for the South African government against efforts to end apartheid to later bribing members of Congress to oppose regulation of sweatshops and sex trafficking in US territories — he just blamed the political system.

“I thought this system is maybe not right,” he told students studying to be a part of that system. “I thought when I got out, I should probably try to help.”

So he wrote a book, Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Corruption From America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist, and he says that he’s been developing political reform legislation that he intends to start pushing next year along with unnamed others.

Abramoff has consulted with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who founded Rootstrikers to push political reforms, but Abramoff doesn’t support many of the central tenets of that and other reform groups, including public financing of elections and overturning “corporate personhood” court rulings that deem political spending by the rich to be a free speech right.

In fact, Abramoff is still a right-winger who shows little interest in limiting the ability of wealthy corporations and individuals to freely spend their money on political candidates and issues, placing him at odds with pretty much the entire political reform movement.

Phillip Ung, a spokesperson for Common Cause — which has been working on these political reform efforts for decades — was a little skeptical about getting help from someone who once embodied the most corrupt and excessive aspects of the current system.

“As much as we enjoy his newfound support for political reform, we also understand that he has a debt to pay, and not just to society,” Ung said of the $44 million in restitution that Abramoff still owes to his victims.

Ung said that a stark example of political corruption like Abramoff represents does help the cause, but that has little to do with his current advocacy. “The reform flag at the federal level goes almost nowhere if there’s not a political scandal,” Ung said, although even that isn’t saying much because, “Congress and DC only have tolerance for political reform one every 10 years or so.”

With Democrats now overwhelmingly controlling California’s Legislature and executive offices, Ung sees opportunities for important reforms here. The most promising is Senate Bill 27, which would require political groups that raise more than $500,000 to disclose their donors.

By contrast, Abramoff’s proposal seems tepid at best, and his strategy for selling it relies on using political spending to elect sympathetic people to Congress, which would seem to undermine his reform message almost as much as pitches to corporate clients to hire him for lobbying consulting services (see www.abramoff.com).

“He seems to be going back to his old ways,” Ung said of Abramoff.

Abramoff said his legislation would broaden the definition of lobbyist, limit their campaign contributions to $500 per election cycle, and prevent public officials from working as lobbyists for 10 years after they leave government.

Then Abramoff said that he and his unspecified “we” will dump money into six contested Congressional races in 2014, trying to elect three Democrats and three Republicans who pledge to support his legislation, following that up in 2016 by targeting 25 to 50 races.

“Then and only then will Congress take it seriously,” Abramoff concluded, arguing that politicians respond to losing their jobs more than other means of persuasion. He’s going to use aggressive political spending to win the reforms he seeks, which don’t really do anything to limit political spending.

When I asked Abramoff how increased political spending can reform a political system corrupted by money, he replied, “You play with the tools and the battlefield you’re on.”

THE SYSTEM, OR ITS SPONSORS?

Abramoff blames Congress for corruption far more than the lobbyists or wealthy special interests who are doing the corrupting, noting how difficult it is to get political reforms approved by legislators who want to later cash in on their public service.

“The lobbyists are a response to the system set up by Congress,” he told the students, building on his earlier point that “99 percent of everything I did was legal, and that’s a bigger deal than the 1 percent that was illegal. That’s what has to change.”

But he acknowledges that reforming the system will be “impossibly difficult” because those who are invested in the current system will always find loopholes to any new regulation. “They’re extremely brilliant people and their goal is to get around things,” he said.

Omitted from Abramoff’s recitation of what’s wrong in Washington are the people doing the corrupting, that other 1 percent, the very rich. When I asked him about how he can really attack institutionalized political corruption without going after the cash that feeds that corruption, he told me, “I tend to be nervous about a political approach that says, ‘It’s the rich.”

Abramoff actually supports the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling, which ended controls on the political spending of wealthy individuals and corporations, telling the students, “We all want certain corporations to have the rights that we individuals have.”

Abramoff also seems to dismiss the possibility of a grassroots political reform effort, saying that any change in the system would need support from both the left and the right, and the latter will kill any effort to actually removes private money from political campaigns.

“You’re not going to have federal financing of elections. The right will die before they let that happen,” Abramoff said.

That might have been the most insightful thing that Abramoff said to the students, although he certainly didn’t intend it the way that I heard it: maybe the right needs to die, in the political sense, before the system that Abramoff both decries and supports will change.

City College overseers bar most speakers from meeting

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The Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges has the power to close City College of San Francisco, and students and faculty in line at the San Francisco Airport Marriott June 7 were there to hear about the fate of their school.

But at the only public meeting available to meet with City College’s accreditors in more than seven months, some 30 people were barred from entry.

The doors were were shut, police said, because there were only about 20 seats available.

Even the San Francisco Chronicle’s higher education reporter, Nanette Asimov, was left outside, haggling with officers to get into the meeting — and she called ahead to reserve a seat.

Lalo Gonzalez, a City College student who was recently elected to the Associated Students Senate, was dismayed at not being able to meet with the accreditation agency. “I would’ve assumed they would have reached out to students,” he said.

But they didn’t.

The commission made its decision June 6 on whether City College would keep its accreditation — without which the school would lose state funding and close. But that decision won’t be revealed until early July.
The accreditors put the school sanction for a number of reasons, mostly fiscal but also relating to measuring student achievement. The college has 85,000 students and nearly 2,600 faculty.

The meeting was held at the same Marriott used many times in the past for meetings, the commissioners said. But unlike normal meetings, on June 7 there were four police officers, two from Burlingame PD and two from City College, who patrolled more than 60 feet of metal barriers erected around the corner.

Part of that may have been reaction to the 30 demonstrators from the Save CCSF coalition (www.saveccsf.org) that protested outside the accreditor’s closed meeting Wednesday.

“I was shocked that we couldn’t get in,” student Sharon Shatterly said.

No bags, recording devices, or cameras were allowed in the meeting. As a private entity, the accreditation commission does not fall under California open access laws like the Brown Act.
Inside, 24 commissioners from the agency were seated, dealing with the day-to-day business of managing matters of California’s 112 community colleges, seemingly unconcerned about the dozens who waited outside wishing to speak. In fact, only two public speakers were allowed to address the accreditors.

One was Teeka James, a San Mateo community college teacher speaking on behalf of the California Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. She read aloud a litany of complaints about the accreditors, alleging that the teams sent to evaluate community colleges didn’t have enough faculty members, that the policies of the accreditors weren’t values “widely accepted” by educators or other accrediting bodies, and that there was a lack of transparency in how they operate.

She especially bemoaned the agency’s conflict of interest —  the commission president is Barbara Beno, and her husband served on the team that visited and evaluated City College a year ago, which resulted in the severe sanction the school is under today.

The president and the reviewing agents are supposed to be independent entities.

“To serve the students and people of California properly, ACCJC has to change or be delisted by the Department of Education,” James said. “The time is now.”

She was basically summarizing an official complaint about the accreditation agency sent to the Department of Education last month. It’s 280 pages long, and the allegations are serious.

After her presentation, the members of the commission started to grill her.

“What qualifications do you have? What is the source of your evidence?” said Steven Kinsella, who was named in the official complaint as someone whose ties to business constituted a conflict of interest to his role as a commissioner on the ACCJC. He is a “public member” of the agency.

The questions kept coming – and some were about James herself.

“I don’t think they took her very seriously,” said Fred Teti, president of the City College Academic Senate.

James also argued that the accreditors needed to be more transparent about their process, which was exemplified by the dozens of people who weren’t let into the meeting. Beno disagreed.

“We’re a private institution,” she said. “You can imagine a college president comes in and they discuss matters that could be embarrassing or challenging. That can’t occur in public.”
 
Outside, the students who had come to talk to the commission that may potentially close their school sat beside each other in the sun, watching the blue of the bay from the hotel’s patio.

And what would Gonzalez and his fellow students have said to the panel if they had gotten in?

“I would’ve asked about if they knew how this was affecting my people, people of color. I would’ve asked about EOPS,” he said, which is the second chance program at City College for those coming out of prison. “They’ve cut over 30 counselors, they’re dismantling the school in the name of accreditation.”

Gonzalez and all of San Francisco will have to wait until the beginning of July to find out what will happen to City College.