› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Late last month, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times managed to get a story about IRS layoffs picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and placed on page three. That’s no small challenge, even in one of the most politically charged cities in the nation. It was not a sexy story, neither to liberals nor to conservatives.
But the story’s timing was impeccable.
Johnston reported that the IRS was poised to lay off 157 of its 345 estate- and gift-tax attorneys working at agency offices throughout the country — a division of investigators that generates more revenue for the federal treasury by catching tax cheats than any other group of auditors, about $2,200 for every hour that they work.
Dismantling the estate tax has been among the most aggressive crusades taken up by the Republican Party and its friendliest contributors for at least the last decade. Leaked to the Times by IRS whistle-blowers, the story about the layoffs surfaced just days before Congress rejected for the fifth time since 2001 an attempt by fiscal conservatives to get rid of the estate tax. The legislation failed despite Republican control of both the House and Senate. Even tempting Democrats with the first federal minimum-wage hike in 10 years couldn’t do the trick.
So how could defending the estate tax and the right of the IRS to collect it survive two branches of the federal government dominated by a political party that holds most taxation in contempt? It’s because families awash in seemingly infinite wealth are the only ones who get hit by the tax — despite false claims made by the GOP that the estate tax kills small businesses.
California filed more estate-tax returns in 2001 than any other state in the country by a margin of thousands. The only state that came close was Florida, and California still filed around 6,000 more returns, according to the most recent IRS numbers.
In other words, the Golden State is filthy, stinking rich and more vulnerable to the estate tax than other states. GOP party leaders in Washington insist the issue will return in the form of a new bill, and the IRS is behaving as if the estate tax has already disappeared. If it does, the richest families in the United States — highly concentrated in California and the Bay Area — stand to collectively save billions of dollars.
The Bay Area contains within its sloping hills and mammoth upstart tech firms higher income levels and more general wealth than almost anywhere else in the country. In fact, the San Francisco metropolitan area is the fourth wealthiest in the nation, according to Merrill Lynch, and two tiny cities between here and Mountain View, where Google is based, have the highest per capita median income in the United States. Those two cities, Atherton and Hillsborough, have a combined population of about 17,000, and while many of these techie tycoons are young, the day will come when they die and pass millions of dollars on to their descendants. Will there be enough tax investigators available to audit those estates? Will there even be an estate tax?
Following Johnston’s revelations, a Times editorial suggested the layoffs were a politically motivated attempt by the Bush White House to circumvent the legislative process. What it can’t accomplish through Congress it can do by handcuffing the tax police.
“This is an election year issue,” said Jay Adkisson, a private sector tax lawyer from Laguna Niguel who documents egregious cases of fraud on his Web site, Quatloos! “They’re trying to appease Republican voters who were angry over the failure of Congress to do something about the estate tax.”
The story of the IRS layoffs didn’t just catch the attention of readers. Congress responded too. Twenty-three lawmakers — including, somewhat predictably, Democrat Tom Lantos of California’s 12th District — immediately fired off a letter to Bush-appointed IRS commissioner Mark Everson demanding to know if the agency could now effectively investigate estate-tax avoiders.
None but the most obscenely wealthy Americans pay even a dime in taxes when they earn an inheritance upon a death in the family. Estates aren’t hit with taxes until they reach a value of $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple. Only estates exceeding those amounts are assessed any tax, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
And if the family hires a savvy tax attorney or estate planner, those nontaxable values could easily rise to $10 million, according to Adkisson.
A research director at the Brookings Institution named Diane Lim Rogers opined in the Chronicle last May that because of current exemptions, about one half of one percent of dead people will actually be followed to the grave by the tax man. Besides, it’s the beneficiaries of an inheritance who pay. Despite grand claims made by Republicans that the beneficiaries of an estate will be paying half of what they’re handed in taxes, even the estates eligible for taxation see on average a 20 percent rate, according to the CBPP, which relied on the IRS for its statistics. For those who do pay estate taxes, deep discounts are available through charitable donations.
“The argument made about lots of people being ‘burdened’ by estate taxes is that they go through lots of convoluted tax-planning strategies in order to avoid the estate tax, so even if they don’t end up paying any estate tax, they are still adversely affected [burdened] by the existence of the tax,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.
But even considering the cost of estate planning, Rogers said, no one would rationally spend more avoiding taxes than they would actually paying them.
Keith Schiller, a respected private sector tax attorney based in Orinda, earns princely sums teaching millionaires how to take advantage of loopholes in the federal tax code. He’s not opposed to the estate tax on principle; he just wants to simplify the way his clients pay their dues.
“I do believe the estate tax serves a social function of breaking down generational dynastic wealth,” he said in a phone interview.
Schiller said the IRS is conducting nowhere near the estate-tax audits it once did and that may be the only justification for laying off auditors. Still, the knowledge required by agency investigators to analyze and understand complex estate-tax avoidance schemes is immense. About 50 estate- and gift-tax attorneys based in Southern California and the Bay Area exclusively handle returns filed for the IRS from inside the state.
David Dean, president of the San Jose–based National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Local 238, said it’s not clear which offices will have layoffs. All 350 estate-tax auditors are being offered buyout deals that include their pensions plus up to $25,000, or $13,000 after taxes.
Dean and the NTEU, which represents the auditors and opposes the layoffs, insist the IRS isn’t entirely sure how much money is hidden from the agency each year through either elaborate trusts or simple refusals to file. It’s known as the “tax gap,” and three days after Johnston’s story appeared, the inspector general of the IRS, J. Russell George, told Congress that the agency’s estimated figures for delinquent estate taxes hadn’t been updated in years. His report described a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the IRS expressed no desire to update the figures because “consideration is being given to eliminating or reducing the number of people required to pay estate taxes.” The last estimate was about $8 billion, but that figure is for the most part unreliable, he testified.
But the law still exists, regardless of whether an anti–estate tax agenda eventually succeeds in Congress.
“If a law is on the books, you still have to close down on the cheaters,” said JJ MacNab, an estate planner who spent 18 years in the Bay Area working for tech clients. “If you don’t enforce a law on the books, no one’s going to have faith in the system.”
MacNab now lives in Washington and as a hobby assists people who buy into tax-avoidance schemes that turn out to be illegal. She said these days, it’s low-income earners who are likelier to be audited, a conclusion Johnston also came to in his 2003 best-seller, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else. The book shows how the recent layoffs are a small part of a larger movement to weaken the IRS’s investigative capabilities.
And that movement begins with those who can afford to fund it. Who are they? Well, they’re not your average farmer.
Consistently during the debate over estate taxes, the GOP has co-opted the populist language that once dominated America’s agrarian communities by claiming that the “death tax” bleeds poor farming families dry. It’s a spectacular rhetorical tool, but it’s an ugly distortion.
In fact, it’s the nation’s wealthiest families who have led the charge to dismantle the estate tax, not its small farmers, according to an April report put together by two groups, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy. The analysis identified a handful of enormously wealthy families that stand to save more than $70 billion if their lobbying efforts succeed. And that lobbying effort, the report notes, has amounted to around $490 million in direct and indirect lobbying expenditures since 1998.
The list includes Ernest Gallo of the E & J Gallo Winery, based in Modesto, and John A. Sobrato of Sobrato Development, listed by Forbes as one of the largest commercial landlords in Silicon Valley, with a familial net worth of approximately $2 billion. The Gallo family is reportedly worth about $1 billion.
The rest of the list is in part a who’s who of America’s billionaires: Wal-Mart’s Walton family; Charles and David Koch of the nation’s largest privately held company, the Kansas-based Koch Industries (also benefactors of libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, founded in San Francisco); and the Dorrance family of the Campbell Soup Co.
Ernest Gallo’s participation in antitax measures is particularly well documented. Elected officials he has supported with contributions in the past sponsored federal legislation in the ’70s and ’80s that allowed for millions of dollars in estate-tax exemptions for the Gallo family. One bill was even dubbed by estate-tax supporters the “Gallo amendment.”
The Public Citizen report links the Gallos to anti–estate tax lobbyist Patricia Soldano and her Orange County–based Policy and Taxation Group (PTG), which has spent $4 million lobbying solely against the estate tax since 1998. While the authors are unable to pinpoint exactly how much the Gallos had given to PTG directly, both the Sobratos and the Gallos are listed as clients of the group. The Gallos have reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars supporting individual candidates.
It’s doubtful that very many people who actually paid estate taxes last year would know how to repair a grain harvester. In 2001, Johnston of the Times famously challenged the anti–estate tax American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bush administration to find just one example of a farm estate being sold to pay the taxes on it. Johnston reported they were unable to do so.
Estate planner Schiller likened opponents of the estate tax to medieval villagers who complained of gout to prove how well nourished they were.
“People want to believe they have an estate-tax problem,” he said, “so they can feel successful.” SFBG
Bay Guardian Archives
NOISE: Sleater-Kinney’s last stand
Guardian music intern Michael Harkin made the trip up to Portland, Ore., for the last Sleater-Kinney show at the Crystal Ballroom on Aug. 12. Here’s his review:
A warm Saturday evening in Portland set the scene as Sleater-Kinney laid their axes down. The three of them – drummer Janet Weiss and singer-guitarists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein – have an iconic status that’s duly earned and responsible for some of the best rock records in recent memory.
It all went down in the Crystal Ballroom, where the Thermals, terse garage-poppers and fellow Portland residents, opened the show. Next Eddie Vedder made a brief, flashbulb-bathed appearance onstage, playing a surprisingly well-received two-song set that included an acoustic, Dylan-esque political tune as well as a song sung with Janet Weiss as he played ukulele.
Other than the thank-yous and song dedications, the show didn’t have the resonance of a last hurrah: the heaviness normally characterizing their shows was sustained over more than 25 songs and two hours, filmed and recorded for later release on a DVD or live album.
Both at this show and on record, they never seemed like a band that had run out of ideas. Last year’s The Woods (Sub Pop), from which the set drew pretty heavily, was so damn good – it somehow proved refreshing even as it came from a band whose work never became tired or contrived. Opening banger “The Fox,” as well as the singles, “Entertain” and “Jumpers,” were among the most raucous that night, carrying the kind of stomp value rarely seen outside of Led Zeppelin’s discography.
Brownstein had the most rock-star demeanor of any up there, adding arm-swing flourishes to her guitar-playing, while Tucker would lift her right arm like a choir leader at a song’s chorus, subtly imploring the sing-alongs already requisite for a crowd at a band’s final show. They traversed their back catalog in properly comprehensive fashion, where “Oh!” and “You’re No Rock ‘n’ Roll Fun” sat alongside “Words and Guitar” and the incendiary “Dig Me Out,” all prompting floor fluctuations that bordered on the unnerving. Weiss’s cool, adroit intensity behind the kit left one relieved that her other band, Quasi, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
Your humble writer may have been hoping for a “Get Up,” but there was really nothing else to ask from the women, who totally killed throughout. It’s sad to see one of the Pacific Northwest’s greatest assets have to go, but records as awesome as The Hot Rock (Kill Rock Stars) should inspire many bands for years to come.
The slither king: the complete interview
This is not a story about the feverish hype swirling around Snakes on a Plane. It’s not a review of the film, because Snakes on a Plane is so critic-proof that snotty journalists like me don’t get to see it before it opens. And it’s not yet another piece in praise of Snakes star Samuel L. Jackson’s inherent awesomeness (not that I’m denying it, of course). What follows is an interview with the individual who just may be the coolest cat in America right now — snake handler Jules Sylvester, the guy responsible for charming winning performances out of Jackson’s forked-tongued co-stars. Sylvester, a Hollywood veteran who’s wrangled critters on everything from Men in Black (thousands of cockroaches) to Out of Africa (lions, dogs, owls) to Arachnophobia (duh), is bar none the jolliest person I’ve ever talked to at 8:30 in the morning on the subject of killer snakes.
Image of Albino Monocled Cobra from Chameleon Counters.
[Note: this is the complete transcript of the interview that appears, in edited form, in this week’s Guardian print version.]
May the “Force” be with you?
Somewhere between our best intentions (to rent The Constant Gardener, no less) and the new-release wall at Lost Weekend, we plunged into the vortex of Edison Force. The pull of Justin Timberlake’s movie-star debut — sundry cameos don’t count, including that worth-reconsidering turn as a flaming make-up artist in the will-Lance-Bass-get-the-girl comedy On the Line — was stronger than the Death Star’s tractor beam. Despite debuting at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, and boasting a somewhat prestigious cast (besides JT, you get Morgan Freeman, LL Cool J, Dylan McDermott, Cary Elwes, Piper Perabo, and an oddly coiffed Kevin Spacey), Edison Force went straight to video. And oh, we were ever about to find out why.
Why people get mad at the media, part 7, a letter to the editor of Business Week/McGraw Hill
Note to the reader:
This is a copy of a letter I emailed today to the unidentified “editor filter” at bw@businessweek.com, as instructed yesterday by Assistant Managing Editor Mary Kunz at Business Week/McGraw Hill headquarters in New York City. I copied her and Editor-in-Chief Stephen J.Adler and Executive Editors John A. Byrne and Kathy Rebello. I asked for an acknowledgment that they had received my letter and that, if there was any editing, that they show it to me in advance to help prevent further “correction” messes. I also asked that the letter run in both the print and online BW magazines. Let us see what happens.
Coming soon: due to popular demand, I will soon be supplying details on the Potrero Hill martini, how to make it and where to get it.
Letter to the editor of Business Week/McGraw Hill:
In your front page story on Digg.com, you made two major errors in the first three lines of the first paragraph of your lead article. (“How This Kid Made $60 Million in l8 months.”) First, you wrote that Digg.Com was situated “above the grungy offices of the SF Weekly in Potrero Hill.” This is incorrect: Digg.com is situated above the offices of the San Francisco Bay Guardian in the Guardian building, which we own. SF Weekly, our major competitor, has offices on the other side of Mission Bay. Second: our offices are not “grungy.”
You rightly corrected the first mistake in your online edition (not in your print edition). But you have refused, again and again, to honor my simple request for a retraction and explanation in your print and online editions of how your reporters and editors got their facts so wrong. Your reporters and editors did not visit the Guardian offices nor can they specify just what is so”grungy” about the Guardian, our offices, and our building. In short, your correction has only made an “atrocious” mistake even more “atrocious,” the word used by your writer in her conversation with me. Why? What great journalistic principle is at stake in refusing to correct or remove the word “grungy” from your story?
So I posted on my Bruce blog at SFBG.com some candid snapshots of our building and our offices. I invite your staff and your readers to go to my blog and judge for yourself. And I invite you to leave your splendorous offices in mid-town Manhattan and come to San Francisco. I will give you a personal tour of our “grungy offices” and serve you a Potrero Hill martini in my office.
Bruce B. Brugmann, founder, editor, and publisher, San Francisco Bay Guardian, printing the news and raising hell and spreading sunshine inside and outside San Francisco since l966
Why WiFi?
By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are so intent on following through with their promise to deliver free wireless Internet to SF residents that they’ve basically dispensed with seeking input from the public or Board of Supervisors, locked into private and protracted negotiations with Google and Earthlink, and simply decided not to do the board-approved study of Sup. Tom Ammiano’s plan for a municipal broadband system. The unilateral, secretive approach has driven journalists and activists nuts. But there is an opportunity tonight at 6 p.m. to weigh in during a hastily called and little noticed hearing before the Department of Telecom and Info Services. Media Alliance has been raising hell over the issue and this week the group is releasing a study showing that the city could make $2 million per year with a municipal Internet system, as opposed to going with Newsom’s so-called “free” system, which wouldn’t make the city any money and would subject citizens to targetted advertising. The tradeoff might be worth it, but there are still too many unknown details to know that, so show up this evening to talk about it.
Why WiFi?
By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are so intent on following through with their promise to deliver free wireless Internet to SF residents that they’ve basically dispensed with seeking input from the public or Board of Supervisors, locked into private and protracted negotiations with Google and Earthlink, and simply decided not to do the board-approved study of Sup. Tom Ammiano’s plan for a municipal broadband system. The unilateral, secretive approach has driven journalists and activists nuts. But there is an opportunity tonight at 6 p.m. to weigh in during a hastily called and little noticed hearing before the Department of Telecom and Info Services. Media Alliance has been raising hell over the issue and this week the group is releasing a study showing that the city could make $2 million per year with a municipal Internet system, as opposed to going with Newsom’s so-called “free” system, which wouldn’t make the city any money and would subject citizens to targetted advertising. The tradeoff might be worth it, but there are still too many unknown details to know that, so show up this evening to talk about it.
Sue Bierman memorial, Sept. 3
By Sarah Phelan
A memorial will be held for Sue Bierman on Sunday, Sept. 3, 2-4pm at Delancey St, 600 Embarcadero.
News that former San Francisco Sup. Sue Bierman died on the afternoon of Monday August 7 after her car crashed into a dumpster in the Cole Valley, got the current supervisors sharing memories of her at the August 8 Board of Supes meeting.
Sup. Gerardo Sandoval said “volumes could be written about the accomplishments” of this woman, who was “probably a grandmother/sister figure to many of us.”
Sup. Aaron Peskin called her “an incredible person, an FDR-type Democrat,” who was behind the demolition of the old Embarcadero freeway.”Said Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, “she was a hero in so many battles in San Francisco..most recently, when we were trying to bring attention to excessive, disproportionate closure of schools, Sue Bierman and her daughter were on the front line. She was very disarming, but very strong. I will miss her dearly.”
Sup. Sean Elsbernd acknowledged that “should she and I have served on the board together, we would have had a few disagreements. I’ll miss her look.”
Sup. Tom Ammiano recalled how,”When Carole Migden put on lipstick, Sue would follow, You knew something was going to happen, as if a secret handhske was involved…I don’t know if there’s a highway to heaven, but thanks to Sue it ain’t a freeway.”
Sup. Dufty remembered how she had a lot of influence over Mayor Willie Brown. “If you heard him cussing at Sue, you knew she’d won one over him.”
Sup. Alioto-Pier, noting how she and Bierman often did not agree when they were both on the Port Commission said, “She very eloquently told you, she was very forceful, she was always the first person to call, it was dismaying to hear her voice on the machine, saying, “michela,” in a shaky voice.
Sup. Daly said she was the champion of young adults–and renters.
‘She understood what made San Francisco great.”
And Gloria Young, clerk of the board, recalled trying to get Bierman, who served on the board from 1992-2000, to vacate her office at noon on the day she was termed out, so to tidy up before the new supe [Peskin] arrived.
“Absolutely not,” bierman is said to have said. “I’ll be working until the end of the day, It’s immportant to acknowledge thew constituents who put us in office.”
“And she left me with a big stack of books,” added Peskin. “They’re still on the shelf.”
The Race is On: Candidates for local Nov. 7 races
By Sarah Phelan
Sixty-six took out papers. Forty-one filed, meaning that over one-third of the potential candidates in local races in the Nov. 7 election, bailed before the train even left the station.
So who’s in the running?
On the Board of Supes front, there are five races.
District 2 incumbent Michela Alioto-Pier, who has not accepted the voluntary expenditure ceiling and does not intend to participate in the public financing program, faces one lone challenger: business management consultant Vilma Guinto Peoro, who has accepted a voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in the pubic financing program.
In District 4, seven candidates are vying to fill the vacancy Sup. Fiona Ma created as Democratic nominee for Assembly District 12, (where she is running against the Green’s Barry Hermanson.) Mayor Gavin Newsom has endorsed Doug Chan, who lent his name to PG&E’s anti-Prop. D campaign, has not accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and does not intend to participate in public financing campaign. Chan, who also got Ma’s endorsement and has served on the San Francisco Police Commission, Board of Permit Appeals, the Rent Board and the Assessment Appeals Board, has promised to return SFPD to its legally-required numbers (it currently operates 15 percent below voter-mandated leval), and upgrade policies, practices and technology, and would likely become the establishment conservative on the Board,
Other contenders are business consultant Ron Dudum, who lost against Ma in 2002 and against then Sup. Leland Yee in 2000, anti-tax advocate Edmund Jew, who would also be popular with the district’s conservative base, and San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commissioner and Fiona Ma-supporter Houston Zheng, David Ferguson, Patrick Maguire and Jaynry Mak, though Neither Maguire nor Mak, who has already raised $100,000, had filed papers as of Aug. 11, perhaps because District 4 has a Aug. 16 filing extension, thanks to departing incumbent Ma.
District 6 incumbent Chris Daly, who has accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in public financing campaign, appears to face the biggest fight—at least in terms of numbers, with seven challengers hoping to fill his shoes. Of these Mayor Gavin Newsom has portrayed former Michela Alioto-Pier aide Rob Black, who has accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in public financing campaign, as “the best contender to lessen divisiveness in the district.”
Fellow challengers are Mathew Drake, Viliam Dugoviv, Manuel Jimenez , Davy Jones, Robert Jordan and George Dias.
District 8 incumbent Bevan Dufty faces stiff opposition from local resident and Oakland deputy city attorney Alix Rosenthal, who was instrumental in turning around the city’s Elections Department, has worked on turning the former Okaland Army Base over to the Redevelopment Agency and has helped rebuild the National Women’s Political Caucus. Rosenthal, who is running on a platform of affordable housing, sustainability and violence prevention, also wants to keep SF weird.
In District 10, Incumbent Sophie Maxwell, who says a November ballot measure opposing the Bayview Redvelopment Plan is based on fear and unfairness, has five challengers: Rodney Hampton Jr., Marie Harrison, Espanola Jackson. Dwayne Jusino, and former Willie Brown crony Charlie Walker. Of these, the most serious are Harrison, helped shut down the Hunter’s Point PG&E plant and has worked for decades to fight all the pollution that’s being dumped on southeast residents, and Espanola Jackson, who has fought for welfare rights, affordable housing, seniors and the Muwekma Ohlone.
In other races, Phil Ting runs unopposed as Assessor-Recorder.
18 challengers are fighting over three seats on the Board of Education, one of which is occupied by incumbent Dan Kelly, and six candidates are vying for three seats on the Community College Board, one of which is occupied by incumbent John Rizzo.
A brighter Sunday at the Chronicle
Things improved at the Chronicle with yesterday’s weekend edition, compared to some of the fluff that graced its pages last week.
Congrats to cops-and-crime reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken for snagging the story on an out-of-control snitch named Marvin Jeffery Jr. that the San Francisco Police Department used to arrest a suspect in the 2004 shooting death of Officer Isaac Espinoza. An identity-theft master, Jeffery was repeatedly released from jail in exchange for information he’d provided to the department. And each time, he went right back to formulating fraudulent monetary schemes making somewhere around $3 million in the process. Now the department is not sure where he is.
Why people get mad at the media, part 6, “Grungy” or “not grungy,” the Guardian presents some candid photos of its offices and building
Well, to continue this “grungy” saga, Mary Kuntz, an assistant managing editor at Business Week/McGraw Hill, called me from the splendorous McGraw Hill building in midtown Manhattan.
She was, it turned out, the designated editor and stonewaller to deal with my complaints that a cover story in the Aug. l4 edition of Business Week had made three major errors in the first three lines of the lead story. The first errors: the article referred to the “grungy offices offices of the SF Weekly,” our chain competitor, when the offices were those of the Guardian. The second error: our offices are not “grungy,” as you can see by the candid photos below.
She repeated what others down the masthead had told me before: that the magazine had indeed corrected what she called “the factual error” (the one misidentifying our offices as the offices of our competitor). But she said the magazine would not correct or remove the word “grungy” because the use of that adjective was a matter of opinion.
How, I asked again (see my earlier blog items), could she and BW/MH say that our offices were “grungy” when the reporters on the article never came into our offices and could not specify what was “grungy” about the Guardian, our offices, or our building, which we own? Did BW/MH just intentionally want to annoy me further and make the situation worse? She was adamant, as if she were upholding some major journalistic principle and the institutional honor and structural integrity of BW/MH. If so, what in the world was the principle she was fighting for over the use of one word: “grungy?” She wouldn’t say. More: she would not send or fax me the company’s retraction and corrections or reader response policy. She kept saying, we only correct factual mistakes, write us a letter, this is our corrections policy. And so the “grungy offices” phrase remains in the print and online versions of the article for the duration and my simple request to get a full correction ended up only making an “atrocious” mistake even more “atrocious,” to use the phrase of the reporter in confessing her original “factual” mistake to me.
I realize all of this might get tedious but there is a serious point here: this incident illustrates the kind of corporate arrogance and stonewalling that make people mad at the media. All BW/MH had to do was to say in effect, sorry, we made a mistake, we will correct it, we regret the error. And not jack me around for l0 days over a phony charge that they could not back up or explain. (Summary report coming on the company’s stonewalling policy on corrections.)
Note the pictures below, taken by Guardian co-founder and co-publisher Jean Dibble. From top left: the side of our three story building, known as the Guardian Building, at l35 Mississippi St., at the bottom of Potrero Hill in San Francisco; the front of our building; our lobby; our reception desk; our conference room; the stairs in the middle of our advertising offices on the first floor; Jean Dibble’s office, and the alternative view of San Francisco from Potrero Hill from our rooftop.
Grungy or not grungy? That is the pressing issue of the day. I’m ready for a Potrero Hill martini. B3
For sale: hooded jacket and sunglasses (slightly used)
The Smoking Gun posted the court document directing the U.S. Marshals Service to sell off Ted Kaczynski’s property — except the stuff pertaining to, you know, bomb-making and whatnot. Proceeds go to the victims. So far, no word on which online auction site will do the honors.
Where are Hearst and the Chronicle? The conglomerate cometh
Yet another signal on what is happening to daily newspaper competition in San Francisco and the Bay Area:
The Contra Costa Times, now a MediaNews/Singleton paper, ran some minimalist stories Friday by George Avalos on the new developments in the new conglomerate that is poised to destroy local newspaper competition, according to a Singleton filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission inWashington.
Among other things, the story disclosed that Hearst made a $299 million equity investment in MediaNews and that MediaNews had “obtained a financing package from a syndicate of lenders that enables the newspaper company to borrow up to $597 million to help finance its acquisitions…The syndicate of lenders includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, General Electric Capital Corp and several financial and other organizations.” Not a word in the Friday Chronicle. And only skimpy details in the CCTimes and Oakland Tribune coverage. Why? The conglomerate cometh.
More troubling signals:
+Serious newsroom cuts are coming: In an accompanying article, Avalos reported “some pain looms.” He quoted Kevin Keane, the new vice president/new for the new partnership north, as saying that “Some tough choices are going to have to be made.”
+And there are the stock ludicrous statements about “competition.” “We want to take it to the Chronicle,” says Chris Lopez, editor of the Contra Costa Times. “This puts us on a path to attack them in areas where they have strength.” Then he writes without gulping that “MediaNews officials say they believe the combined resources of the papers, along with a readership clout that surpasses the Chronicle, will help in the newspaper wars.” And then he quotes John Armstrong, who heads MediaNews operations in the East Bay, as saying, “We are winning the battle against the Chronicle. This will hasten the inevitable.” Did he or anybody else on any of the conglomerate papers ever call an outside expert, a journalism or law school professor, for some independent comment on this market allocation scheme? Or are they already under the shackles?
I suggest all staffers on all the McClatchy/Singleton/Hearst/Gannett/Stephens conglomerate papers take a look at the complete Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto antitrust filings in federal court and the SEC filings. And I hope they follow the story along as it develops. The emerging one newspaper company for the Bay Area is there for all to see. B3
Why people get mad at the media, part 5, up pops a real editor at BusinessWeek/McGraw Hill
Following up on my reports of the BW/MGH stonewall on my modest request for a full correction to what has become an “atrocious” correction:
I got a call today (Friday) on my answering machine from Mary Kuntz, who is listed as an assistant managing editor on the BM/MGH masthead. She said that the Aug. l4th Business Week with the original errors was a double issue, every one was off this week, and so there would be no issue this week for any correction to appear. She said she was leaving the office for the weekend, but would call me on Monday. She said she was “very sorry” that I felt that “we have been unresponsive because that is not what we aim for.” I called her back and thanked her for the call but pointed out that the online version of the story still stood on the world wide internet with the phrase “grungy SF Bay Guardian offices in Potrero Hill.” I asked her to fax me a copy of the BM/MGH corrections and retraction and reader response policy.
Meanwhile, Erik Cushman, the publisher of the Monterey County Weekly, blogged in with a suggestion: that we take some pictures of the controversial Guardian offices and let the readers decide. I have assigned my wife and co-publisher Jean Dibble to take the pictures and hope to have them up early next week. Stay tuned. (I know, I know, that is a broadcast term. What is the correct blogging term?) B3
NOISE: Yes, there is a Grandaddy, Virginia
Yes, Grandaddy may be gone but the band’s not forgotten. In particular, poobah Jason Lytle hasn’t spaced on his group’s songs — though he did stumble and not quite fall during “Jeez Louise” off his latest album, Just Like the Fambly Cat. It was a sweet, hypnotic, dimly lit, and not-quite-acoustic set on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at Cafe du Nord, the first of two nights at our fave former speakeasy. Lytle switched between guitar and keyboards, playing with multi-instrumentalist Rusty Miller from Jackpot.
Nice Vans, by the way, JL.
Why people get mad at the media, part 4, will guerrilla email help?
It looks to me as if there isn’t anybody from Business Week /McGraw Hill that will be graduating from the Rock Rapids College of Community Journalism (see my first blog about journalistic principles as practiced at the Lyon County Reporter in Rock Rapids, Iowa.) The Business Week folks really don’t want to deal with readers who have legitimate complaints.
As you will remember from my last post, the stonewall continues. The Business Week author Jessi Hempel refused to correct the erroneous statement about the “grungy SF Bay Guardian offices,” and sent me merrily along to her editor in New York, Elizabeth Weiner. I called Weiner twice, on two successive days, and left messages on her answering machine asking for a full correction on the Business Week errors. No reply.
So I finally figured out her email address and sent her an email. I got an automated email response that said she is “on vacation and will return on Aug. 28th.” Great. That will be well after the next issue is out, the issue that ought to have contained a full correction. It would have been nice if I had been told that she was on vacation and it would have been even nicer if I had been given another real live editor for me to talk to. Are all the editors in hiding at Business Week/McGraw Hill?
So, since I was still getting stonewalled after almost a week of trying to get a full correction and explanation of the errors, I figured out the email address formula of Business Week staffers and sent off guerrilla emails to them with my request for a full correction to everyone from the editor in chief Stephen J. Adler to President William P. Kupper Jr to President of Information and Media for McGraw Hill Glenn S. Goldberg, to others listed on the masthead of Business Week. I suggested that they go to my blogs for background on the issue. Most important: I asked for a copy of the Business Week/McGraw Hill policy on corrections and retractions and dealing with reader complaints. No reply as yet, but I will keep you posted.
The operating principle seems to be: set up a track field of hurdles and make it as difficult as possible for a reader (particularly a reader with a legitimate complaint) to talk to a real editor, to get a full correction, to get some satisfaction for a grievance. The point: It doesn’t have to be this way, as you will soon see. Stay tuned. B3, still grunging away down here in my office at the bottom of Potrero Hill
Peskin’s political playbook
By Steven T. Jones
Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin helped engineer the placement of some solid progressive measures on the fall ballot yesterday — and unsuccessfully tried to derail one that would give sick days to all SF workers. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association had been trying to weaken the measure with fewer sick days (five, rising to 10 after an employee works three years in the same job, which few in this category of worker do) and exemption of part-time employees (which, again, is most workers who don’t get sick days). Measure advocates say they were willing to compromise a little on the former request, but not the latter. So Peskin at the last minute not only said he won’t support the measure (after advocates say his aides said he probably would), but he also convinced Sup. Sophie Maxwell to pull her support, even though she’d already signed on the dotted line. That might have left advocates without the four supervisors needed to place the measure on the ballot, but they convinced Sup. Jake McGoldrick to lend his support. But in the end, election law requires all sponsoring supervisors to agree to let a colleague withdraw, and since Sup. Tom Ammiano couldn’t be found as the 5 p.m. deadline neared, the measure ended up going to the ballot with supervisors Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, Ammiano and Maxwell as sponsors.
So what happened here? Well, it’s more than meets the eye.
Gypsies, tramps, and thieves
It was Cher done him in. Oh, Bradley the time-management-challenged hippie, we’ll miss your non-sequitors about beards and whales and eagles.
Cop measure headed for full board
By Sarah Phelan
The San Francisco Board of Supes Rules Committee voted 2-1 to send a resolution opposing federal meddling in local police investigations and calling for support of California’s reporter’s shield law, as well as support of similar bills at the federal level that are currently working their way through Congress.
The best things in life aren’t free
By Cheryl Eddy
Maxing out my inbox’s credit line today: a press release heralding the Westfield San Francisco Centre‘s September 28 grand opening. The $460 mil project is sandwiched between Walgreens and the mall that’s already down by Fifth St and Market (you know, the one with the spiral escalator — across the street from that “Jesus Loves You” guy). It’s freakin’ huge — 1.5 million square feet, to be exact.
From the curiously punctuated PR missive:
Topping the hoop
› culture@sfbg.com
“Wowza, how’d you get that gnarly bruise?” wide-eyed oglers at the office, in line at the taquería, or on my MySpace blog would ask with awe after peeping the five-inch-long trophy wound on my hip.
“Oh, this old thing,” I’d sniff. “No big deal. Just picked it up in hula hoop dance class.”
“Hula hoop dance class?” my friends back home would reply incredulously, their tiny brains atrophied by played-out calorie burners like hiking and cycling. “You got that from hula hooping? [Guffaw, guffaw, insert joke about pitiful lack of physical endurance here.]”
“Yes, friend, you see, I’m doing an article about this new fitness trend, hoop dance, and …”
“HULA HOOP DANCE CLASS!?!? Only in California, dude, only in California.”
Well, yeah, bitches. That’s right: California. Utopian birthplace of an endless array of revolutionary fitness regimens. Jazzercise. Tae Bo. Heck, according to Wikipedia, Jack LaLanne invented the jumping jack right here in California.
It’s true, though, that when it comes to wacky-sounding physical fitness, it’s been a while since the Golden State unleashed any new trends upon the world. Opportunities for women to get their saucy swivel on have been dwindling — spinning’s hardly saucy, girlfriend — with nary a Curves-free shimmy in sight in some parts of the country.
So yes, indeed, I say thank heavens for the hula hoop, God’s sexiest training wheel. Not only is the hoop helping to polish the state’s tarnished gym-class cred, it’s also spawned hoop dance, a swayin’ and slithery new workout aimed at squeezing the inner juiciness out of average dames like you and me (or possibly your girlfriend or even your mom).
The practice has already gained a healthy following in San Francisco, thanks to inspirational instructor Christabel Zamor, a.k.a. HoopGirl (winner of the 2006 Guardian Best of the Bay Award for Best Personal Trainer). But what about my hoop-deprived friends back East? When and how will they ever get their jaded swivel on?
Good news for all: having wisely determined that despite her effervescent charm and spiritual buoyancy she simply can’t be everywhere at once, HoopGirl’s now passing her hard-earned knowledge along to a bevy of women from all over the country who seek opportunity in this brand-new industry. After all, what better way to sneak erotic exercise into the red states than via the seemingly innocuous hula hoop, Trojan horse of the fitness world?
The 10 women who attended Zamor’s first weekend-long teacher certification workshop in June formed a broad career spectrum: a nurse, a raw food chef, an elementary school teacher, a massage therapist, an architectural assistant, and, of course, a handful of professional fitness instructors. All possessed the requisite hoop skills, and a few even had teaching experience.
What they came to learn, however, was the nitty-gritty of the hoop dance biz, something that Zamor did not have the benefit of knowing at the beginning of her own career. In fact, Zamor’s first exposure to hoop dance came while she was pursuing a career as an anthropology professor at UC Santa Barbara.
“When I was studying anthropology, I loved teaching, but I was really interested in ethnic dance and music traditions,” she says. “The academic environment only contextualized these things in terms of their own preestablished academic jargon. I had been very naive going into graduate school. I really thought it was about exposing myself to the beauty of dance.”
She found herself entranced by hoop dancers at a rave outside of Los Angeles. Disillusioned with the academic environment, she committed herself to learning hoop dance. She returned to Santa Barbara with a hula hoop and started practicing in the park.
“It was a new field, based on no other cultural dance form,” she explains. “And all of a sudden people were beating down my door for hoop dance.”
After struggling in an environment in which she was constantly forced to defend the legitimacy of studying African dance traditions, Zamor found herself at the epicenter of a dance revolution. Within three months of her first hoop dance experience, she found herself teaching group classes.
Today, the hoop dance teacher certification course is the latest addition to Zamor’s hula-shake empire, which includes group classes, private lessons, instructional DVDs, and performances. It’s also a crash course in running your own business.
Over three days, students learn everything they need to effectively teach a hoop dance fitness course, including how to clearly explain and demonstrate the key principles of hoop dance (squat and shimmy, very important); how to make use of imagery and metaphors (“Reach into the honey pot!”); the physiological and psychological benefits of hooping (“Did you know that the most beautiful sound in the world is the sound of a hoop hitting the floor? That’s the sound of learning and growing.”); class structures (hoop jam!); and how to deal with the top five difficult situations (a cranky, clumsy reporter in your midst, perhaps). The course also leaves students with a sense of marketing savvy and all the esoterica involved in operating a small business, such as insurance, liability waivers, pricing, and property rental.
“I really respect Christabel as an artist and a business woman,” says Candice Schutter, a movement facilitator and life coach from Portland. “She’s given us a workable structure that can be used right away to create a thriving business.”
But Zamor said she hopes the women take away much more than technical know-how. “The most important thing that I want the teachers to exude, so that other people can absorb it, is confidence,” she says. “It’s the key to learning hoop dance. It’s a feeling. It’s not something people can memorize. You just have to believe it.” SFBG
The next HoopGirl teacher-training course will be in San Francisco, Oct. 6–8. To register or for more information, go to www.hoopgirl.com.
Spiff your licks
› culture@sfbg.com
Painting, welding, playing the xylophone … these all seemed like mildly entertaining pursuits to me, but they didn’t quite inspire the level of intense passion needed to get me off my ass and into a classroom. If I was going to invest my valuable time in any course of instruction, it had to involve something I truly wanted to learn. Drinking, smoking, shoplifting … I was way too good at that stuff already. No, what I needed by way of education was something I could really get a hard-on about. That was it — I could definitely stand to learn more about the activity that gives me the biggest hard-on of all: going down on my girlfriend. Couldn’t we all? Join me, then, as I gently ease back the hood of our city’s sexual instruction resources in search of my very own cunnilingus guru.
Embarking on this quest had me feeling a little like Frodo: small, hairy footed, and bristling with trepidation at the thought of meeting a true cunnilingus master. Don’t get me wrong (I say in typical straight-guy fashion), I’m OK at what I do. But how would I ever convince the woman or man who was to teach me that I’d be a worthy pupil? Yet I knew I had to continue. Perhaps my libido was in charge. Perhaps somewhere in my heart, I knew my girlfriend deserved better than what I had been giving her. Whatever the case, I was determined to fix my licks for better kicks.
Finding my ideal tongue tutor wasn’t as easy as I thought. Most sex educators don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages, nor are they easily googled. And I’m a little leery of gaining sexual insights from the Learning Annex — I might walk away with my entire life savings invested in yoga retreats and Trump towers. To find someone to teach me how to orally astound, the first thing I needed to do was head to a respectable sex shop. In San Francisco that means go to Good Vibrations on Valencia Street.
There at the service counter, on an events calendar dotted with workshops on spanking, sex after 60, toe sucking, lap dancing, and whatever other sex acts you can imagine, I found the course that shot a twinge of excitement through my loins: Tracy Bartlett’s “Oral Majority” workshop. Alas, I’d missed it by a month — but didn’t despair: Tracy was due to come around again soon, I was assured by the counterperson. In the meantime, it was recommended that I read Bartlett’s bible, The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus (Cleis Press, www.tinynibbles.com) by Violet Blue.
If The Ultimate Guide works for a professional like Bartlett, I knew it would help me, so I purchased a copy and headed home. There in the cozy corner of my bedroom, I sat for the next three hours reading erotic fiction, techniques for mind-blowing orgasms, and helpful advice on proper pussy-eating etiquette. From the proper utilization of butt plugs to the pleasures of doggy-style licking, Blue’s book offers the sound advice of one who has braved the bush many times. Not only did it hone my cunnilingus skills, but it also provided me with a possible reason why my search for a teacher was proving difficult. “Most sex instructors,” Blue reveals, “are heterosexual females. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — unless you want to know what it’s really like to lick a pussy. Heterosexual women don’t know, so they tend to gloss over or skip cunnilingus in their classes.”
A bell went off in my head. I knew exactly whom I needed to find: a woman who teaches cunnilingus classes and actually licks pussies.
After reading Blue’s book, I could find the clitoris in two seconds flat. I could also judge the correct moment to introduce a well-lubed finger into a hesitant anus and could expertly perform a down-tempo version of “the ice-cream lick.” I was ready to meet my swami. But where was I to find her? After some more, perhaps embarrassingly persistent queries at Good Vibes, I struck gold. Bartlett had passed the local licks-pertise torch down to her top pupil, Koko West of www.sexysexed.com.
For the past two years, Koko has been making home visits and hosting parties for up to 40 people at a time. She’s queer identified and female, and teaches both fellatio and cunnilingus classes (one and a half hours for $250) and sex classes for couples (two hours for $300). Perfect! I set up a demonstration meeting with her and held my breath (while compulsively brushing my teeth). The next morning I headed to a local park where my pussy guru was patiently waiting on a checkered picnic blanket.
There on the knoll she sat, barefoot and draped in a polka-dot dress, her glistening tray of cucumbers and a silky pillow by her side. Without saying a word, I walked up, dropped to my knees, and prepared to imbibe the lessons of a true master. With tears streaming down my face, I begged her to teach me all she could. Her hands came down from the heavens to push the hair from my sweaty brow. “Shhh,” she said, “Koko’s gonna make it all better. Tell me what you want to know.”
My first question was obvious and the answer surprising; “What is the best way to perform cunnilingus?” I blurted. “First of all,” she said, “I find the word cunnilingus a bit unsexy. I like to say ‘going down’ or ‘licking pussy.’ And honestly, there’s no tried-and-true way to go down on a woman. She may love something one day and yearn for something completely different the next. The key is talking.”
“What do you mean,” I asked naively, “like, talk into her vagina or something?” Koko looked at me disapprovingly, took a breath, and said, “Uh … no. Communication between lovers is the key. Usually when people get over the initial discomfort of talking about sex, they find conversation extremely beneficial and hot.”
Yes, I thought. That’s what my girlfriend needs. A man who can talk and perform “the crooked tongue whip” at the same time. Shit, I had some serious work to do.
We sat for hours talking about the best way to ease a lover, how to use toys, and so on, but it wasn’t until evening approached that we got to the good stuff: cold hard sex tips. Koko flipped over the odd-shaped pillow she had been leaning on. On the other side were lips, a clitoris shrouded in a satin hood, and many, many folds. “This,” she said, “is the ‘Wondrous Vulva Puppet,’ from the House o’ Chicks [www.houseochicks.com], and you’re going to lick it with your hand.”
My arm became a mock tongue as Koko guided me through her repertoire of swirly techniques, flicking motions, penetration, and more. I could have played with Koko’s pussy puppet for days, but she eventually grew weary of my puppyish enthusiasm, packed up, and left. Still, she was only an e-mail away, and I knew that although I may not have earned my master’s in munching, I was no longer just whistling in the dark. SFBG
GOOD VIBRATIONS
603 Valencia, SF
(415) 552-5460
www.goodvibes.com