• No categories

Editors Notes

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

I was over at the San Francisco Public Defender’s office the other day, headed for a press roundtable, and I’d forgotten what room the event was in so I wound up at the reception desk on the second floor. When I arrived, a man was standing at the counter, highly agitated, trying to explain that something was wrong with his case, and that nobody was listening and he was getting the runaround — the kind of scene you see every day at the bottom level of the legal system, where people who don’t have money scramble constantly to figure out which end is up.

And on the other side of the counter was a young guy who was calmly collecting the information, analyzing the problem, and explaining exactly what the client needed to do. He sent him a few doors down to another service then said, with a smile: "But don’t worry, if they can’t help you, just come right back here and we’ll get you taken care of." He was the model of what a good public employee ought to be — professional, friendly, polite, smart, and (particularly important in this office) sympathetic.

And as I stepped up to ask him where the press event was, I realized I knew his name. He still looks just like he did when his picture ran on the front page of the Guardian on Sept 3, 2003, the day he was released from prison after serving 13 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

John Tennison works for the guy who devoted years to winning his freedom, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and as far as I can tell, he’s a perfect fit for the job. He survived 13 years of hell with no visible bitterness. And he’s a reminder, for all those who like to forget, that everyone in prison is not a violent thug — or even guilty.

Coincidentally, if there is such a thing, I had just been working on a story about a move to criminalize cell phones in California prisons. The wardens have gone beyond drugs and weapons; phones are the new contraband. I posted an item on the politics blog about it and got the typical responses: Why should prisoners have access to cell phones? Aren’t they supposed to be punished? Give ’em bread and water and that’s it.

I get that cell phones can be a safety issue if they’re used by gangs and violent criminals to conduct business. But I also get that prisoners (or more truthfully, their families) have to pay exorbitant rates to make collect calls on the pay phones in prisons, and that there is often a wait, and that calls can only be made at certain times.

I’m not going to make cell phones for prisoners the biggest crusade of my life, but you know, a sizable number of the 170,000 California inmates did nothing other than buy and sell drugs that ought to be legal anyway; a fair number did nothing at all and were wrongly convicted; and most of the rest will get out at some point — and the more contact they have with their families (and potential employers), the better and safer we all are.

Something to think about. *

Editor’s Notes

-
0

Tredmond@sfbg.com

In 1984, journalists Milton Moskowitz and Robert Levering published a landmark book called The 100 Best Places to Work for in America. I didn’t want to work for any of them. The list is updated every year through the San Francisco-based Great Places to Work Institute, and it runs in Fortune.

The institute looks at things like pay, benefits, and perks, as well as at trust and culture: Does management accept input freely? Are workers in involved in key decisions? Do people feel part of a team? All of these are important factors in a workplace.

But the selection process doesn’t look at what the company actually does.

For example, Texas Instruments is on the list. It’s also a defense contractor that makes precision-guided weapons systems. You know, bombs. Starbucks — the voracious chain that drives out small local coffee shops — is on the list. So is Whole Foods and Microsoft and Goldman Sachs.

I’m not saying that Levering, who runs the institute, isn’t doing good work. But when you talk about great places to work these days, I think you also should be talking about places that have a positive impact on the environment.

The world is facing two cataclysmic crises these days. The planet is melting down. So is the economy. The only way we’re going to fix both is to look at economic development that is also environmental development. And a lot of it is going to happen in cities.

Real sustainable development includes green jobs (Bay Area activist Van Jones is bringing that agenda to the White House) — and a commitment to preserving locally-owned, independent businesses and a diverse community.

Those aren’t conflicting goals, they’re complimentary. But looking only at one piece of the puzzle — how many jobs we create, or how nice they are — isn’t going to get us where we need to go. *

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

I spent the weekend with my head under the kitchen sink, experiencing that loop of doom that makes old San Francisco houses so charming. The drain was stopped up, so I figured I’d pull the trap and clean it out, but the pipe broke in half the minute I tried to unscrew it. When I bought a new one, the pipe it attached to started to crumble, and when I replaced that one, the seals on the next pipe were shot, and after the third trip to Cole Hardware, I realized that I was going to have to pull out all of the kitchen plumbing and replace everything.

So I was lying there on my back, with dirty water and little pieces of whatever foul gunk had adhered to the insides of the old pipes dripping into my eyes, and all of the Sunday ads and advertorial sections of the Chronicle next to me to sop up the mess, and I started thinking about why I subscribe to The New York Times.

We’ve considered cutting it off — it costs a lot of money, and we’re trying not to spend a lot of money these days. Also, if I want to, I can find all the entire paper on the Web anyway. I don’t even get most of my world news from the Times; I read the British papers, the Guardian and The Independent.

But every morning while I’m sitting at the counter eating my breakfast, I turn to the Times op-ed page and get some of the most intelligent, interesting insight and commentary you’re going to find on a single sheet of paper anywhere in the world. And I thought: If the Times was in such dire financial straights that it had to fire half its staff, and Bob Herbert was one of the unfortunate souls chosen for a pink slip, I’d be joining the national uproar. There would be petitions, and editors’ inboxes would be jammed with e-mail, and marchers would mass in Times Square.

Ditto Paul Krugman, who is one of the few prominent economists in America who isn’t full of shit. And Thomas Freidman, who is sometimes full of shit but thinks so clearly and makes such cogent arguments that it’s a pleasure to get mad at him. And Nicholas Kristof, who routinely travels to some of the nastiest places on the planet to bring back the stories of how American policy affects human beings who otherwise would have remained in the shadows for life. That page alone is worth $1 a day; in fact, it’s one of the greatest bargains on Earth.

I don’t know whom the Chronicle is going to fire March 31 when the cutbacks are supposed to happen. I have kinda, sorta friends there, and there are some good, honest reporters, and I hope they all survive. But is there any political opinion columnist whose pending demise would get me out of my chair to a rally? Uh, no.

I love Jon Carroll, but he writes a lot about cats and mondegreens and there’s a good reason he isn’t on the op-ed page. Debra Saunders? Sorry, she’s an idiot. (And not just because I disagree with her — William Safire is one of my favorite writers ever. Saunders? Idiot.) C.W. Nevius? Belongs in the suburbs. John Diaz? Eh. Whatever.

I still pay for the Chron, but I’m not surprised that hardly anyone else I know does.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

My sister did a sociology project in college that involved the culture of laundromats. Nothing revolutionary, and I suspect it’s been done before, but she hung out in coin-ops and watched what happened when somebody ran out of money before the final load. What she discovered (again, nothing that sociologists haven’t written about for years) was that the less money patrons had, the more likely they were to lend it to someone else. You can imagine what the poorer folks told her: "Hey, last week that was me needing a quarter."

I know this is a huge, vast, sweeping generalization, but I’ll cop to it: Poor people are better at building communities than rich people. If you’re someone who is always living on the edge, always one step away from economic disaster, you’re more likely to play a role in a community that helps others in your situation.

So check out our cover story this week, because it gives some perspective on the evils of gentrification.

In the 1980s, lower Polk Street had an active sex-worker community. Hustlers and bartenders and guys looking for hustlers took care of each other. New kids in town, many of them runaways fleeing homophobic and abusive situations, got connections, work (not always sex work), and a chance to build a life. There are quite a few prominent, successful San Franciscans who came out of that world. It wasn’t always pretty, and was often dangerous, but it was a legitimate community.

But as more upscale businesses and residents started to displace the hustler bars and push the kids off the streets, the community fell apart. It didn’t help that the drug of choice was changing from pot to meth, and that AIDS was ravaging queer San Francisco, particularly places like Polk Street, and a lot of the damage would have occurred anyway. Still, the gentrification made it worse.

And as organic, self-sustaining communities made up of people who help each other are riven by economic displacement, the costs are shifted to the public sector. In other words, gentrification is bad for the taxpayers.

I saw this happening way back in the early 1980s, when I was a volunteer with the Haight Ashbury Switchboard. We saved the city millions, mostly by helping people in the neighborhood help each other. My friend Jasin, who was living on SSI, had a flat with some extra space, and we sent homeless crashers to stay with her while they got on their feet. A few of the local communes took in crashers too. We told people how to work the system, how to say out of trouble, how to survive in the big city.

But as rents went up, and people who had plenty of time to volunteer either left town or had to take full-time jobs, and the communes and food conspiracies disappeared, and SSI no longer paid for a five-room flat — as the Haight gentrified — that model fell apart. There are still plenty of community-based services and organizations in the Haight and elsewhere, but it’s harder, much harder. And the sense that we’re all in this together, that we’re all kind of struggling but we’re all going to help each other make it through, is almost gone.

I don’t know. Maybe the depression brings it back. *

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

The historian and political scientist Alan Gibson argues that much of the contemporary discussion the founders of the United States misses the political point. In his new book, Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions, Gibson, a professor at California State University, Chico notes that conservatives often claim the framers of the Constitution for their own agenda — a position he calls historically inaccurate.

James Madison in particular was very much a progressive thinker, says Gibson (who is one of the winners of the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ freedom of information awards this year, see page 15). The fourth president of the United States particularly believed that a free press was crucial to democracy.

I thought about that this week as I followed the news that the San Francisco Chronicle may shut down — and read stories from the Chauncey Bailey Project and the Chronicle about the murder of the Oakland journalist. On March 7, the project reported that an Oakland homicide inspector had close ties with the head of Your Black Muslim Bakery, Yusef Bey IV, who it now appears may have played a role in the killing. The Chronicle reported March 8 that Bailey was caught up in a power struggle at the bakery (and that the publisher of the Oakland Post was afraid to run Bailey’s stories). These detailed investigative pieces will almost certainly help ensure that Bailey’s killers are brought to justice. Without this press attention, the Oakland cops would have gotten away with bungling the case.

Without full-time, paid reporters on the job, those stories would never have come to light.

I’m as pissed at the Chron as anyone, and I’ve been watching the paper self-destruct for many years. And I’m not sure what sort of financial model will keep a daily paper going in the next decade.

But I know that a model exists — because it has to. Democracy can’t survive without a free press, and a free press can’t survive without staff to do the work. That’s something to remember as we celebrate the James Madison Awards and our annual Freedom of Information issue. * *

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

When the news broke last week that Hearst Corporation was threatening to shut down the San Francisco Chronicle, the pundits across the country raised the obvious question: will San Francisco become the first American city without a major daily newspaper?

I think it’s a little early to say that Chron is actually going to vanish; part of what’s going on is clearly a shot across the bow of the paper’s unions, a warning on the part of tough-guy publisher Frank Vega that he’s deadly serious about cutting costs. That will mean widespread layoffs, outsourcing of union jobs, etc. Hearst is a big corporation run by bean counters, one that has major financial problems at many of its media properties. It’s not going to keep sustaining $50 million a year losses in San Francisco.

But Hearst is also a major political player in the United States, California, and San Francisco, and a big-city newspaper carries with it a lot of influence. Shutting down the Chron would be a huge step, one that the Hearst board members, who include William Randolph Hearst 3rd, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, are going to do only as an absolute last resort.

What happens if we lose the Chron? Well, in the short term, we’re stuck with the Examiner, which recently lauded Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s CEO as an icon of alternative energy. I need say no more. In the longer term, something will arise to replace the Chron, probably several Web-only daily newspapers, but they’ll never achieve the clout an old-fashioned morning paper had on the political, cultural, and civic dialogue. Those days are numbered anyway; the urban news media of the future will be smaller, less concentrated, and less individually influential.

I’m not a huge fan of Hearst’s San Francisco flagship, but it’s always a shame to see a newspaper die. And I’m convinced that the creaky old Chron could still survive. But it will need major surgery — not just on the finances, but on the content. Because these days, nobody I know under 30 bothers to read it.

So for Mr. Vega and his editor, Ward Bushee, allow me to offer some hints at reviving the moribund publication:

1. Become a San Francisco paper. Nobody reads the Chron for national news any more. You can get The New York Times delivered or read it on the Web and get far better coverage than anything the Chron offers. So give it up. Go local. And by local I don’t mean Walnut Creek and Orinda; forget the suburban readers and try to convince people in your central circulation area that you have something worth reading every day.

2. Trade C.W. Nevius to the Examiner for a draft choice and a writer to be named later and hire seven young, progressive columnists who can talk about issues that people in one of America’s most liberal cities actually relate to. Run a front-page opinion column every day, by a different one of them — make every powerful interest in the city nervous.

3. Redirect the energy and money from the national news to local investigative reporting. A team of five reporters can break a dozen major stories a year. We do it here on much less.

4. Since David Lazarus left for the L.A. Times, there’s not much muckraking on the business desk. Forget the wire stories and the puff — kick some corporate asses.

5. Hire a liberal editorial page editor.

6. Ray Ratto. Go team.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

You’d think Gavin and Jennifer were the king and queen or something, or that the San Francisco Examiner had turned into People magazine, to see all the fuss about the First Baby. Seriously, the Ex devoted a full two-page spread to the kid, who isn’t even past the first trimester. Sample baby names, a composite photo of what His or Her Little Highness might look like, an entire story on the political implications of fatherhood (hint: family photos look great in campaign mailers) … it’s not as if it’s been a slow news week.

Does anybody really care that much if a married couple decides to procreate? Jesus, when Willie Brown was mayor and impregnated his fundraiser, who was about 30 years younger than he was, it was a collective civic "whatever."

The mayor doesn’t typically take my phone calls (imagine that) so I passed along my best wishes through his press secretary, Nathan Ballard, who doesn’t take my phone calls, either, but does occasionally deign to respond to my e-mail. I don’t know if he got that one, since he never wrote back, so perhaps I’ll just say it again, in public:

Congratulations, folks. It’s a wonderful and crazy world out there, being working parents with busy careers and raising a kid. I hope you never need all the family services you’re about to cut.

Cloth diapers are much more ecological, but that absorbent stuff they use to make the disposables is so incredibly cool that you just want to take them apart with a scissors and pour colored water on them just to see how they expand. (Trust me, things like this will become fascinating at 5 a.m. when you’ve been up all night.) A tiny little square of that stuff sucks up about 50 times its weight in liquid. It’s one of the great inventions of the 20th century.

When the kid’s a little older, you can ride the Muni trains. That’s what my son and I used to do every weekend. You come to appreciate Muni as performance art. It doesn’t really matter when the train shows up or how slowly it moves; you aren’t going anywhere anyway. And you’ll meet all kinds of people who will give you all kinds of tips about child-rearing, and maybe a few about how to run San Francisco. And it only cost $1.50; kids still ride free.

Then it’s time to send your kid to public schools.

I get a lot of shit when I talk about this; my blog post complaining about the Obamas choosing a private school got all sorts of comments from all over the country, every single one of them negative. But I soldier on: elected officials should send their kids to public schools. If the San Francisco schools aren’t good enough for the mayor’s kid, then the mayor needs to be working harder to fix them. I know it’s none of my business, and that you have to do what you think is right for your own child and all that, but … if the mayor, or the president, or the school superintendent, or the school board members, or the supervisors choose private schools, then they’re saying that public education is good enough for the poor kids, but not for their own.

Hell of a statement, huh Gavin?

San Francisco has some great public schools, and I suspect you can figure out the admissions process. Or just gimme a call. I’ll pass along some tips.


Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

Two noteworthy meetings took place in the past couple of weeks. One was led by David Chiu, the president of the Board of Supervisors, the other by Ryan Chamberlain, a downtown political consultant. Other than the sfbg.com politics blog, no local media have been paying much attention. But both ad hoc gatherings could have tremendous political significance.

Chiu was trying to solve the budget crisis, or at least get a handle on it. He called together the major stakeholders in the hope that some sort of consensus, or at least reluctant, unhappy common ground, could be found on the worst fiscal crisis in 80 years.

Chamberlain invited a group of downtown power brokers and moderate-to-conservative political candidates to try to map out a strategy to oust the progressives from control of the board in 2010.

If Chiu succeeds, and crafts a budget compromise that most of the competing interests can accept, it will be a huge victory for the freshman supervisor — and a big win for the progressives he’s aligned with. Governing — actually making tough choices in tough times and finding workable solutions — is much harder than simply leading the opposition. And if the left in this town can show that we can run things better than the Newsom camp, Chamberlain and his big-money crew won’t do much better in 2010 than they did in 2008.

Chamberlain’s group is looking for new approaches and new strategies, and they’ll focus on things like "quality of life" (read: homeless people on the streets). Chiu ought to be able to tell the downtown folks (who, interestingly, are probably going to both meetings) that the Newsom administration’s budget cuts are going to make the homeless problem way worse.

So all this political and policy debate is going on quietly in San Francisco. And what’s most interesting is that the person who should have the most at stake in both areas isn’t even at the table. He’s too busy running for governor.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

It was kind of weird to be standing in front of the White House last week and not protesting anything. I’d been there so many times before, but always with a sign or a shout or at the very least a sneer: the White House wasn’t a symbol of hope as much as it was a monument to everything that infuriated me about the United States of America. The Reagan years, the Bush years, the Clinton years, the Bush years … I used to say, and it wasn’t that long ago, that I didn’t think the United States could ever elect a president I could actually believe in.

And late Saturday night, I was sitting in a hotel bar with a bunch of cynical editors and publishers from a bunch of cynical alternative newspapers — and everyone was talking about walking over to the White House. We knew the Obamas weren’t even there (they’d gone to Camp David for the weekend). And there wasn’t much to see, particularly late at night. But it felt like the street in front of the White House was just a cool place to be.

Pretty amazing.

Barack Obama has a remarkable amount of good will built up. He has a honeymoon period like no president has had in my lifetime. The left is generally patient, the center seems enthralled, and the right is a lot more muted in its criticism than we were when, say, Ronald Reagan took office on a wave of popularity. And his political capital is already getting tested.

It was astonishing listening to some of the debate over the stimulus plan. I’m not thrilled with the way the thing is coming down — it’s too small, it’s too focused on the private sector, there’s too much in tax cuts and not enough in spending. But the way the Republicans have been talking about the bill, particularly in the Senate, is mind-boggling.

John McCain (didn’t he just lose an election or something?) was blubbering away about "pork." Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona insisted that the bill "wastes a ton of money." Sen. Susan Collins of Maine introduced (and remarkably enough, got passed) an amendment reading: "None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project." As if parks, theaters, and art centers are the same as casinos. (Remember, the Works Progress Administration, one of the most successful parts of the New Deal, built theaters and parks — and put artists to work, something missing from this bill).

Look: the only way the federal government can pull us out of this tailspin is with huge amounts of spending. You can’t spend $800 billion without wasting something, somewhere; some dollars will wind up getting stolen or diverted or used for the wrong thing, and some of what’s in the bill will be foolish.

But the notion that the people who created this mess, who used tax cuts and lax regulations to wreck the economy, should be criticizing government spending is more than a little nuts. You have to wonder: Why does anybody listen to these people any more? And why is Obama even trying to work with them?

Obama’s first prime-time press conference was a little shaky (although it’s hard to blame a guy who’s got the future of the world’s largest economy in his hands for not having a clear position on the A-Rod steroid scandal right now). The stress on Obama is already showing.

But he still has the political capital, and he ought to be playing a little more public hardball.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

This is what happened in the office of the mayor of San Francisco last week:

1. One of the most highly respected members of the Newsom administration — quite possibly the only department head the mayor ever hired who has the unquestioned respect of every sector of the community she works with — was forced to resign, for reasons the mayor won’t explain. In fact, in a lame attempt at spin, the mayor’s press office put out a statement suggesting that Margaret Brodkin, who ran the Department of Children, Youth and Families, was leaving to take a new position.

Wrong, as Brodkin quickly (and predictably) pointed out in her own release, which hit my inbox at almost exactly the same time. Brodkin told the truth: the mayor, who has had nothing but praise for her in public, fired her, summarily.

2. Just a few weeks after vowing to begin a new era of mutual respect and a desire to work with the new Board of Supervisors, the mayor tried to override the board, quietly, and place his own unqualified ally on a key state commission.

The supervisors had voted 8-0 to nominate Sup. Ross Mirkarimi for a slot on the state Coastal Commission. That’s an important job: the commission regulates development all along the state’s coast, and the person who represents San Francisco, Marin, and Sonoma counties needs to be a strong and reliable environmentalist. Mirkarimi, a Green Party member, has devoted much of his life to environmental causes; his colleagues on the board agreed he was the best candidate to forward to the state Senate Rules Committee, which has the final say on appointments.

Without informing Mirkarimi or Board President David Chiu, Newsom tried to pull a fast move: he forwarded the name of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier to Senate Rules, hoping, perhaps, that as a Democrat, Alioto-Pier might get the nod. There’s a good reason the supervisors didn’t nominate her — her record on environmental issues is awful, she’s way too friendly to developers, and the last time she had an outside job, as a delegate to the Golden Gate Bridge board, she missed half the meetings. But Newsom wouldn’t trust the board, and wanted his own candidate.

Which was not only wrong, but stupid: turns out state law gives the supervisors, not the mayor, the exclusive right to nominate Coastal Commission candidates. Newsom’s office didn’t even check the regulations, and by the end of the week, his spinmeisters were pretending that they’d never really forwarded her name in the first place.

3. The mayor came out strongly against a June special election to raise taxes to cover some of the half-billion-dollar deficit — but offered absolutely no alternative. That left the supervisors, city employees, the press, and the public wondering what exactly the mayor has in mind — 1,000 layoffs? 2,000? Major service cuts? — and when he’s going to tell us about it.

Oh, and while all of this was happening, Himself was out of town, hobnobbing with the hip swells at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s asking — what the fuck is going on in Newsom-land, anyway? *

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Just about every progressive economist agrees that the federal bailout bill should include money to help state and local government. I agree. Forcing government to lay off public sector workers and cut services is the worst thing you can do in a recession.

But in a strange way, some sick, contrary part of me almost hopes the Obama administration doesn’t bail out California. Federal money would let us off easy. It would let us do what just about everyone in Sacramento desperately wants to do right now: figure out a way to get out of this mess for another year. Then we can all hope things will get better again.

But they won’t, is the thing. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported Jan. 25, the weak economy is leading to a lot of home sales, and a lot of those sales are at prices below the level of the property’s current tax assessment. So property tax revenue will be dropping this year – but they’ll stay low next year, and the year after, and the year after that. Because under Proposition 13, property taxes can’t go up by more than 2 percent a year. So even as the economy recovers and property values rise, those houses and commercial properties sold at bargain basement levels today will continue to enjoy nice tax cuts for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, the state already owes billions from previous one-time borrowing to cover previous one-time budget solutions. And since most of the money comes from taxes that are highly unstable and move with the economy (sales taxes, for example), the budget hole is going to get worse before it gets better.

This is no way to run the world’s eighth-largest economy.

And I keep thinking: could this finally be our chance to do something about it? Might things get so bad this year that people start asking about actual radical change?

And when I talk about radical change, I’m not talking about a tax here or there. I’m talking about somebody in the Legislature standing up and saying, if we were going to create from scratch a system to fund the state of California, what would it look like? And I can tell you, it would look nothing like the Winchester Mystery House of tax laws that we have today.

I won’t be the one called on to draft the blueprint for a new California revenue system, which is probably a good thing. But I can make a few observations and offer a few proposals that almost everyone with any sense agrees ought to be on the table.

First, California may be broke right now, but many of its residents are not. Generally speaking, the fairest types of taxes are income taxes, and the state doesn’t charge the people with very high earnings anywhere near enough. And since the rich don’t tend to suffer as much as the rest of us in recessions, that’s a fairly stable resource.

We don’t do enough to capture our share of the money companies make off California’s resources, either. This is an oil-producing state, yet we have no tax on oil at the wellhead; even Louisiana has that. And we don’t do nearly enough to charge consumers for the damage they do to the environment (the car tax being the most obvious example).

But beyond that, we tax goods and manufacturing, which is no longer the base of our economy, and let services go free. Some services are necessary and should be exempt (medical care, for example). But are the people who pay for, say, personal trainers or cosmetic surgery by and large better off financially than the rest of us? I suspect they are. Should they be taxed on what is by almost any standard a luxury service?

The point is, we need to stop looking at this as a one-time problem. This year’s deficit is the canary in the financial coal mine. Maybe instead of a ballot measure on one tax plan, we should have an election to reconsider Prop. 13, the tax code, and the entire way we finance the state. The system is about to collapse. Maybe we should start again, and get it right this time.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

Barack Obama is going to have to be a different kind of president, and I don’t mean just policy or the fact that he’s by far the coolest guy to hold that office in my lifetime. I mean he’s going to have to change the tone of how Americans look at our country. He’s going to have to do something that George Bush (and Bill Clinton before him) never did. He’s going to have to get rid of the selfish baby boomer ethos. He’s going to have to talk about sacrifice.

The economy can’t be fixed with deficit spending alone, and the equally massive environmental issues can’t be fixed with just hybrid cars and wind turbines. All those things are important. Without massive federal spending, probably well beyond what Obama is talking about today, the nation will continue to lose millions of jobs, the recession will become a deep depression, and life around here will really suck. And without new technologies, climate change will continue to get worse and energy will become far more expensive and far less reliable.

But in the end, it’s going to take more.

I was listening to the Democratic response to the governor’s State of the State speech Jan. 15 and the KQED radio host asked Darrell Steinberg, the state Senate president pro tem, the basic question of our time: why do Californians want all these wonderful services — education, parks, roads, trains, etc. — but don’t want to pay for them? Steinberg ducked beautifully, but the question still hangs out there. And it’s not just California.

Let us not forget: the United States is still a very wealthy country, and the Bush years made some of its residents exceptionally rich. I just added up the net worth of the top 20 people on the latest Forbes 400 list, and it came to $433 billion. That’s 20 people. The net profits of the top 10 companies on the Fortune 500 list for 2008 totaled more than $100 billion. That’s 10 companies.

Bush never asked any of those people or corporations to help pay for his war. Instead he told them everything would be easy, and gave them juicy tax cuts.

Obama has to set a different tone. He needs to say, loudly and clearly, that those who have the most (far more than they need) in very tough times should be willing to share.

A one-time, 10 percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich would probably raise half a trillion dollars. A short-term excess profits tax (similar to what the nation enacted during World War II) would provide another huge chunk. And it would send a signal to the rest of the country: this isn’t going to be easy. We all have to help out, starting with those at the top.

It also means that, on every level, we all have to get more engaged, more involved in the community. We have to become a nation of givers, not just takers. Public service has to be more important than private profit.

That’s a tough order for a generation raised on selfishness and greed. But it’s the only way out — and the guy we put in office on a banner of change has to lead the way.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I guess Mayor Gavin Newsom really wants to cut the budget. He wants to force city employees (and not just the cops) to accept pay cuts. He wants to lay people off and eliminate services. He wants to solve the budget crisis entirely on his terms — and honestly, it baffles me.

Anyone who runs a public or private enterprise has to make tough decisions and tough choices in tough times. I know that. I’ve had to cut spending and lay people off — and I can tell you, it sucked. It didn’t make me feel like a strong leader or a hard-nosed manager, it just made me sad.

In politics, I guess, there’s some advantage to looking like you can stand up to organized labor and the left. Maybe Newsom thinks he can run for governor as the mayor who refused to raise taxes during a budget crisis. Maybe he, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, thinks taxes are for girlie men.

But does he really want to preside over the decline of his own signature health care plan? Does he want to be mayor of a city that recovers more slowly from the recession? Does he want to be the environmental leader who cut public transportation funding?

He doesn’t have to do that. There’s another alternative. He can work with the supervisors — and labor, and business, and community activists — and look at ways to bring in some more money. It shouldn’t be that hard a sell, really. The budget gap is huge — Aaron Peskin, who served on the Board of Supervisors for eight years, said before he left office that he’s having a hard time even getting his mind around the monstrosity of the necessary cuts. I’ve been watching local politics for 25 years, and I’ve having a hard time too. We could be looking at eliminating half the discretionary spending in the general fund.

Do people who live and work in this city (including business owners) want to see public health cut by 25 percent? Do they want to see libraries closed, and neighborhood fire stations eliminated, and police stations shut down, and recreation programs that keep kids off the streets eliminated, and the Small Business Assistance Center defunded, and more mentally ill people wandering the streets, and longer waits for more crowded Muni buses? Is this the city we all want to live in?

Or are the wealthier residents and bigger businesses willing to pay just a little bit more each year to keep basic services in place?

If Mayor Newsom, who is still quite popular in town, asked that question, in that fashion, and presented budget cuts that everyone knows are necessary and better oversight and good government programs to let us all know that the money isn’t being wasted, and then promoted a couple of fair and progressive new revenue measures in a June special election, the worst of the bloodbath could be avoided.

I can’t understand why he wants this to be so hard.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

When I saw KTVU’s excellent report Saturday night about the BART police officer shooting an unarmed man, all I could think was: I’ve been here before.

In 1992, Officer Fred Carbtree, a 15-year veteran of the BART police force, shot and killed an unarmed kid named Jerrold Hall in the parking lot of the Hayward station. That was way before cell phones and ubiquitous video; there were no pictures of the shooting and few witnesses would come forward. BART made a monumental effort to cover it up; I spent an entire month working seven days a week to break through that brick wall. In the end, I got the story: Crabtree, who was white, had heard a report of an armed robbery on the train, saw Hall, who was black, leaving the station and called him over. Hall, who had no weapon, argued with the cop and told him he’d done nothing, then turned and started to walk away. Crabtree racked his shotgun, fired a warning shot over Hall’s head, then fired again, killing him.

There is no police agency in the United States that allows its officers to fire warning shots. There is no police agency that authorizes an officer to shoot an unarmed suspect who is fleeing the scene. I thought Crabtree should be prosecuted for homicide, but at the very least, he violated his own agency’s clearly written rules.

Nothing happened. He was not subject to any discipline at all. BART called the shooting justified.

Back then, I raised the question: Who’s in charge of the BART police? Where’s the civilian oversight?

There wasn’t any. And 17 years later, there still isn’t.

This latest incident is going to cost BART at least $10 million when the lawsuits are over. That could fund a modest civilian oversight operation for 20 years. And maybe it will save someone’s life.

>>Read the Guardian’s previous BART tragedy coverage here

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was going to do New Year’s resolutions this week. I got started: turn the cell phone volume down when the kids are in the car and Aaron Peskin is on the line. ("That man sure does like to use the f-word when he talks about PG&E," my nine-year old noted this fall.) Stop shouting "Yo, asshole!" when cars come too close to my bicycle. (I know I can be way more creative and foul-mouthed than that.) Return Gavin Newsom’s phone calls. (Hey, the poor guy must be lonely.)

But really, it’s not all about me.

So instead, in honor of the end of the Bush Years and in the hope of a 2009 we can all be proud of, here are some things I would like to see other people do:

I would like to see the California Legislature and US Congress raise the gas tax enough to bring the price to about $3 a gallon, making sure SUVs remain unattractive forever.

I would like to see the new progressives on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors make open government a real priority; I would like to stop having to fight to get even routine information out of City Hall. I would like everyone in public office to read Bob Herbert’s column in Dec. 27’s The New York Times and understand that one reason FDR was successful with the New Deal was that he understood the importance of restoring faith in government; transparency, accountability, and oversight were a central part of the package.

I would like Anchor Steam to start making a light beer.

I would like someone to get Wi-fi installed at City Hall.

I would like Gavin Newsom to stop hiding behind Nathan Ballard.

I would like the right lane of the stretch of I-80 near Lake Tahoe repaved so those of us with small cars don’t get bounced up and down like ping pong balls.

I would like the federal drinking age lowered to 18.

I would like everyone to stop talking about the death of newspapers and stop pretending that blogs and citizen journalism can ever replace full-time trained reporters.

I would like the San Francisco police to stop turning immigrants over to the feds.

I would like the executive editor of Village Voice Media to shave his head, move to Tibet, become a monk, and accept the karmic implications of the way he’s lived his life.

I would like the state to tax the millionaires instead of the college students.

I would like some really rich person to die and leave $20 million for a public power campaign so that for once we could match Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s money and have a fair fight.

I would like Barack Obama to appoint Arnold Schwarzenegger ambassador to some meaningless country so we can have a new governor.

I would like Newsom to liquidate his personal fortune and use the money to pay rent and grocery bills for the front-line city workers he’s laying off.

I would like the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco to quit the gay-hating.

I would like all my fellow dog owners to clean up the poo on the sidewalk.

I would like to be able to ride high-speed rail to Los Angeles before I start collecting Social Security. Happy New Year.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Let me say something out of synch with the holiday spirit, something you don’t want to hear in a "season of sharing," something utterly uncharitable. Listen:

Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist, had a piece Dec. 21 complaining that liberals aren’t generous enough. He had a couple of studies showing that conservatives give more money to charity. The progressives, he suggests, ought to be ashamed that they aren’t doing more to help the less fortunate.

Well, a couple of problems. For starters, much of the money conservatives give to "charity" actually goes to churches, some of which spend that largess promoting bigotry, fighting women’s rights, and trying to stop same-sex marriage. Particularly the churches that conservatives support. And when you eliminate religious institutions, liberals give about the same as conservatives.

But Kristof misses the big point. Charity, at least the way the right wing portrays it, is really the privatization of the social safety net.

Look, I’m not against charity. I give money — I hand cash to every panhandler I see. I like Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll’s "Untied Way" approach — give directly to the needy (even if I don’t get a tax deduction for it). I give money to political groups that are trying to make structural change (teach a man to fish and all that). I give money to my public school.

But the problem with charity is that it allows the wealthy to decide where their money goes — which means they decide what society’s priorities ought to be.

Instead of lauding Bill Gates for donating millions to Harvard, a sane political system would tax the hell out of Gates and let democratically elected representatives decide where the money should go. Maybe the public schools in Detroit need cash more than Harvard does. Maybe mental health services for homeless people in the South Bronx ought to be funded instead of a new computer science building at the world’s richest university. Maybe we should all set the priorities, not just the rich people.

That’s what charitable liberals believe. At least, I do.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s not ready to make $118 million in budget cuts.

I realize the city can’t operate at a deficit, and if payment due exceeds accounts received, something has to be done. But it can wait a few weeks. In fact, the final decisions ought to wait for the new Board of Supervisors to take office in January. The city won’t go broke in the meantime.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom is rushing his cuts through, demanding 400 layoffs and taking a hatchet to the Department of Public Health. There are all sorts of alternatives — our editorial in this issue looks at how the city can bring in more revenue. There’s also a lot more sanity needed as the board and the mayor look at what could be devastating reductions in essential public services.

For example: I like the 311 program. It’s convenient. But I’d rather wait longer for my non-emergency call to be answered than to have public health workers lose their jobs. And the 311 budget hasn’t been touched.

Police and fire are, of course, essential — but it’s insane to give the cops and firefighters, who are among the best-paid city workers, a 7.5 percent pay hike this year while social service workers are getting laid off.

It’s lovely to have more fire stations per square mile than any other big city in California, but there are nowhere near as many fires as there were when the system was designed, and closing some down would save millions.

How come the mayor still has seven people in his press office, most of whom are paid to keep the press from finding out what’s going on?

Why are we talking about cutting the $800,000 Small Business Assistance Center, which actually helps the most important sector of the economy, when there’s $10 million, much of it redundant, in the mayor’s Office of Economic Development?

Why is Dean Macris, the former city planning director, still hanging around and getting paid?

Wouldn’t an across-the-board wage freeze be better than layoffs? What about capping the pay for city employees at $150,000 a year? What about capping police overtime?

What about having all these discussions in public, before the mayor sends out pink slips?

Or would that just make too much sense?

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› Tredmond@sfbg.com

Muni is heading for a hiring freeze and delaying system improvements at the same time that Mayor Gavin Newsom says this is "not a time to raise fees and taxes on business." The head of the California High-Speed Rail Authority is fighting with the head of the Transbay Terminal project over money to extend train tracks downtown. The United States of America is bailing out car companies that have been fighting for years against tougher emissions standards and still can’t seem to make fuel-efficient vehicles. And we’re all worried about global warming and a deepening recession.

I’m not getting this.

Historians and economists can argue forever about the causes of the Great Depression, but most people agree about what brought it to an end: massive, over-the-top levels of public spending. Huge investments in infrastructure. Huge investments in employment programs.

Tax cuts didn’t end the Depression. Government layoffs and belt-tightening didn’t end the Depression. Under President Roosevelt, the government taxed and spent, borrowed and spent — and spent and spent and spent — starting with the New Deal and continuing through the gigantic reindustrialization of America known as World War II. And money went into things that actually created jobs — in many cases, public-sector jobs.

So now we’re in a period where San Francisco, California, and the nation desperately need new infrastructure . We need to shift, fairly radically, away from a car-based transportation system to one based on energy-efficient transit, particularly trains. We need to profoundly shift the electricity grid, away from nuclear and fossil fuels (and away from private control). All these things create jobs. It’s kind of a no-brainer.

California just approved $9.9 billion in bonds for a high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But even that money isn’t going to be enough, and progress is going to be slow. Take 1/10th of the $800 billion the federal government is putting into propping up big banks and spend it on an emergency plan to build high-speed rail all the way from Seattle to San Diego, and imagine how many jobs that would produce. Jobs for planners, engineers, accountants, office-support people, steel fabrication, construction work, heavy equipment operators … jobs for college grads, jobs for high school grads, union jobs, steady jobs, jobs that train people for other jobs –tens of thousands of them.

Take another 10 percent of that and spend it building solar panels on every public building on the West Coast. Again: jobs of every sort, at every level. Mandate that all the work gets done in America, and you’ll develop an entire new industry or two (we don’t build trains in this country much, but we could, and we already have auto workers and factories that are about to be idled).

I hear some talk about this from the Obama administration, but I also hear some caution and some discussion about budget deficits and keeping the financial sector happy. Fact: the financial sector will be happy when a few million more people are working and spending money. That’s where the economy starts.

I just watched all 34 minutes of the economic segment of Newsom’s state-of-the-city YouTube extravaganza. In and around the rhetoric, he devoted a few moments to the city’s budget deficit and how he was going to institute a hiring freeze, lay off workers and consolidate departments. All wrong.

In fact, this is an excellent time to raise taxes and fees — on the rich, the well-off commuters, the big businesses, the billionaires … Shifting wealth from the top to the bottom, creating public sector jobs in the process, is an fine recipe for economic stimulus. At every level of government.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was out of town the day Tom Ammiano appeared at his final meeting as a San Francisco supervisor. Too bad; I would have gone, no matter how busy I was, just to be a part of history.

I know that sounds silly. The Barack Obama inauguration will be part of history. The election of Harvey Milk was part of history. Ammiano’s last day? Hey, the guy’s moving on to Sacramento. Take a bow, everyone says thanks, and another local politician takes another political job. History?

Well, yeah, actually. Because when the history of progressive politics is written in this town (and I hope some other poor sucker takes on that job so I don’t have to) Tom Ammiano will go down as a central figure in the movement that turned San Francisco around.

It’s worth noting that the movie Milk, celebrating the life of the gay pioneer, opened around the same time Ammiano was clearing out his City Hall office. The connection goes deeper than the fact that they were both queer men fighting for basic human rights and dignity at a time when that was a huge uphill struggle.

Milk was part of an urban movement that came out of the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of San Francisco from a cadre of military and big business leaders who had been running it since World War II. The agenda of the crew that we collectively refer to as "downtown" was turning the sleepy port city of the 1930s into the financial headquarters for Pacific Rim trade. They wanted San Francisco to be another Manhattan; they laid plans, they put the machinery in place — and they never asked the people who lived here whether that was the future we wanted.

Because all that downtown development meant higher rents, more evictions, gentrification, budget deficits, too many cars, the death of small businesses … and by the mid-1970s, the activists had figured out how to fight back. It started with electing supervisors by district so that big money didn’t always carry the day.

Milk was elected supervisor as part of the progressive push that put George Moscone in the Mayor’s Office. And if Moscone and Milk had lived, it’s possible that the tide could have turned right then. But the assassinations derailed district elections, turned the city back over to downtown, and sentenced the San Francisco left to more than 20 years of tough political dark ages.

Ammiano got elected in that era, when the developers called all the shots, when tenants and environmentalists and neighborhood people were lucky to get two or three votes on the Board of Supervisors. His pro-tenant and anti-development proposals never even reached the desks of mayors who would have vetoed them anyway.

But he didn’t give up, and in 1999, in the bleak days of the dot-com boom, he took on a long-shot campaign for mayor that, in one six-week period, reenergized the San Francisco left. With his help, district elections came back; and with his leadership, a decidedly progressive board took office in 2001. Living wage, sick pay, universal health care, bike plans, real estate transfer taxes, tenant protections … these are all products of that change.

Ammiano was an odd sort of leader, someone with a sense of humor who didn’t take himself anywhere near seriously enough. He would be the first to credit the movement, not the man — and he’d be right. But when we needed him, he was there.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Is anyone else appalled that the Obamas are not even considering sending their kids to public schools? Seriously. This may not seem like the most important issue on the president’s agenda, but I think it’s a big deal.

According to The New York Times, Michelle Obama has toured Sidwell Friends, the pricey private school where Chelsea Clinton was educated. She’s also looking at Maret School and Georgetown Day, two institutions that cater to the children of the rich and powerful. There are no public schools on the list.

Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, DC has urged the Obamas to consider the schools that most DC kids attend, but he has little moral suasion: Mayor Fenty’s twin sons go to private school.

I’m a public school parent, and this really bothers me. What the Obamas are saying, in essence, is that there is no public school anywhere in the district good enough for their kids. They’re saying that if you’ve got the money, you should flee for the safety of private academies. Those lowly public places are just for the peasants.

That sort of statement matters. It matters when you think about the new president’s priorities. It matters when you think about the role he wants to play not just as a chief executive but as an agent of change and a moral compass for the nation and the world. In a way, it’s his first test, and he’s flunked it.

I’m sorry: the children of the president should go to public schools. The children of mayors, and city council members, and county supervisors, and city attorneys should go the same schools as the kids of the majority of their constituents. And if those schools aren’t as good as they’d like, well then, join the team. The rest of us are working like hell to make the under-funded, over-stressed public schools better. You can, too.

And by the way, Mr. President-elect, my public school in San Francisco is giving my son and daughter a great education. And they’re growing up with kids who aren’t just like them. That’s worth way more than your fancy $21,000 private school can ever offer.

* * * *

The election of Sup. Ed Jew two years ago gave ranked-choice voting a bad rep. This year, however, I think we saw how the system can work.

I understand the critics who say that old-fashioned runoffs — second-round elections held a few weeks after the general — are more fair and allow for excitement, like Tom Ammiano vs. Willie Brown in 1999 and Matt Gonzalez vs. Gavin Newsom in 2003. But they also create a problem, particularly when one side has a lot more money than the other.

Downtown had almost endless resources to try to defeat Eric Mar, David Chiu, and John Avalos. The Democratic Party, thanks to the progressive takeover this summer, was supporting the three progressives, as was labor, the Sierra Club, and the Tenants Union. And while party chair Aaron Peskin raised a sizeable sum for slate cards and labor spent cash on organizing efforts, that was dwarfed by the landlords and developers.

Mar, Chiu, and Avalos had the advantage of a high-turnout election. If they’d been forced to run again three weeks later, downtown would have again dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the races — and at some point, the good guys would run out of money. Plus, RCV gave the candidates an incentive to make alliances.

Not a perfect system, but better, I think, than the obvious alternative.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

The Castro District on election night was filled with joy and excitement as people poured out into the streets to celebrate the Obama victory. Three nights later, the streets were filled with people protesting, not reveling. That was the weird thing about being a San Franciscan this past week: we won a world-changing victory in the presidential race, and won most of the key races locally — but on same-sex marriage, we lost.

There are plenty of reasons for that, and we talk about some of them in this issue. There have been protests at Mormon churches and at some Catholic churches, as there should be, since those two religious groups raised most of the Yes on Proposition 8 money. (And can you imagine how many low-income Catholic-school kids could have been educated and how many hungry people could have been fed for the more than $25 million these folks spent trying to keep people from getting married?)

But if San Francisco really wants a poster boy for the attack on same-sex marriage, a local symbol of bigotry, he’s right in front of us: Archbishop George Niederauer.

Now, if you’re a Catholic archbishop, you kind of have to accept the church’s dogma, which says that marriage is a sacrament that can only be bestowed on a man and a woman. Whatever — he can believe and preach what he wants.

But if you’re the archbishop of San Francisco, you don’t have to mount a major political campaign against same-sex marriage. You could decide to use the church’s influence and money helping the poor, for example, which is pretty much what Jesus did. I might have missed that lesson in Catholic school, but I don’t remember the Big J ever saying a word about gay marriage.

Instead, Niederauer and his colleagues made Prop. 8 a huge issue. A flyer produced by the archbishop and handed out widely contained some glaring, inaccurate homophobic crap, including this: "If the Supreme Court ruling stands, public schools may have to teach children that there is no difference between traditional marriage and ‘gay marriage.’"

That infuriated Matt Dorsey, a gay Catholic who is active in Most Holy Redeemer Church. "Far worse than mere falsehood," he said, "is that the claim deliberately plays to the most hateful, vicious stereotypes and fears about gays and lesbians — that they are out to recruit (and perhaps even seduce) children."

Dorsey told me that this was part of a clear political campaign. "I would argue that the Catholic bishops in California made a cold, calculated, Karl Rovian decision that they were going to put a lot of skin in the game, so to speak, to beat gays and lesbians," he said, "even to the exclusion of prevailing on, say, Prop. 4 about parental notification for abortion. One would assume abortion is still opposed by Catholic bishops, right? Well, one would hardly have known it by this election. Gays and lesbians were the archbishop’s enemy this year, and abortion got a pass."

Again: I don’t expect the Catholic church to change its position and start marrying same-sex couples, not any time soon, anyway. And Niederauer can’t be expected to openly break with the Vatican. But for the archbishop of a city like San Francisco — a church leader who has a surprising number of queers and same-sex couples in his flock — to put so many resources into going after people with such an un-Christian hatred was over-the-top unnecessary. And by the way, this guy never talks to the press and won’t return my phone calls.

The good news, of course, is that the archbishop and his colleagues are on the losing side of history. Catholics voted for Prop. 8 by a 64 percent margin — but people under 30 (of all faiths and ethnic groups) voted against it by about the same percentage. Same-sex marriage is going to be part of the nation’s future, whether Niederauer likes it or not.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

In Milk, the new Harvey Milk movie, the hero (as in real life) is well aware that he’s a target and faces regular death threats. He also makes the point – and it’s kind of a theme in the film — that the movement he represents is far bigger than he is. It’s about the movement, not any one person, he keeps telling his supporters.

And that’s what we have to remember now that the Nov. 4 election is over.

Thanks to the weirdness of old-fashioned print publishing schedules, I’m writing this well before election day, and by the time you read it, Obama will have won the election. It’s a giddy feeling, actually winning a campaign on this level after so many bitter disappointments. And that’s fine — we should celebrate while we can.

But we should also remember that the real work starts now — and that’s the work of making sure that President Obama is accountable to the people who put him in office.

No other candidate in my adult life has had the kind of grassroots support that put Obama over the top. From the early days of the primaries, he has raised money on the Internet from tens of thousands of small donors. People who have never worked in a political campaign came out to volunteer for him. He has offered hope — and that’s a dangerous commodity. Because now he has to deliver.

We can’t expect too much too fast — but we can demand that he gives the progressive side of the Democratic Party its due. We don’t want the war to drag on. We don’t want the rich to keep gaining market share. We don’t want big business to derail environmental programs. We actually want change, real change — and we have to keep pushing for it.

Electing a president is necessary, not sufficient. It’s still about the movement.

(And if I’m all wrong, and John McCain is the next president, we all better start singing "O Canada")

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Our 42nd anniversary issue is all about creating a sustainable San Francisco. So, in many ways, is the Nov. 4 ballot.

Think about it. If you were going to design a blueprint for a sustainable city, it would have to include a clean-energy policy. That’s Proposition H. It would include provisions to make sure that a diverse population could afford to live here. That’s Proposition B. It would shift some of the tax burden off the smallest businesses and make sure the rich pay their fair share (that’s Props. N and Q). A sustainable city would need progressive leaders who understand that land-use planning can’t be run by developers. Electing Eric Mar in District 1, John Avalos in District 11, David Chiu in District 3 would keep the Board of Supervisors in progressive hands.

And of course, you’d want a mayor who makes sustainability a hallmark of his administration. So why is Gavin Newsom against every single ballot item that would take the city in a more environmentally sound direction?

He’s against Prop. B because he says he doesn’t want to tie his hands when it comes to future budgets. But this is a mayor who has refused to spend the affordable housing money the supervisors have allocated, and who insists that plans to add more than 50,000 new housing units, 85 percent of which will be affordable only to the top five percent of San Franciscans, is a sign of progress. He isn’t promoting a sustainable city; he’s promoting a city for millionaires.

Newsom’s against Prop. H because … wait, why is he against it? He’s never really explained himself — except through his proxy, Eric Jaye, who also happens to be running the $5 million Pacific Gas and Electric Co. campaign against H. Newsom doesn’t want a sustainable city; he wants a private-power-monopoly city.

He’s against the progressive supervisorial candidates and the progressive tax measures because, I think, he wants to keep the current power structure, controlled by downtown and landlord money, safely in place. That’s not a move toward a sustainable city; that’s leaving in charge the very same people who got us into environmental trouble in the first place. *

1...678...13Page 7 of 13

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org