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Guardian editorial: Ellison wins, San Francisco loses!

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EDITORIAL San Francisco’s not going to lose the America’s Cup. Oracle CEO and yachting billionaire Larry Ellison is too excited about the prospect of bringing the sport (and his company’s logo on the sail of his boat) to a mass audience for the first time in history that he’s not about to abandon San Francisco Bay. The process is too far along; that much is a done deal.

But the development agreements for the city’s waterfront is not a done deal at all — in fact, the proposal could wind up giving Ellison effective control over five piers and a valuable waterfront lot that he could develop for condos. And the city won’t get anywhere near enough out of the deal.

The development agreement is really just a sideshow in the cup planning; nobody’s arguing that Ellison’s America’s Cup Event Authority will need space to stage the race, and that will require the renovation of some waterfront property. And nobody disputes that the event will bring tourism and revenue to the city, which will offset some of the cost of allowing Ellison rights to the waterfront.

The rest of it is purely a real estate deal: Ellison’s offering to put millions of dollars in to renovating crumbling and underused piers, and in exchange the Port of San Francisco — which lacks the money to rebuild the waterfront and has no credible plans for a good part of its property — will give Ellison long-term low-cost leases and development rights on Piers 26, 28, 30-32 and possibly 29, as well as Seawall Lot 330 at Embarcadero and Bryant.

The city’s never been terribly good at cutting tough deals with real-estate developers, and the history of San Francisco is littered with examples of the taxpayers losing out to the speculators and builders. And in the furor of excitement over the America’s Cup, this development agreement could become the latest sellout.

The original projections for the economic impact of the event are looking more and more questionable; it’s entirely possible that San Francisco will wind up with far less than the $1.4 billion in spending and the thousands of jobs that cup promoters have promised. It’s still going to be a big deal, and the city (particularly the hospitality industry) will do well — but it’s not the answer to all of San Francisco’s problems. By the end of 2013, the event will be over — and Ellison will have essentially taken title to a huge amount of public land, for as long as 60 years into the future. And he won’t be paying the city the normal development fees, the normal impact fees, or even reasonable annual rent to the Port.

The supervisors need to put aside the hype around a sailing regatta and look at this for what it is: A real-estate development agreement with one of the world’s richest people. And right now, it’s a lousy deal for the city.

 

Dick Meister: Sit down, punk!

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

I spotted a forgotten hero at the memorial service for SF labor leader Walter Johnson the other day, a true but largely unacknowledged hero of the anti-Vietnam War movement – Art Carter, former head of the AFL-CIO’s Contra Costa Labor Council.

The AFL-CIO, you might recall, was a major and outspoken supporter of that damned war which was waged as a key part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.  The AFL-CIO held tenaciously to its unqualified support of the war, whether it was being waged by a long-time labor ally, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, or by his anti-labor Republican successor, Richard Nixon.

It was in 1969, at the AFL-CIO’s national convention in Atlantic City, that Carter, a 28-year-old delegate, dared stand up to oppose a resolution unconditionally supporting the Vietnam War and the Vietnam policies of then-President Nixon, which delegates had loudly cheered when a guest speaker, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, had spelled them out. The measure was presented by hawkish AFL-CIO President George Meany and ultimately opposed by only six of the 700 delegates – including, of course, Art Carter.

Much to the open disgust and anger of Meany and most delegates, Carter offered a substitute resolution that urged the AFL-CIO “to exercise all possible influence and persuasion on the national administration to effect an immediate major reduction of American military involvement in Vietnam and to bring the Vietnam War to a speedy end. “

Carter called his proposed measure  “a rather modest resolution” that came from his members – “working men whose sons have either just returned from Vietnam or who face going to Vietnam.”

He urged the AFL-CIO ‘s national leaders to take a critical look at the government’s Vietnam policies rather than “giving carte blanche to a president to do anything he regards as in the national interest.” Carter followed that with a proposed resolution condemning the Nixon administration’s Vietnam policies that got but one delegate’s vote – his.

Boy, did the stuff hit the fan, as I and other reporters from around the country rushed forward to question the young renegade from the Bay Area. It was big news, someone inside the AFL-CIO actually challenging the imperious George Meany, who was rarely challenged within labor circles.

Consider the situation. There was Carter, a delegate from a small, nationally obscure labor council, surrounded by hostile men at least twice his age and faced with the barely concealed animosity of a 75-year-old who was known nationwide as “Mr. Labor.” How dare Carter question Meany and the other labor elders?

 Meany, at the convention podium, snapped back at Carter immediately. He derided Carter and others who sought “peace at any price,” equated their suggestion for a reduction of forces in Vietnam with surrender and claimed that would result in “the kind of peace you get in the jail house.” Carter tried to respond, but Meany abruptly ruled him out of order, and Carter was forced to move away from the floor microphone and resume his seat amid noisy catcalls and angry shouts of “sit down! sit down!”

Carter was hardly a wild-eyed radical, just an intelligent young man of liberal bent calling for a peaceful solution to an ugly, futile war that had already left many Americans dead. Yet, he asked reporters, with an air of angry futility, “Did you hear what they called me?  Young punk, that’s what they said: Sit down, punk!”

Although Carter’s brave stand – and, believe me, it was indeed brave – didn’t directly alter the AFL-CIO’s war mongering, or that of others, it couldn’t help but have an impact on millions of Americans both inside and outside the labor movement.

 Just a few days after the AFL-CIO convention adjourned, as many as three million people in more than 200 cities took part in marches and other demonstrations to  demand immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. It was the largest peace demonstration ever held up to that time.

Although the precise effect of Carter’s courageous stand is not clear, it undoubtedly did help inspire many others to openly oppose or at least seriously question the government’s Vietnam policies and pressure the AFL-CIO and others to at least tone down their support of the war.

In the context of the time, Art Carter’s was indeed a heroic act. Thankfully, today’s AFL-CIO leaders bear little resemblance to Cold Warrior Meany and his cohorts. The AFL-CIO’s current president, Richard Trumka, is an outspoken backer of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, for instance, as are many other AFL-CIO leaders and members who can cite Carter as an inspiration.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Guardian editorial: The parking war

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EDITORIAL When you talk about changing parking rules in San Francisco, you’re setting off the political equivalent of shooting war. Nobody wants more parking tickets, nobody wants more expensive parking meters, nobody wants to pay for parking that’s been free for years — and the Municipal Transportation Agency has, by most accounts, done a pretty poor job of selling its new parking management program.

That’s too bad, because the MTA proposals aren’t all bad. In fact, the agency is doing exactly the right thing by looking at a long-term citywide plan for altering the way people pay for and use on-street parking. If the bureaucrats at a city department that isn’t used to San Francisco’s often slow community-oriented planning process can shift their outreach efforts into a different gear, there’s no reason they can’t come up with a plan that most neighborhood residents and small businesses will support.

The MTA’s SFPark program uses high-tech meters that accept credit cards and change prices at different points of the day to maximize turnover on the streets. That’s actually good for local businesses — the less time people spend circling the block looking for a parking space, the more likely they are to stop and shop. Limiting the number of cars cruising for a space improves traffic flow. And parking for an hour or two at a meter is still much cheaper than parking in a garage.

But when the MTA announced that it was expanding SFPark into the Northeast Mission, Dogpatch, Potrero Hill and Mission Bay, the neighborhoods rebelled. Some of that was just anger over the prospect of meters being installed on streets that don’t have them. Some of it comes from the changing land use in areas that are increasingly both residential and commercial. Some of it comes from the intense development pressure in those areas.

But a lot of it was a legitimate response to a perception that the MTA was trying to ram the changes through without making a serious effort to work with the community. It’s not surprising — the MTA has been somewhat isolated from the politics of land use and planning in the city. So the staff isn’t used to the fact that San Francisco is a process-oriented place where a wide range of constituent groups want input before anything happens where they live or work.

The neighborhoods also  need to understand reality: The era of free parking in San Francisco is coming to an end. That’s a good thing — the city as a matter of policy should discourage the use of cars, and charging drivers for parking (and using that money to improve Muni) is an obvious solution. And the proposals aren’t that onerous: Paying 25 cents an hour for all-day parking where you work is hardly a terrible financing burden. (And let’s face it — the neighborhood parking stickers are way, way too cheap.)

But much of the southeast is badly served by transit and there are vehicle-intensive production, distribution and repair uses, and MTA needs to understand that. The agency has wisely delayed the program — and after its shown it can work with the neighborhoods, this sort of bold initiative will be possible.

 

 

Jeffrey Sachs: The necessity for sustainable development

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By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

ADDIS ABABA – Sustainable development means achieving economic growth that is widely shared and that protects the earth’s vital resources. Our current global economy, however, is not sustainable, with more than one billion people left behind by economic progress and the earth’s environment suffering terrible damage from human activity. Sustainable development requires mobilizing new technologies that are guided by shared social values.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has rightly declared sustainable development to be at the top of the global agenda. We have entered a dangerous period in which a huge and growing population, combined with rapid economic growth, now threatens to have a catastrophic impact on the earth’s climate, biodiversity, and fresh-water supplies. Scientists call this new period the Anthropocene – in which human beings have become the main causes of the earth’s physical and biological changes. 

The Secretary-General’s Global Sustainability Panel has issued a new report that outlines a framework for sustainable development. The GSP rightly notes that sustainable development has three pillars: ending extreme poverty; ensuring that prosperity is shared by all, including women, youth, and minorities; and protecting the natural environment. These can be termed the economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainable development, or, more simply, the “triple bottom line” of sustainable development.

The GSP has called for world leaders to adopt a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, that will help to shape global policies and actions after the 2015 target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Whereas the MDGs focus on reducing extreme poverty, the SDGs will focus on all three pillars of sustainable development: ending extreme poverty, sharing the benefits of economic development for all of society, and protecting the Earth.

It is, of course, one thing to set SDGs and quite another to achieve them. The problem can be seen by looking at one key challenge: climate change. Today, there are seven billion people on the planet, and each one, on average, is responsible for the release each year of a bit more than four tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This CO2 is emitted when we burn coal, oil, and gas to produce electricity, drive our cars, or heat our homes. All told, humans emit roughly 30 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, enough to change the climate sharply within a few decades.

By 2050, there will most likely be more than nine billion people. If these people are richer than people today (and therefore using more energy per person), total emissions worldwide could double or even triple. This is the great dilemma: we need to emit less CO2, but we are on a global path to emit much more.

We should care about that scenario, because remaining on a path of rising global emissions is almost certain to cause havoc and suffering for billions of people as they are hit by a torrent of droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and more. We have already experienced the onset of this misery in recent years, with a spate of devastating famines, floods, and other climate-related disasters.

So, how can the world’s people – especially its poor people – benefit from more electricity and more access to modern transportation, but in a way that saves the planet rather than destroys it? The truth is that we can’t – unless we improve dramatically the technologies that we use.

We need to use energy far more wisely while shifting from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. Such decisive improvements are certainly possible and economically realistic.

Consider the energy inefficiency of an automobile, for example. We currently move around 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of machinery to transport only one or just a few people, each weighing perhaps 75 kilograms (165 lbs.). And we do so using an internal combustion engine that utilizes only a small part of the energy released by burning the gasoline. Most of the energy is lost as waste heat.

We could therefore achieve huge reductions in CO2 emissions by converting to small, lightweight, battery-powered vehicles running on highly efficient electric motors and charged by a low-carbon energy source such as solar power. Even better, by shifting to electric vehicles, we would be able to use cutting-edge information technology to make them smart – even smart enough to drive themselves using advanced data-processing and positioning systems.

The benefits of information and communications technologies can be found in every area of human activity: better farming using GPS and micro-dosing of fertilizers; precision manufacturing; buildings that know how to economize on energy use; and, of course, the transformative, distance-erasing power of the Internet. Mobile broadband is already connecting even the most distant villages in rural Africa and India, thereby cutting down significantly on the need for travel.

Banking is now done by phone, and so, too, is a growing range of medical diagnostics. Electronic books are beamed directly to handheld devices, without the need for bookshops, travel, and the pulp and paper of physical books. Education is increasingly online as well, and will soon enable students everywhere to receive first-rate instruction at almost a zero “marginal” cost for enrolling another student.

Yet getting from here to sustainable development will not just be a matter of technology. It will also be a matter of market incentives, government regulations, and public support for research and development. But, even more fundamental than policies and governance will be the challenge of values. We must understand our shared fate, and embrace sustainable development as a common commitment to decency for all human beings, today and in the future.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

Meister: So, what about the state of the unions, Mr. President?

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Unions? Organized labor? The AFL-CIO? Those words were nowhere to be heard in President Obama’s State of the Union address, despite labor’s vital role in the economy and strong support for Obama. The continued support of the labor movement is essential if the president is to carry out the bold plans he outlined and if he is to be re-elected.

The president’s failure to mention one of the country’s most important economic and political institutions was unfortunate. It was perhaps understandable, however, given the anti-union climate stirred up by attacks on public employee unions and their allies.

Obama’s failure to mention unions and their leaders was ignored in the post-speech pronouncements of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other major unionists. They in fact proclaimed the speech a victory because of its endorsement of policies widely supported by labor.

“It was clear throughout the president’s speech that the era of the one percent is over,” Trumka declared. “We demanded a strong stand on behalf of working families – and the president delivered.”

Trumka cited, in particular, Obama’s promise to thoroughly investigate “misconduct in the mortgage industry that wrecked our economy,” his promise to invest in jobs and infrastructure, and his proposed tax rules that would help the 99 percent.

President Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers praised Obama for making it clear “that children and our future must be priorities,” and for noting “what America’s teachers have long understood. We can’t test our way to a middle class, we must educate our way to a middle class.”

Praise, too, from President Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers Union. He singled out Obama’s promise to work “to bring manufacturing back to America.” Gerard said, “The president’s commitment to discourage job outsourcing and promote insourcing is a ticket to a better economy.” It was most welcome news, added Trumka, to the millions of Americans who are unemployed.

President Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees described the president’s speech as “a comprehensive plan to move our country forward, bolster job creation and find real solutions for the problems confronting our country.”

McEntee noted that “in today’s political environment, it takes guts to stand strong with working families – even when we make our voices heard, loud and clear, because the toxic influence of money in politics – which the president spoke out against – is powerful.”

So, although Obama made no mention of organized labor in his address, he said much that greatly pleased labor, and made promises to carry out measures high on labor’s economic and political agendas.

As the AFL-CIO’s Trumka declared, Obama showed he “listened to the single mom working two jobs to get by, to the out-of-work construction worker, to the retired factory worker, to the student serving coffee to help pay for college.” The president, in short, “voiced the aspirations and concerns of those who are too often ignored.”

Trumka cited the similarities between Obama’s approach and that of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like the occupiers, the president is “speaking out forcefully against the staggering increase in inequality” between the one percent and the 99 percent. The president’s speech, Trumka added, demonstrated “a focus on job creation Republican House and Senate leaders should follow.”

It’s clear, certainly, that as long as Obama continues on his current path, he’ll have strong labor support. But should he stray, it’s clear that labor will forcefully remind him of his promises and of the needs of those who work for a living – or who are attempting to work for a living.

Whatever Obama does is certain to be in startling contrast to his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, one of the most virulently anti-labor presidents in U.S. history. Obama has already rescinded several of Bush’s executive orders that limited the union rights of some workers and has replaced openly anti-labor Bush appointees to labor-related federal agencies, boards and commissions with his openly pro-labor appointees, including Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.

Imagine Bush, or any of his GOP allies, actually saying, as Obama did, that “we need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests because we know you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement.”

Important words. But they need to be heard – and acted on – by the millions of Americans who know little or nothing of unions and their important position in our economic and political lives.

President Obama failed to take advantage of a great opportunity to explain the true nature of unions and their importance to the country-at-large and make clear the often vicious anti-unionism of his political enemies. He missed a chance to explain the crucial role labor is certain to play in attempts to carry out essential reforms.

Obama needed to speak out forcefully to try to counter the anti-unionism that is limiting the chances of many Americans to find decent jobs at decent pay and a strong voice in workplace and community matters.

Obama missed an important opportunity. But if he stays true to his promises, the president will have plenty of other chances to show the country the true nature of the labor movement and its opponents, to speak out in favor of unions and the importance of their members, leaders and supporters, and to carry out his proposed and much needed reforms designed to help the nation’s working people.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Guardian editorial: Plazas are public space

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EDITORIAL The attack on public space has been underway for years now in San Francisco. Parks and recreation centers have been turned into pay-to-enter facilities rented out to private organizations. The sit-lie law restricts the use of public sidewalks. Occupy protesters have been evicted from a public plaza. And now, Supervisor Scott Wiener wants to put new restrictions on the mini-parks and plazas that have been a rare bright spot in the battle to reclaim the streets.

Wiener has introduced legislation that would ban camping, cooking, four-wheeled shopping carts, and the sale of merchandise in Harvey Milk Plaza and Jane Warner Plaza, near Market and Castro. He argues that the two parklets — one reclaimed from what had been roadway — are in legal limbo: They aren’t parks, so the city’s park codes don’t apply, and they aren’t sidewalks, so rules like the sit-lie law don’t apply, either.

But there are serious problems with the Wiener legislation. For one thing, it’s clearly directed at homeless people — the ban on shopping carts makes no sense at all except for the fact that a lot of homeless people carry their possessions in those carts. And the ban on camping (which isn’t a problem right now in the two plazas) could be used to prevent an Occupy-style action in the Castro.

The ACLU says there are serious constitutional issues with the bill. In a Jan. 21 letter, ACLU staff attorney Linda Lye notes that the ban on the sale of merchandise without a permit could “burden expressive activity.” And she explains that the shopping cart rules have exceptions for bicycles, strollers, and two-wheeled carts, but “it is wholly unclear why some but not other wheeled conveyances are singled out for prohibition, other than to restrict the activities of an unpopular group.”

A letter signed by 21 members of the Harvey Milk Club, including co-founders Harry Britt and Cleve Jones, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, and eight past club presidents, points out that “the interests of the LGBT community have always been united with the interests of public space. As a community that is forced—far too often and for far too long—to spend much of our collective lives ‘in the closet,’ the ability to be free in public spaces has been tremendously liberating. Harvey Milk knew that liberation was only possible if we escaped the shadows of anonymity and invisibility. When we restrict these spaces—even when those restrictions are meant, initially, to be applied to another group of people—we damage ourselves.”

The issue goes far beyond the Castro. There are a growing number of small plazas in the city, part of the popular and successful Pavement to Parks Program — and the last thing the city should be doing is putting undue restrictions on their use.

Wiener, to his credit, has been in touch with the ACLU, and amended his original proposal to exempt the sale of newspapers and other printed material. But that doesn’t solve the First Amendment issues — for example, would the sale of T-Shirts with political slogans be banned? Could the city decide which political candidates or causes could get a permit and which couldn’t?

The whole thing seems like a solution in search of a problem. The plazas, like most of the city’s parklets, are for the most part clean and well-maintained community gathering spots that don’t need new rules or restrictions. The supervisors should reject the Wiener legislation.

 

Louis Dunn: Christian conservatives boo Ron Paul’s ‘Golden Rule’

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Louis Dunn: Christian conservatives boo Ron Paul’s ‘Golden Rule’

Guardian graphic by Louis Dunn

Rep. Ron Paul, in the  Jan. 17th  debate in  Myrtle Beach in the  Bible Belt of  South Carolina,  proposed that American foreign policy adhere to the “Golden Rule.”  The audience booed him.

“My point is if another country does to us what we do others, we’re not going to like it very much,” according to Saul Relatiive in Yahoo News. “So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in–in foreign policy. Don’t do to another nation…what we don’t want to have them do to us.” 

Relative continued, “As reasonable as that may sound..and it is a rule taught by every major religion on a personal scale–the audience in South Carolina, made up of mostly white middle-aged evangelicals, were having none of it…How could the thought even be entertained? …This is the state of the modern conservative movement: non-thinking, non-substantive, reactionary, bellicose, exceptionally arrogant, ignorant, and vindictive.”

Read Relative’s report in full: http://news.yahoo.com/christian-conservative-voters-boo-ron-pauls-golden-rule-011800008.html

Calvin Trillin: Newt lays into Mitt

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It’s “pious baloney.” Yes, pious baloney.

What Mitt speaks, Newt says, is remarkably phony:

His citizen pose is all hooey;

He’s hungered for office like Thomas E. Dewey.

And what he was doing those years spent at Bain

Was not create jobs but cause working stiffs pain.

While Newt covers Mitt’s smooth exterior with blotches,

Obama’s campaign staff just carefully watches.

Calvin Trillin: Deadline poet (The Nation 1/30/2012)

Louis Dunn comments on Mitt Romney statement that “corporations are people”

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Louis Dunn comments on Mitt Romney statement that “corporations are people”

“Corporations are people, my friend,” says Mitt Romney on the campaign trail.

Hear him emphasize and embellish the point: 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2h8ujX6T0A

Guardian graphic by Louis Dunn

Louis Dunn: The corporate media covers Occupy

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Louis Dunn: The corporate media covers Occupy

Guardian graphic by Louis Dunn

“Occupy America,” as the Guardian says on the front page in this week’s  issue. “Let’s take back the country–starting now.  A proposal for the next stage of the Occupy movement.”

Louis Dunn comments on the response of the corporate media to Occupy. B3

 

Editorial: Mayor Lee, support Prop. 13 reform

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EDITORIAL You want a quick way to cut a huge chunk out of the city’s budget deficit? A way to save essential services without having to put a tax increase before the voters?

Just force the owners of large commercial properties to pay their property taxes.

It’s an open secret in California that the biggest properties are bought and sold under a loophole in the Proposition 13 that prevents city’s from reassessing them. It’s a fairly easy scam, one that almost never happens with lower-priced residential property: Instead of selling, say, a large commercial office building, the owners simply incorporate the building as a limited liability corporation and then sell shares in the LLC. That doesn’t count as a property transfer under Proposition 13, so the building is never reassessed.

That means a building that may have sold for $500 million still pays taxes on an earlier assessment, which is often far, far lower. That loophole alone is costing San Francisco millions of dollars a year, according to Assessor Phil Ting.

The California Tax Reform Association, in a May, 2010 report, notes that many of the biggest mergers, acquisitions, and property sales in the state over the past 30 years have taken place with legal tricks that keep property taxes artificially low.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano has introduced a bill, AB 448, that would classify any substantive transfer of property, even if it’s done through subsidiaries and corporate shells, as a sale and allow counties to reassess the property. It’s a fairly mild step, far short of a split-roll measure that would treat commercial and residential property differently. In fact, Ting told us, 99 percent of all commercial sales (mostly smaller properties) don’t use the loophole. It’s just (once again) the 1 percent taking advantage of everyone else.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has contacted Ammiano and asked to testify and help pass the bill. But at press time, Ammiano had heard nothing from San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. (Lee’s spokesperson, Christine Falvey, told us she didn’t think the bill was still alive. It is.)

Lee needs to take a high-profile position in support of this bill — and he needs to encourage every other mayor in the state to do the same. The Board of Supervisors ought to pass a resolution of support — and push the County Supervisors Association of California to make this bill a top priority.

Making even a minor, eminently reasonable change in Prop. 13 is tough, and Ammiano’s best chance is if local elected officials really push for this. It’s crazy that Mayor Lee isn’t leading the way.

 

Dick Meister: Walter Johnson did what needed to be done

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BY Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century, Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns,

Walter Johnson was everything a labor leader should be – a dedicated, unflinching, champion of working people and their unions. But more than that, Walter was also an unyielding advocate of all those  inside and outside the labor movement who wanted – and badly needed – a decent living , or who were in any way oppressed.

Johnson, who died in San Francisco of a heart attack on Jan. 12 at age 87, devoted his life to that noble – yes, noble – task as head of the Department Store and Retail Clerks unions in San Francisco. He also later headed the SF Labor Council for nearly 20 years, from 1985 until his retirement in 2004.

 Walter was a genuine humanitarian, a kind, thoughtful man who very much liked and sincerely wanted to help people, who freely acknowledged the contributions of others who joined him in his efforts for social, political and economic justice, who seemed always ready and eager to do what needed to be done.

He was a man of great good humor, an outgoing man who seemed to get along with just about everybody, even some of his toughest adversaries. I know, I know. That surely does sound like pure hyperbole. But, believe me, it’s not, as many others who knew Walter Johnson could tell you.

Listen to Art Pulaski, who heads the California State AFL-CIO. He declared that Johnson “was a big and fearless advocate for everyone and anyone who was wronged, mistreated, put down, left out, pushed aside or just down on their luck.  He was fearless because he always followed his faith, his values and his heart.”

Despite the seriousness of his undertakings and his militancy, Johnson was no grim advocate. Whatever the situation, there was always lots of good-natured teasing, and jibes to be traded with friends. And jokes, always jokes – always! Corny, make-you-groan jokes usually, but effective at lessening the tensions that invariably came with the struggles he helped lead.

One look at Johnson’s face made clear his Scandinavian background, a mixture of Norwegian and Swedish. But you wouldn’t necessarily recognize him as a labor leader. He didn’t fit the stereotype. He almost invariably dressed in coat and tie and otherwise looked more like the public image of a business leader, more like management than labor.

Many union leaders spend most of their time in their offices, but Walter was out on the picket lines, or marching or otherwise demonstrating in support of the demands of his union and others, as well as those of other organizations also demanding justice. He was arrested several times for joining in sit-ins and other demonstrations that the authorities wanted to halt. And Johnson kept that up, despite his retirement.

I met Walter thanks to my job as the Chronicle’s labor editor. That was in the early 1960s, a few years after he had arrived in San Francisco from his native North Dakota to work as a Sears appliance salesman.

Dave Selvin, the labor historian and former public information officer for the Labor Council, had told me I should be sure to check out “a young guy” who’d just been elected president of the Department Store Employees. Walter Johnson, of course.

Selvin predicted good things for Johnson, and he was right.

Under Johnson’s leadership, San Francisco store clerks, department store employees and others won labor contacts at least as rewarding as the contracts as those who held similar jobs elsewhere.

Johnson was a key leader in winning strong, virtually unprecedented support for labor from City Hall and the Board of Supervisors – especially from Mayor Joseph Alioto.

Union representatives were appointed to many city commissions, major job creating construction projects were approved, and Alioto stepped in to mediate settlements of major strikes. Picketing strikers could be pretty certain police wouldn’t interfere. New businesses unfriendly to labor found it difficult to get the necessary city permits. Thanks to Johnson and other leaders, labor had gained considerable political clout to go with its considerable economic clout.

Johnson didn’t fear clashing with the AFL-CIO and its other affiliated unions as long as he felt he was right. He was one of the few labor leaders to speak out against the Vietnam War, which was wholeheartedly supported by the AFL-CIO’s national leadership and most of its affiliates.

Johnson was a leader in the growing global union movement that aims to create a powerful international labor federation that would bring the world’s unions close together to deal with “global capitalism” and thus improve the often deplorable conditions of many workers in many countries.

Closer to home, Johnson was one of the first labor leaders to give unconditional support to the LGBT movement. He was an important supporter of proposals to create a gay organization within the labor movement, despite the homophobic nature of most unions at that time. Johnson played a key role in the founding of the LGBT group that became Pride at Work in 2004.

Nancy Wohlforth, the current president of Pride at Work and now an AFL-CIO Executive Council member, had approached Johnson with the idea of such a group in 1979 and was shocked when he readily agreed it was a great idea. Wohlforth was so thankful for his help she dubbed him “an honorary lesbian.”

“Walter was thrilled,” Wohlforth said.

She later was the new business manager of a San Francisco secretarial union that was on strike against a union group that employed its members. Wohlforth noted that Johnson could very easily have avoided being involved, but “he dove right in.”

“He walked the picket line on rainy days and led a toy drive for the strikers during the Christmas holiday. He was, as always, so concerned that workers would know that they were supported at that difficult time.

“Working people’s struggles were always on his mind. I’m sure he dreamed of them every night – and he constantly was coming up with ways to make people’s lives better. He truly was my hero and he will be missed so much by all who were fortunate enough to know him.”

Amen to that.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century, Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns,

Dick Meister: It’s do or die for the United Auto Workers

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Historians invariably cite the sit-down strikes at the country’s auto plants in the 1930s as a key to the spread of unionization throughout the automobile industry and throughout American industry generally.

The strikes helped establish the United Auto Workers Union – the UAW – as one of the country’s most economically and politically powerful, progressive and influential organizations, and its president, Walter Reuther, as one of the country’s important leaders.

But that was then, when the American automobile industry was virtually unchallenged by foreign automakers. Now U.S. automakers face heavy competition from Asian and German firms, especially from the firms that have opened plants in the United States. The steady growth of the non-union plants has been accompanied by a steady weakening of the UAW. The union’s membership, once in the millions, has declined to 350,000.

There are 14 foreign-owned assembly plants and several dozen parts factories now operating in the American South and Midwest – “transplants,” as the UAW calls the foreign-owned facilities. The transplants have become a major part of the U.S. auto industry, accounting for the industry’s only growth in the past 30 years. They employ about 50,000 workers, and as Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes reports, the workers produced more than 40 percent of all vehicles made in the United States last year.

If the UAW is to regain its power and influence and standing as a cornerstone of the labor movement, it will have to organize the transplants, whose owners are generally as hostile to unions as their American predecessors were in the thirties.

Organizing the transplants could very well be as tough – or tougher – as organizing U.S. plants was eight decades ago. In the thirties, many auto workers were already organized and able to act as a strong unified body to demand union contracts – and get them. But today, the UAW is faced with having to first convince workers to join the union and then make a unified demand for contracts from their staunchly anti-union employers, most of them based in the heavily anti-union South.

As a recent report from Reuters News Service noted, workers in the transplants “have rebuffed the union repeatedly,” in large part because of heavy employer pressures on them, including not-so-veiled threats of moving their plants elsewhere.

The UAW is initially seeking union rights for workers at the facilities owned and operated by the German companies Volkswagen and Daimler. The union sees the German companies as relatively easier targets than the Japanese and South Korean manufacturers who also operate U.S. plants.

Reuters found that the UAW’s failure to organize workers at the foreign-owned facilities has put the union in a financial bind. It has forced the UAW to sell some of its assets and shift money from its fund for financing strikes in order to pay for its operations. That includes trying to organize workers in the foreign-owned plants at the same time that the decline in the union’s membership has greatly lessened its dues income.

Despite its financial problems, the union is planning a worldwide $60 million campaign aimed at pressuring the transplants into agreeing to elections in which their workers could freely vote for or against unionization. The UAW is hoping to get strong support for elections from other unions and its Democratic political allies.

The UAW will also need broad public support, and that may not be easy to get, given the widespread popular opinion that the automobile industry’s problems stem at least in part from the relatively high pay and benefits the union has won from auto makers. The union is trying to overcome that by promising that contracts resulting from the voting would commit the UAW to sharing responsibility with employers for “quality, innovation, flexibility and value.” But if the union concedes what workers perceive as too much, it may lose many potential new members.

The situation facing the United Auto Workers, long one of America’s most important institutions, is indeed drastic – so drastic, says UAW President Bob King, that if the union fails to effectively organize the foreign-owned plants, the union will have no future.

 King insists he is not exaggerating. “I have said that repeatedly,” he declared, “and I believe it.”

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Louis Dunn: ‘The Forgotten Wages of War’

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Louis Dunn: ‘The Forgotten Wages of War’

Guardian graphic by Louis Dunn

John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies at M.I.T., wrote the best account I’ve seen on what he calls “The Forgotten Wages of War” in an op ed piece on the end of the Iraq War (New York Times 1/3/2012.) The piece inspired Louis Dunn’s graphic comment. 

“We rarely question that war cause extensive damage, but our view of America’s wars has been blind to one specific aspect of destruction: the human toll of those who live in war zones,” wrote Tirman. .

“We tune out the voices of the victims and belittle their complaints about the midnight raids, the house-to-house searches, the checkpoints, the drone attacks, the bombs that fall  on weddings instead of Al Queda.

“Gen. Tommy R. Franks famously said during the early days of the war in Afghanistan, ‘We don’t do body counts.’ But someone should.”

Timan is author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in American Wars.” 

See Tirman’s full piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-forgotten-wages-of-war.html 


 



Democracy in distress, but it’s the best of the alternatives

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By Dominique Moisi
Dominique Moisi is the author of The Geopolitics of Emotion.

PARIS – Is democratic time too slow to respond to crises, and too short to plan for the long term?

At a time of deepening economic and social crisis in many of the world’s rich democracies, that question is highly relevant. In Italy, for example, Prime Minister Mario Monti has the necessary and legitimate ambition to carry out comprehensive reform. He is both competent and honest, but faces a quasi-structural impediment: whereas leaders once had three years to convince voters of their policies’ benefits, they now have three hours to convince global financial markets to back their approach.

Caught between Italian legislators who, deep down, do not understand that change and markets in quest of near-immediate certainties, can Monti transcend his natural prudence and act with sufficient clarity and decisiveness?

In the United States, too, the political system is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. The political philosopher Francis Fukuyama goes so far as to say that “vetocracy” could triumph over democracy, regardless of who wins the 2012 presidential election. The separation of powers, a principle established by the US founders under the influence of philosophers such as Montesquieu, is leading today to near-paralysis.

Democracies suffer not only from their slow reaction time at moments of crisis, but also from the difficulty that they face in projecting themselves into the future and planning for the long term. On both sides of the Atlantic, political leaders know what they must do for their countries, but don’t know how to get re-elected if they actually do it. They seem to be structurally condemned to short-termism.

But it is not because democracies have a “time problem” that their era seems to some to be over. China is rightly proud to be able to project itself into the twenty-second century. But China owes that quality of long-term thinking much more to its culture than to the nature of its political system. Chinese think long term because they are Chinese, not because they are not democrats.

China’s leaders can, of course, react to events without much regard for Chinese public opinion. After all, the great majority of Chinese do not dream of democracy, even if something like a civil society is emerging, generating new interests and demands that can no longer be totally controlled or manipulated, as in the past.

But that is precisely the weakness of non-democratic regimes in a global age dominated by transparency: Who dreams of becoming a Chinese citizen, or even a citizen of Singapore? In the aftermath of North Korea’s hereditary succession, strategic thinkers rightly emphasize China’s key role in shaping the peninsula’s future. But, despite the scenes of hysteria that followed the death of the “Great Leader” Kim Jong-il, most North Koreans probably dream of joining democratic South Korea (even if many South Koreans fear that prospect).

The majority of Chinese may not want to be governed like Westerners, but it would be wrong to assume that their only ambition is to spend like Westerners. The more successful they are, the more individualistic they will become and the more they will expect the respect and consideration of those who govern them.

By contrast, if China’s economic growth slows, which is likely in the coming years, protest against corruption – a source of fragility for any regime – will escalate. Indeed, it is important to bear in mind that, ahead of the upcoming Chinese leadership transition, new occupants for only the top two posts have been chosen, and that through a process of gradual anointment by roughly a hundred people at most.

The current crisis in the advanced countries, which may very well lead to a global recession (if it is not already doing so), not only reveals the many maladies of democratic regimes, but also acts as their incubator and accelerator. And yet the crisis may turn out to have an even greater impact on non-democratic systems that seem to be more efficient, but are in reality much more fragile. We see this in mounting unrest in both Russia and China.

Contrary to what one might think, democracy is more resilient than the alternatives in the long run. This will remain true as long as democrats remain convinced of it. Non-democratic models cannot truly challenge democracy. Only the misbehavior of democrats can do that.

Dominique Moisi is the author of The Geopolitics of Emotion.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.o

Guardian editorial: Mixed report on Mayor Lee

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EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee’s first big decision — the appointment of a District 5 supervisor — demonstrated something very positive:

The mayor knows that he can’t do what his predecessor did and ignore and dismiss the progressive community.

His inauguration speech demonstrated something else: That he has no intention of being a mayor who takes on and defies the interests of downtown.

Part of the reason Gavin Newsom was a failure as mayor is that he was constantly at war with the left. He ran the city as if his was the only way, as if there were no good ideas coming out of anywhere except his office — and as if anyone who disgreed with or voted against him was his enemy.

That didn’t work, and it doesn’t seem to be Lee’s style. He was under pressure to appoint a supervisor who would go along with him on key votes, but he also knew that a moderate or a lackey would deeply offend the voters in D5, who supported John Avalos for mayor and remain among the most progressive voters in the city. The choice of Christina Olague shows a willingless to accept that progressives play a significant role in San Francisco politics. (It also shows that he is better than any mayor in recent memory at keeping a secret — nobody outside of his inner circle had any idea who his choice was until he announced it Jan 9.)

Olague was, overall, an excellent planning commissioner, and has the potential to be an excellent supervisor. But she will need to make clear from the start that she is representing the district, not the person who gave her the job. Because on some of the key issues that will come before the board this spring, her constituents are well to the left of the mayor. If she can’t vote against his wishes, she’ll have trouble in November.

Olague also needs to be sure that some of the issues her predecessor, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, championed (public power and community policing, for example) don’t fall by the wayside. Her expertise in land use issues should be helpful as the board wrangles with waterfront development, affordable housing and the giant California Pacific Medical Center hospital project.

Lee’s inaugural speech was mostly a typical political speech for a new mayor, but it contained a nugget that’s worthy of note. He proclaimed that San Francisco should be a “city of the 100 percent,” a takeoff on the Occupy movement’s 99 percent slogan. And while that’s mostly rhetoric, it’s also a sign that the former housing activist is not going to be a mayor who wants to make a legacy of challenging the economic and political powers of San Francisco.

Working together is fine — but there are a small number of very wealthy and powerful people who have interests that are utterly opposed to the interests of the rest of us. Economic injustice is every bit as real in this city as it is elsewhere in the country — and that’s something the mayor didn’t even mention or acknowledge. Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the big real-estate developers, the landlords out at ParkMerced, the Chamber of Commerce,  and the Board of Realtors … they don’t want to work together. They want their way.

So it’s a mixed report for Mayor Lee — and over the next few months, he’s going to have to realize that everyone in the city can’t and shouldn’t work together, that there are battles where politicians have to take sides, and that all of us will be watching very closely to see where he draws the line.

Louis Dunn: Chicago’s cardinal compares a gay parade to the Ku Klux Klan

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Louis Dunn: Chicago’s cardinal compares a gay parade to the Ku Klux Klan

Headline  in the Chicagp Tribune story (12/28/2011): Cardinal defends comparing gay parade organizers to KU klux Klan

Lead in the Tribune story: “Setting off a new round in his dispute with gay rigfht activists, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George has issued a statement defending his recent comparison of the gay rights movement to the Ku Klux Klan.”

The Cardinal’s statement in the Tribune story: “Organizers (of the pride parade) invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle hte religious freedom of the Catholic Church,” thecandinal said in a statement issued Tuesday.  One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940s paraded through American cities notonly to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus.  it is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.”  b3

Meister: Student athletes deserve pay for their play

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

Few groups of workers are more highly exploited than so-called student athletes, as they’re called euphemistically by the colleges and universities that employ them.

That’s right, employ them – employ them to play games that bring in billions of dollars in television money and other revenue to their schools and their highly-paid coaches.

The schools really make out at this time of the year, playing in football bowl games that bring schools millions of dollars from radio and television networks that use the games to peddle beer and other merchandise at great profit.

The athletic factories, aka schools, are like any other factories. They pay lots to those who manage their enterprises  – coaches, in their case – and as little as possible to those who do the work – the student athletes, of course.

Major schools pay their coaches in the high five or six figures, and allow them to collect thousands more from manufacturers for outfitting their teams of supposed amateurs in particular brands of clearly labeled footgear and uniforms bearing brand names and symbols, such as the Nike swoosh.

And what do the student athletes get in return for their efforts in behalf of the coaches and shoe salesmen of America? Most don’t even get college degree  – don’t even graduate. And only a relative few go on to the professional teams that pay big bucks to former college stars.

Football and basketball players, whose play brings in revenue of more than $6 billion a year, are the most exploited. They typically spend more time practicing and playing than studying and attending classes. They get room, board, tuition, a few thousand dollars under the table or some expensive goods and services in some cases. But that’s about it. And they have no job security. They can be fired – stripped of their athletic scholarships – if they don’t play as well as their coaches demand.

“You’re not a student athlete, but an athlete-student,” noted Basketball Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas, who left the University of Indiana before graduation to play professionally for the Detroit Pistons of the National Basketball association.

Thomas said the student athlete’s “main purpose is to be a ballplayer, to generate some money, put people in the stands. Eight or ten hours of your day are filled with basketball, football.”

The money the players generate is badly needed, say the schools that employ them. Badly needed, that is, to help finance the schools’ athletic programs. The schools could scale down the programs, of course, maybe even redesign them for the use of genuine students. But the schools engaged in big-time athletics are so heavily committed to staging lucrative public spectacles they wouldn’t even consider such a revolutionary move.

So, as long as schools continue chasing after money generated by their athletes, how about sharing some of what they get with the athletes whose play makes their money-making possible? How about treating them as employees elsewhere are treated?

Drop the fiction that student athletes are amateurs and openly pay them for their play, and provide them fringe benefits, job security and a voice in determining their wages, hours and working conditions.

That’s not as far-fetched an idea as you might think. The board of directors of the National Collegiate Athletic Association actually agreed in November to allow major colleges and universities to pay $2,000 stipends to athletes who sign up to play for them.

As the New York Times’ Joe Nocera reported, more than 125 college athletic directors and conference commissioners have protested even that modest proposal, which has kept it, at least temporarily, from going into effect.

It’s not much, but it would be a start toward giving athletes a fair share of the billions they earn for their schools. The next step should be up to the student athletes themselves. They should  – what else? – organize a union.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

What? Glenn Beck in for Strephanie Miller on Green 960

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As we were driving to work this morning (1/4/2012), we were surprised and angered to find Glenn Beck, the rightwing  broadcaster who was too much for Fox News, replacing Stephanie Miller, the liberal, articulate, and clever talk show host on Green 960. How in the world could that be?  How in the world could the Clear Channel broadcast conglomerate put Beck on morning drive time on Green 960, which up to now had “proudly” proclaimed itself as the progressive radio station in progressive San Francisco? .How could it make this crucial political change at the very start of the presidential electon season?  Was it because Clear Channel is now owned by another conglomerate involving Mitt Romney? (In 2008, a Boston-based private equity firm purchased Clear Channel in a leveraged buyout, according to the Bradblog.)  Has Clear Channel/Romney no shame?

I have often tried in vain through the years to contact Clear Channel for explanation or comment on news stories. This time, I  am happy to turn the job over to the Bradblog below, operated by Brad Friedman, who runs an excellent independent blog specializing in investigative reporting, broadcast analysis, and election integrity issues.

Read what he has to say and get good and mad. Clear Channel is screwing the City and County of San Francisco yet again. Resist! B3
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8974


Calvin Trillin: Deadline poet on Rick Perry and Tim Tebow

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Rick Perry Compares Himself to Denver Broncos Quarterback Tim Tebow

So Perry is fond of debates now,

He’s calling himself in these rumbles

An Iowa caucus Tebow–

Except for how he fumbles.

(Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet, The Nation (1/9/2012)

Louis Dunn: Census says dogs outnumber children in San Francisco

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Louis Dunn: Census says dogs outnumber children in San Francisco

Another cartoon from longtime contributor Louis Dunn — this one poking some fun at a recent population change.

Guardian editorial: City Hall’s 2012 agenda

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EDITORIAL There’s so much on the to-do list for San Francisco in 2012 that it’s hard to know where to start. This is a city in serious trouble, with unstable finances, a severe housing crisis, increased poverty and extreme wealth, a shrinking middle class, crumbling and unreliable infrastructure, a transportation system that’s a mess, no coherent energy policy — and a history of political stalemate from mayors who have refused to work with progressives on the Board of Supervisors.

Now that Ed Lee has won a four-year term, he and the supervisors need to start taking on some of the major issues — and if the mayor wants to be successful, he needs to realize that he can’t be another Gavin Newsom, or Willie Brown, mayors who were an obstacle  to real reform.

Here are just a few of the things the mayor and the board should put on the agenda for 2012:

+Fill Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s seat with an economic progressive. This will be one of the first and most telling moves of the new Lee administration — and it’s critical that the mayor appoint a District 5 supervisor who is a credible progressive, someone who supports higher taxes on the rich and better city services for the needy and is independent of Lee’s more dubious political allies.

+Make the local tax code more fair — and bring in some new revenue. Everybody’s talking about changing the payroll tax, which makes sense: Only a small fraction of city businesses even pay the tax (which is not a “job killer” but is far too limited). Sup. David Chiu had a good proposal last year that he abandoned; it called for a gross receipts tax combined with a commercial rent tax — a way to get big landlords and companies (like law firms) that pay no business tax at all to contribute their fair share. That’s a good starting point — but in the end, the city needs more money, and the new system should be set up to bring in at least $100 million more a year.

+Create a linkage between affordable and market-rate housing. This has to be one of the key priorities for the next year: San Francisco’s housing stock is way out of balance, and it getting worse. The city’s own General Plan mandates that 60 percent of all new housing should be available at below-market-rate prices; the best San Francisco ever gets from the developers of condos for the rich is 20 percent. The supervisors need to enact legislation tying the construction of new market-rate housing to an acceptable minimum level of affordable housing to keep the city from becoming a place where only the very rich can live.

+Demand a good community-benefits agreement from CPMC. The California Pacific Medical Center has a massive new hospital project planned for Van Ness Avenue — and so far, CPMC officials are refusing to provide the housing, transportation and public health mitigations that the city is asking for. This will be a key test of the new Lee administration — the mayor has to demonstrate that he’s willing to play hardball, and refuse to allow the project to move forward unless hospital officials reach agreement with community activists on an acceptable benefits agreement.

+Make CleanEnergySF work. A recent study by the website Energy Self-Reliant States shows that by 2017 — in just five years — the cost of solar energy in San Francisco will drop below the cost of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s fossil-fuel and nuclear mix. So the city’s new electricity program, CleanEnergySF, needs to be planning now to build out both a large-scale solar infrastructure system and small-scale distributed generation facilities on residential and commercial roofs and set the agenda of offering clean, cheaper energy to everyone in the city. The money from the city’s generation can be used to purchase distribution facilities to phase out PG&E altogether.

+Don’t let Oracle Corp. take over even more of the waterfront. The America’s Cup continues to move forward — but at every step of the way, multibillionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is trying to squeeze the city for more. Mayor Lee has to make it clear: We’ve given one of the richest people in the world vast amounts of valuable real estate already. He doesn’t need a giant TV screen in the Bay or more land swaps or more city benefits. Enough is enough.

There’s plenty more, but even completing part of this list would put the city on the right road forward. Happy new year.

 

 

Off to Pompei’s Grotto for our 25th annual New Year’s Eve dinner

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In a couple of hours, Jean and I will be going to the delightful Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant we have  frequented for the past quarter century on New Year’s Eve.

Twenty-five or so years ago, we happened to be strolling along on Fisherman’s Wharf looking for a place to eat New Year’s Eve dinner, We happened upon Pompei’s Grotto. in the heart of the Wharf at 340 Jefferson St.

It looked warm and inviting and beckoned to us  with colorful holiday decorations and a friendly demeanor and so we went in.  We found it the perfect place for us on New Year’s Eve and we’ve never missed since.

Red-checked table cloths. Lamps on each table.  Lots of greenery.  Reasonably priced and nicely prepared fish dishes. Superb martinis.  And always members of the founding Pompei family on hand to insure good service and quality meals and drinks and the friendly atmosphere of a family-owned and operated restaurant at the same location where Frank and and wife Marian started Pompei’s in 1946 from a tiny place with a couple of counters. Nowadays, daughter Nancy runs things,  son Tom cooks most days, and son-in-law Gayne, who has been cooking for 40 years or so, makes cameo appearances in the kitchen.

Jean and I have the same meals.  We both have the largest Dungeness crab in stock, with lots of drawn butter and fresh sour dough bread.  We each have very dry martinis, one for Jean and at least two for me. Jean has a shrimp cocktail and I have half a dozen oysters with a hearty mix of cocktail sauce and horseradish. We  finish things off  by asking for two spoons and sharing a good old-fashioned Midwestern-style chocolate sundae with a perched cherry on top.  Somehow we never vary the routine and we don’t intend to do so this year.    And we have,  I assure you, the best New Year’s Eve dinner in town.

We’re off.  I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, take a virtual tour of Pompei’s: http://www.pompeisgrottosf.com/tour.html

 

 

Louis Dunn asks ex-President Bush: Was the Iraq war worth it?

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Lead paragraph in the lead story in Thursday’s New York Times (12/29/11):

“BAGHDAD–The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.”

B3 note: the graphics and cartoons of Louis Dunn, a former Guardian art director and artist, will be featured regularly in the Guardian, on the Guardian website, and on the Bruce blog.

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