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No Pasaran!

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MEXICO CITY, Aug. 24th — The Congress of the country is ringed by two-meter tall grilled metal barriers soldered together, apparently to thwart a suicide car-bomb attack. Behind this metal wall, 3000 vizored, kevlar-wearing robocops — the Federal Preventative Police (PFP, a police force drawn from the army) — and members of the elite Estado Mayor or presidential military command, form a second line of defense. Armed with tear gas launchers, water cannons, and reportedly light tanks, this Praetorian Guard has been assigned to protect law and order and the institutions of the republic against left-wing mobs that threaten to storm the Legislative Palace – or so the president informs his fellow citizens in repeated messages transmitted on national television.
No, the president’s name is not Pinochet and this military tableau is not being mounted in the usual banana republic or some African satrap. This is Mexico, a paragon of democracy (dixit George Bush), Washington’s third trading partner, and the eighth leading petroleum producer on the planet, seven weeks after the fraud-marred July 2nd presidential election of which, at this writing, no winner has been officially declared. One of the elite military units assigned to seal off congress is indeed titled the July 2nd brigade.

“MEXICO ON A KNIFEBLADE” headlines the British Guardian. The typically short-term-memory-loss U.S. print media seems to have forgotten about the imbroglio just south of its borders. Nonetheless, the phone rings and it’s New York telling me they just got a call from their man on the border and Homeland Security is beefing up its forces around Laredo in anticipation of upheaval further south. The phone rings again and it’s California telling me they just heard on Air America that U.S. Navy patrols were being dispatched to safeguard Mexican oil platforms in the Gulf. The left-wing daily La Jornada runs a citizen-snapped photo of army convoys arriving carrying soldiers disguised as farmers and young toughs. Rumors race through the seven mile-long encampment installed by supporters of leftist presidential challenger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) three weeks ago, who have tied up big city traffic and enraged the motorist class here, that PFP robocops will attack before dawn. The campers stay up all night huddled around bum fires prepared to defend their tent cities.

The moment reminds many Mexicans of the tense weeks in September and October 1968 when, 12 days before the Olympic Games were to be inaugurated here, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz ordered the military to massacre striking students in a downtown plaza not far from where AMLO’s people are now camped out. Some 300 were killed in the Plaza of Three Cultures, their bodies incinerated at Military Camp #1 in western Mexico City. The Tlatelolco massacre was a watershed in social conflict here and the similarities are sinister– in fact, Lopez Obrador has taken to comparing outgoing President Vicente Fox with Diaz Ordaz.

Fox will go to congress September 1st to deliver his final State of the Union address; the new legislature will be convened the same day. The country may or may not have a new president by that day. In anticipation of this show-down, on August 14th, newly-elected senators and deputies from the three parties that comprise AMLO’s Coalition for the Good of All attempted to encamp on the sidewalk in front of the legislative palace only to be rousted and clobbered bloody by the President’s robocops.

With 160 representatives, the Coalition forms just a quarter of the 628 members of the new congress, but its members will be a loud minority during Fox’s “Informe.” Since the 1988 presidenciales were stolen from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, founder of AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD legislators have routinely interrupted the president during this authoritarian ritual in orchestrated outbursts that have sometimes degenerated into partisan fisticuffs.

The first to challenge the Imperial Presidency was Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a hoary political warhorse, who in 1988 thrust a finger at President Miguel De la Madrid, accusing him of overseeing the theft of the election from Cardenas. Munoz Ledo’s J’Acuse stunned the political class; he was slugged and pummeled by members of De la Madrid’s long-ruling PRI when he tried to escape the chamber. Munoz Ledo now stands at AMLO’s side.

But perhaps the most comical moment in the annals of acting out during the Informe came in 1996 when a brash PRI deputy donned a Babe the Valiant Pig mask and positioned himself directly under the podium from which President Ernesto Zedillo was addressing the state of the nation and wiggled insouciant signs with slogans that said things like ‘EAT THE RICH!” Like Munoz Ledo, Marco Rascon was physically attacked, his mask ripped off like he was a losing wrestler by a corrupt railroad union official — who in turn was hammer locked by a pseudo-leftist senator, Irma “La Tigresa” Serrano, a one-time ranchero singers and, in fact, the former mistress of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz.

This September 1st, if martial law is not declared and the new Congress dissolved before it is even installed, the PRD delegation — which will no doubt be strip-searched by the Estado Mayor for incriminating banners — is sworn to create a monumental ruckus, shredding the tarnished decorum of this once-solemn event forever to protest Fox’s endorsement of electoral larceny. Some solons say they may go naked.

But no matter what kind of uproar develops, one can be secure that it will not be shown on national television, as the cameras of Mexico’s two-headed television monstrosity Televisa and TV Azteca will stay trained on the President as he tries to mouth the stereotypical cliches that is always the stuff and fluff of this otherwise stultifying seance. The images of the chaos on the floor of congress will not be passed along to the Great Unwashed.

NO PASARAN!

There is a reptilian feel to Mexico seven weeks after a discredited Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) cemented Lopez Obrador into a second place coffin by awarding the presidency to right-winger Felipe Calderon by a mere 243,000 votes out of a total 42,000,000 cast. Both Calderon and IFE czar Luis Carlos Ugalde (Calderon was best man at Ugalde’s wedding) make these little beady reptile eyes as they slither across national screens.

Those screens have been the scenes of some of the slimiest and most sordid political intrigue of late. One of the lizard kings who is fleetingly featured on Televisa primetime is an imprisoned Argentinean construction tycoon, Carlos Ahumada, who in 2004 conspired with Fox, Calderon’s PAN, and Televisa to frame AMLO on corruption charges and take him out of the presidential election. El Peje” (for a gar-like fish from the swamps of Lopez Obrador’s native Tabasco) was then leading the pack by 18 points.

Charged by Lopez Obrador, then the mayor of this megalopolis, with defrauding Mexico City out of millions, Ahumada had taken his revenge by filming PRD honchos when they came to his office to pick up boodles of political cash for his lover, Rosario Robles, who aspired to be queen of the PRD. Although the filthy lucre was perfectly legal under Mexico’s milquetoast campaign financing laws, the pick-ups looked awful on national television — AMLO’s former personal secretary was caught stuffing wads of low denomination bills into his suit coat pockets as if he were on Saturday Night Live.

Ahumada subsequently turned the tapes over to the leprous, cigar-chomping leader of Fox’s PAN party in the Senate, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos (“El Jefe Diego”) who in turn had them delivered to a green-haired clown, Brozo, who was then reading the morning news on Televisa. Then the Argentine fled to Cuba in a private plane. Televisa would air the incriminating videos day and night for months.

Apprehended in Veradero after his lover Robles was shadowed to the socialist beachfront, Ahumada spilled the beans to Cuban authorities: Interior Secretary Santiago Creel, who was then AMLO’s lead rival for the presidency, had cooked up the plot with the connivance of reviled former president Carlos Salinas, Lopez Obrador’s most venomous foe, the then attorney general, and Fox himself, to remove AMLO from the race.

The Mexican government did not ask for extradition and Ahumada’s deportation from Cuba was not seen as a friendly gesture. Within a month, diplomatic relations between Mexico and that red paradise were broken off and ambassadors summoned home. The construction tycoon has been imprisoned in Mexico City ever since he was booted out of Cuba, and was last heard from when he had his rogue cop chauffer shoot up the family SUV, a charade both Fox and Televisa tried to pin on AMLO — Ahumada had suggested he was about to release two more incriminating videos. These dubious events took place on June 6th, the day of a crucial presidential debate between AMLO and Calderon.

Then last week, Ahumada abruptly resurfaced — or at least his videotaped confession to Cuban authorities did. Filmed through prison bars, he lays out the plot step by step. Yes, he affirms, the deal was fixed up to cut AMLO’s legs out from under him and advance the fortunes of the right-wing candidate who turned out to be Felipe Calderon and not the bumbling Creel. The conspiracy backfired badly as his supporters rallied around him and Lopez Obrador’s ratings soared.

The origins of the confession tape, leaked to top-rung reporter Carmen Aristegui, was obscure. Had Fidel dispatched it from his sick bed to bolster Lopez Obrador’s claims of victory as the PAN and the snake-eyed Televisa evening anchor Joaquin Lopez Dorriga hissed? The air grew serpentine with theories. There was even one school that speculated Calderon himself had been the source in a scheme to distance himself from Fox (there had always been “mala leche” between them) and Creel, now the leader of the PAN faction in congress.

AMLO advanced a variant of this explanation — the specter of Ahumada had been resuscitated to divert attention from the evidence of generalized fraud the Coalition had submitted to the TRIFE and the panel’s impending verdict that Calderon had won the election.

Perhaps the most nagging question in this snakepit of uncertainty is what happened during the partial recount of less than 10% of the 130,000 ballot boxes ordered by the TRIFE to test the legitimacy of the IFE’s results. Although the recount concluded on August 13th, the judges have released no numbers and are not obligated to do so — their only responsibility is to certify the validity of the election.

Although AMLO’s reps in the counting rooms came up with gobs of evidence — violated ballot boxes, stolen or stuffed ballots, altered tally sheets and other bizarre anomalies — only the left-wing daily La Jornada saw fit to mention them. The silence of the Mexican media and their accomplices in the international press in respect to the Great Fraud is deafening — although they manage to fill their rags with ample attacks on Lopez Obrador for tying up Mexico City traffic.

According to AMLO’s people, 119,000 ballots in the sample recount cannot be substantiated — in about 3500 casillas, 58,000 more votes were cast than the number of voters on the voting list. In nearly 4,000 other casillas, 61,000 ballots allocated to election officials cannot be accounted for. The annulment of the casillas in which these alterations occurred would put Lopez Obrador in striking distance of Calderon and in a better world, would obligate the TRIFE to order a total recount.

But given the cheesy state of the Mexican judiciary this is not apt to happen; one of the judges who will decide the fate of democracy in Mexico is a former client of El Jefe Diego for whom the PANista senator won millions from the Mexico City government in a crooked land deal.

Meanwhile, thousands continue to camp out in a hard rain for a third week on the streets of Mexico City awaiting the court’s decision. They have taken to erecting shrines and altars and are praying for divine intervention. Hundreds pilgrimage out to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, some crawling on their knees, to ask the Brown Madonna to work her mojo. “God doesn’t belong to the PAN!” they chant as they trudge up the great avenue that leads to the Basilica. “AMLO deserves a miracle” Esther Ortiz, a 70 year-old great grandmother comments to a reporter as she kneels to pray before the gilded altar.

At the Metropolitan Cathedral on one flank of the Zocalo, a young worshipper interrupts Cardinal Norberto Rivera with loas to AMLO and is quickly hustled off the premises by the Prelate’s bouncers. The following Sunday, the Cathedral’s great doors are under heavy surveillance, and churchgoers screened for telltale signs of devotion to Lopez Obrador. Hundreds of AMLO’s supporters mill about in front of the ancient temple shouting “voto por voto” and alleging that Cardinal Rivera is a pederast.

AMLO as demi-god is one motif of this religious pageant being played out at what was once the heart of the Aztec theocracy, the island of Tenochtitlan. The ruins of the twin temples of the fierce Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli and Tlahuac, the god of the rain, is adjacent to the National Palace against which AMLO’s stage is set. Lopez Obrador sleeps each night in a tent close by.

Many hearts were ripped out smoking on these old stones and fed to such hungry gods before the Crusaders showed up bearing the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

AMLO is accused by right-wing “intellectuals” (Enrique Krauze and the gringo apologist George Grayson) of entertaining a Messiah complex. Indeed, he is up there every day on the big screen, his craggy features, salt and pepper hair, raspy voice and defiantly jutted jaw bearing more of a passable resemblance to a younger George C. Scott rather The Crucified One. AMLO’s devotees come every evening at seven, shoehorned between the big tents that fill the Zocalo, rain or shine. Last Monday, I stood with a few thousand diehards in a biblical downpour, thunder and lightening shattering the heavens above. “Llueve y llueve y el pueblo no se mueve” they chanted joyously, “it rains and rains and the people do not move.”

The evolution of these incantations is fascinating. At first, the standard slogan of “Voto Por Voto, Casilla por Casilla!” was automatically invoked whenever Lopez Obrador stepped to the microphone. “You are not alone!” and “Presidente!” had their moment. “Fraude!” is still popular but in these last days, “No Pasaran!” — they shall not pass, the cry of the defenders of Madrid as Franco’s fascist hordes banged on the doors of Madrid, 1936 — has flourished.

In this context, “No Pasaran!” means “we will not let Felipe Calderon pass to the presidency.” AMLO, who holds out little hope that the TRIFE will decide in his favor, devotes more time now to organizing the resistance to the imposition of Calderon upon the Aztec nation. Article 39 of the Mexican constitution, he reminds partisans, grants the people the right to change their government if that government does not represent them. To this end, he is summoning a million delegates up to the Zocalo for a National Democratic Convention on Mexican Independence Day September 16th, a date usually reserved for a major military parade.

Aside from the logistical impossibility of putting a million citizens in this Tiananmen-sized plaza, how this gargantuan political extravaganza is going to be financed is cloudy. Right now, it seems like small children donating their piggy banks is the main mode of fund-raising. Because AMLO’s people distrust the banks, all of which financed Calderon’s vicious TV ad campaign, a giant piggy bank has been raised in the Zocalo to receive the contributions of the faithful.

Dreaming is also a fundraiser. Some 10,000 raised their voices in song this past Sunday as part of a huge chorus assembled under the dome of the Monument to the Revolution to perform a cantata based on the words of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. This too is a form of civil resistance, Lopez Obrador commended his followers.

The first National Democratic Convention took place behind rebel lines in the state of Aguascalientes in 1914 at the apogee of the Mexican Revolution when the forces of Francisco Villa and his Army of the North first joined forces with Zapata’s Liberating Army of the Southern Revolution. The second National Democratic Revolution took place 80 years later in 1994, in a clearing in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation wedded itself to the civil society in an uprising that rocked Mexico all throughout the ’90s; eclipsed by events, the EZLN and its quixotic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos have disappeared from the political map in the wake of the fraudulent election.

What this third National Democratic Convention is all about is now being debated in PRD ruling circles and down at the grassroots. Minimally, a plan of organized resistance that will dog Felipe Calderon for the next six years, severely hampering his ability to rule will evolve from this mammoth conclave. The declaration of a government in resistance headed by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is one consideration. The National Democratic Convention could also result in the creation of a new party to replace a worn-out PRD now thoroughly infiltrated by cast-offs from the PRI.

The Party of the Democratic Revolution has always functioned best as an opposition party. With notable exceptions (AMLO was one), when the PRD becomes government, it collapses into corruption, internecine bickering, and behaves just as arrogantly as the PAN and the PRI. No Pasaran?

Seven weeks after the July 2nd electoral debacle, Mexico finds itself at a dangerously combustible conjunction (“coyuntura”) in which the tiny white elite here is about to impose its will upon a largely brown and impoverished populous to whom the political parties and process grow more irrelevant each day. “No Pasaran!” the people cry out but to whom and what they are alluding to remains to be defined.
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John Ross’s ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006 will be published by Nation Books this October. Ross will travel the Left Coast this fall with both ZAPATISTAS! and a new chapbook of poetry BOMBA! and is still looking for possible venues; send suggestions to johnross@igc.org

Fiber vs. wi-fi

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› steve@sfbg.com
San Francisco’s top officials want to get the city more directly involved in creating a better telecommunications infrastructure. Their goal is to overcome the digital divide and pump up the city’s overall bandwidth without waiting for the private sector to maybe get around to it.
But Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have focused on distinctly different pathways to the whiz-bang future they both envision. And the agency in charge of getting the city there — the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) — has moved the mayor’s big idea at high speed while inching the board’s plan along at a snail’s pace.
Newsom first proposed a citywide wireless Internet system that would be free for the city and its residents during his State of the City speech Oct. 21, 2004. At the time it was just an ambitious promise that seemed to languish, until late last summer when the DTIS issued a request for information to a variety of high-tech firms.
By the end of 2005 the city had settled on trying to negotiate a deal with a partnership between Google and Earthlink to build the system, which they will finance largely with revenue from targeted advertising and users who pay a fee for faster connections. City officials are still in negotiations with Earthlink and expect to have a proposal ready for the board to consider by the end of the year.
Yet three weeks before Newsom announced his intention to pursue wireless, Sup. Tom Ammiano and a coalition of public interest nonprofits announced a plan to have the city build and run a municipal broadband system by laying fiber-optic lines as city officials open up the streets for the planned sewer system replacement and other projects.
It was an ambitious idea never realized by a big city in the United States, one that would put tremendous bandwidth directly under city control and be a potential source of millions of dollars in annual revenue and cost savings.
Now, almost two years after the Board of Supervisors ordered a study on the plan, the DTIS has finally hired consultants — the Maryland-based Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC), which works exclusively on fiber-optic projects for public agencies. The first draft of the plan is expected to be available for public comment by the end of the year.
“We consider both the wireless and fiber projects to be important,” Brian Roberts, the DTIS senior policy analyst for both projects, told the Guardian. “But we thought wireless would be something that could be accomplished in a relatively short timeline.”
Roberts and others involved in the projects say the two ventures aren’t mutually exclusive — that any wireless system would actually get a big technological boost from city-owned fiber, San Franciscans will likely use up whatever bandwidth they can get, and wireless reaches mobile users in a way that fiber can’t.
But activists of various stripes have catalogued a number of concerns with Newsom’s wireless plan: the secretive nature of the early negotiations, private sector control over the system, the mayor’s relationship with the Google founders (who proposed the idea in the first place), the exposure of residents to increasingly sophisticated advertising campaigns, shortcomings in serving the poor and truly breaching the digital divide, and problems associated with wireless technology (mainly involving reliability, health, and capacity concerns).
The fact that these two plans are coming before the Board of Supervisors at the same time — which Roberts said is purely coincidental — is likely to renew the age-old debate about privatization and public interest.
Should the city be pursuing the public-private partnerships favored by Newsom, which can be delivered to voters quickly and at seemingly little cost to government? Or should it be focusing on long-term strategies that will give the city more control over the resources its citizens need — from electricity to information technology — without having to depend on the profit-driven private sector?
The DTIS announced the commencement of the municipal broadband study during a little-noticed public meeting Aug. 15, during which a dozen or so of the most committed activists, representatives for Comcast (which aggressively opposes most municipal broadband initiatives), and downtown building owners heard from the consultants.
CTC founder and principal analyst Joanne Howis outlined the scope of her firm’s study and sang the praises of what’s known in her industry as Fiber to the Premises (FTTP), noting that it’s the most reliable, high-capacity broadband technology and that the price of delivering it to people’s homes has fallen tremendously in recent years, to the point where it’s the best all-around broadband delivery system.
“Fiber is better, and wholly controlled fiber is better still,” she said. “That’s an article of faith with us.”
Later, activists pushed the point on wireless versus fiber. “Fiber can do many of the things wireless can’t do, but it can’t go mobile,” Howis said, also noting that fiber is essential to a reliable public safety system. “Fiber and wireless speak to different needs and are used in different ways.”
But when asked what’s better for residential users, she said, “Anyone who can have fiber or wireless to their homes will choose fiber.”
“Unless it’s free,” Roberts interjected.
But public interest media advocates like Media Alliance say the city is going about this backward. The group has been critical of the city’s wireless plans and has studied the potential for municipal fiber, arguing in the just-released report “Is Publicly Owned Information Infrastructure a Wise Public Investment for San Francisco?” that the city could pay for its investment within five years and make $2 million per year thereafter by leasing space on the network. So all sides are happy to see the fiber study finally moving forward.
“We met with a lot of resistance to the study, but the good thing was we got the money for the study from the Mayor’s Office,” Ammiano told the Guardian. “While I’m disappointed that it’s taken so long, I’m heartened that it’s now moving.”
Meanwhile, Google last week got a free citywide wireless system up and running in its native Mountain View. The system is faster than the free service it intends to offer to San Franciscans, who will have to pay a bit more if they want anything faster than the targeted average speed of 300 kilobytes per second.
“Google is putting up a lot of money to make the service free in San Francisco,” Chris Sacca, who is heading up the project for Google, told the Guardian. He estimated that the company has spent over $1 million to develop the San Francisco plan.
While the fiber study will analyze the benefits to the city itself, Sacca said the wireless proposal began with consumer demand. “At Google we start with the end-user problem, then work backward from there.” SFBG

Excerpts from freelance journalist Josh Wolf

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What follows are excerpts from an Aug. 14 letter that freelance journalist Josh Wolf wrote to reporter Sarah Phelan from inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute. Wolf has been held at Dublin FCI since Aug. 1 refusing to give a federal grand jury unpublished footage from a July 8, 2005 anti-G8 protest that turned violent.

Aug. 14, 2006

Dear Sarah,

Thanks for writing to me about my case;

On Judith Miller:

“The issue of Judith Miller is a complicated one. My reservations about the Judith Miller situation are as follows: She should be protected, but should she have published it in the first place? I’m very thankful that she has helped publicize my case and I have talked to her on the phone and wouldn’t want it to seem like I’m ungrateful for the support.”


On the injuries that a SFPD officer sustained during the July 8, 2005 anti G8 protest:

“The officer’s injury is a sad and unfortunate incident, and I do not in any way condone violence against any living creature. However, as tragic and unjust as it may have been, it is a potential crime which falls under state and not Federal jurisdiction and although the Assistant US Attorney has brought up the injured officer repeatedly, he has never asserted that this potential crime is part of the grand jury investigation and is therefore nothing more than an effort to sensationalize the case.

Furthermore, my mother’s statement is accurate, I neither witnessed nor filmed the alleged assault on the officer – I learned of the incident after hearing “officer down” by several bystanders. At that point in time, I was filming the aforementioned officer’s partner choking Gabe Myers whom has been charged with the conspiracy charge of attempting to lynch himself, along with resisting arrest and rioting. The published video illustrates this fairly well and can be accessed through http://joshwolf.net/grandjury/ along with the all the legal documents up until I became incarcerated and could no longer maintain the site.”

On the alleged arson to a SFPD patrol car:

“Another important factor in the police’s story of what happened that night is their claim that the Styrofoam sign (for the 500th time, there was no mattress) became lodged in front of their car, therein disabling it. While the Styrofoam sign may have been lodged – I have trouble believing that a piece of Styrofoam could actually force a modified Crown Victoria to a stop. As a rear-wheel drive car with more-than-ample horsepower, I believe it would’ve been able to push the sign along indefinitely, if not able to completely rise over the top of it. Beyond that, the officers immediately jumped out of their vehicle and chased after the 2 people they believed were originally holding the sign.

By the way, these officers – Shields + Wolf (no known relation to myself) were not assigned to the protest and were responding to some sort of complaint. These police officers attempted to disperse the crowd by accelerating their vehicle towards us – it was at that point that the sign carriers in the back of the crowd dropped their sign and dived out of the car’s path. The most accurate description I heard of the event came from Attorney Ben Rosenfeld who spoke at one of my press conferences, the video can be accessed at the URL I mentioned previously.”

On the grand jury investigation:

“As I’m sure you are aware, the subject of the grand jury investigation, or the reason that I’m in jail, is the alleged attempt to destroy property that the federal government may have had a fiscal interest in, the SFPD patrol vehicle. If this pretense for a federal interest is allowed to stand, then would not all public property – be it city, state, or federal serve to trump state protections such as the California Shield law. This would not only include streets, schools, and sidewalks, but also city hall itself.

Perhaps you recall Matt Gonzales last art exhibit as Supervisor – the Supervisor arrange to have graffiti art sprayed onto his office wall. Now, obviously he did this with the approval of the city, but could the federal government have intervened under the claim that this art damaged Federal Property? Obviously they wouldn’t, but according to the logic of the US Attorney, I imagine they might feel they could legitimately do so. The analogy is a stretch and borders on being cartoonist, but is it really any more outrageous than throwing me in prison for refusing to comply with this order to turn over a videotape regarding a police vehicle that apparently wasn’t even damaged – we’ve yet to see any repair orders for the squad car.
Both myself and my attorney have filed declarations to the fact that I did not film any attempts at arson on a police car. It seems highly unlikely that the US Attorney doesn’t believe us as I imagine lying in a declaration would result in perjury for me but could also, to my best understanding; result in my attorney facing even more serious repercussions than that. Neither myself nor my attorney would be stupid enough to behave that irresponsibly. I remember Alger Hiss.”

On Alger Hiss, McCarthyism and Black as the new Pink:

Speaking of Hiss, I feel that given the circumstances, this witch hunt could very likely be a witch hunt akin to those of McCarthey’s blood thirsty quest to expose communists. If that in fact is the case, then instead of a red-scare, this is a black scare.

Keep in mind, that each subpoena I have received not only demands the unpublished materials, but also my testimony. I do not feel that is paranoia which leads me to think that I would be compelled to identify anyone on the footage whom I might know in an effort to create a list of political dissidents and anarchists in the bay area.

Yes, the idea is alarmist, but; it happened in this country 50 years ago – and anyone with a decent education is painfully aware that history has a way of repeating itself. There is no way this much money and energy has been expended simply to investigate some kid throwing a firework four days after the 4th of July, and as the government has not been forthcoming, I have no reason not to assume the worst.


On life inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute:

“In your letter you also asked me about Dublin; I don’t have a whole lot to say about my experience here, but I can say that the experience is nowhere near the nightmare I had expected. I’ve never felt like my personal safety is in jeopardy, and I have made friends with many of the inmates. There’s food which is edible during every single meal, and 90% of the staff have behaved with the utmost professionalism. At the same time, visits are limited to immediate family, and I only get to feel air on my face for an hour each day; 5 days a week.

Living in captivity is emotionally very difficult, and you find yourself missing the simplest of things. Not having my music, for one, has been very hard for me. The experience is akin to being a young child in man ways, and almost all decisions have been robbed from you. Regulations which serve no purpose abound – we are prohibited from doing laundry after 2pm; I have no idea why.
I have the opportunity by being here to catch up on a lot of reading; however, and I’ve written more letters by hand over the last two weeks than I’ve composed throughout my 24 years up till now. I miss email. I’ve also been inspired to create a new organization, but I can’t share the details just yet about that one.”

Thanks again, for covering the story and in the words of Edward R. Murrow,
Goodnight and Good Luck,
Josh

Snakes in vain

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I’m the only geek in San Francisco who didn’t go to the drunken flash mob event at 1000 Van Ness where Snakes on a Plane played in dangerous proximity to cartloads of extremely stiff, free drinks. My sources tell me that outrageous costumes were worn; somebody brought a real live snake; and there were many inebriated screams that included the epithet “motherfuckin’ snakes on a motherfuckin’ plane!” Was it glorious dork anarchy? Or was it something more sinister — the kind of media-engineered, snake-eating-its-own-long-tail event that Bill Wasik claims he invented the “flash mob” to parody?
Believe me, I would have been there toasting the motherfucking snakes if I could have been. But Birthing of Millions was playing at Edinburgh Castle, and no amount of serpents and spirits could drag me away from Brian Naas on guitar. So now that we’ve established my complicity in the Snakes meme thing, despite my absence on opening night, we can proceed.
Snakes on a Plane became an Internet geek phenomenon, rather than a pleasure reserved solely for dorks who like bad movies, for the same reasons that the Star Wars kid or the Hamster Dance became Internet phenomena. In short, it was weird and stupid and fun. One day neuropsychologists may discover an area in the brain that lights up when we watch home movies of teenagers fighting with light sabers — or campy action heroes battling snakes. But for now, Snakes’ online popularity can only be explained via cultural analysis.
Bloggers began leaking information about this movie with a deliciously literal-minded title more than a year ago, hailing it as a masterpiece of cheese. It had all the ingredients required for hip ironic consumption: Samuel L. Jackson, an airplane disaster, and a bunch of retro, analog-era monsters (snakes — without CGI!). Soon news about the flick was all over the Net. Some of its popularity was probably inspired by everybody’s frustration with Transportation Security Administration regulations and long lines in airports. Who hasn’t wanted to yell something about motherfucking snakes on motherfucking planes after being made to take off jackets, shoes, belts, earrings, and hats during the holiday rush in an airport, when the floor is covered in muddy, melted snow? (As if to underscore this association, a parody TSA announcement about banning snakes from planes was circuutf8g in blogland last week.)
Internet fascination with the film reached critical mass last year when New Line Cinema threatened to rename it Pacific Air Flight 121 and Jackson convinced them to keep the original. At that point, references to the movie were so commonplace on the Internet that the studio decided to promote it more, beef it up with extra footage, and add a line to the script that had actually been invented by Web fans imagining what Jackson’s legendary Pulp Fiction character Jules would say: “That’s it! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” In response, the fans went utterly nuts. The people in movieland were listening to the people in blogland! When this movie comes out, let’s get totally motherfucking drunk and buy a million tickets!
As Quinn Norton pointed out on her blog, it’s important to remember that nobody actually expected to like this movie. To the extent that we do like Snakes, we’re getting pleasure out of it as a joke — a joke on itself for being so flagrantly silly, but also the butt of jokes we’ve made for the past year online. Of course, there’s the less-acknowledged joke Snakes plays on us when we buy tickets to see a movie that can never be as cool or creative as the videos, songs, posters, and satires people have already published about it for free on the Internet.
Trying to imitate the strategy that led to Snakes’ prerelease buzz, the SciFi Channel recently invited its fans to name an upcoming made-for-TV movie “about a giant squid.” Haven’t heard of Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep? Maybe it’s because the name the SciFi folks picked was exactly the sort of dopey thing they’d normally slap on a story about sea monsters. Apparently they passed over some ideas that might actually have gotten them the hipster cachet that Snakes garnered for New Line. Among the discarded titles were Killamari and Tentacles 8, Humans 2.
I vaguely thought that I should go see Snakes, or at least set the DVR to catch Kraken. But the fact is, I’d rather watch all the YouTube parodies tonight.SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who would be happy to buy tickets to see Sharks on a Roller Coaster.

Eye spy

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’ve found myself a femmy boy who’s willing — nay, enthusiastically prepared — to wear green eye shadow in public. This is delicious. However, we live in Colorado Springs, which is for its size a wealthy and well-educated town but also is headquarters for Focus on the Family, New Life Church, Will Perkins, Ft. Carson, NORAD, and the Air Force Academy. One of my femmy-boy friends was recently chased down an alley downtown by some of the local military simians for the apparently gender-treacherous crime of wearing a top hat. It was lucky for him he knew the area well and wasn’t nearly as plastered as they were.
My two questions about the eye shadow thing are these: first, and I understand if you’re not able to answer because you don’t live here, if we do go on a date while he’s wearing it, what do you think our chances are of finishing the evening without getting the shit beaten out of us? And second, what’s your opinion on where he should put his feet while treading the fine line between staying safe and taking a stand for the right to do what he wants with his body if it’s not hurting anyone else?
I guess the question is along the same lines as, how do you feel about him wearing a ball-gag and leash to the local Starbucks? Eye shadow is just a less overtly sexual signal. Well. To some people. Not to me.
Love,
Don’t Kick Me
Dear Kick:
Gotcha. And no, I surely do not live there, nor would I, but we did blow out a tire there on a cross-country trip once and got stranded for a couple days. Pretty town. Really nice park. I knew all that stuff (Air Force, antigay groups, etc.) was there, but you can’t tell by visiting — it’s not like there are giant “FAGS GO HOME” banners flying gaily over Main Street or anything. But would I, were I a guy, dress up in my gayest glad rags and sashay down the same main drag in a pair of darling red wedge espadrilles and a panty girdle? I would not. I suspect you would not either, were you a guy (you’re not, right?). It would be no safer for you to accompany your new girly-boy while he did it, either. There is sticking up for your inalienable right to be a weirdo, and there is stupidity. I draw the line at stupidity in any other context, so why would I make an exception for this one?
There was a time in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the all the cool kids were making a spectacle of themselves in the name of political action: “visibility,” I think we called it. All you had to do was print up some T-shirts or stickers and show up en masse where you weren’t expected, and you got to feel all brave and thrillingly transgressive and challenging to heterosexual hegemony and stuff. It was great. It was also kind of a fake — when you’re surrounded by a few dozen or hundred or thousand of your closest friends and you’re in San Francisco or New York or Washington, not Jakarta or Beijing or rural Rwanda, you’re pretty safe. Even if the cops get you, you’re going to be cited and set free; protesters in the United States are rarely brought to trial, let alone found bound and beheaded in a ditch. That doesn’t mean that nothing we do here is dangerous, though, and unfortunately walking certain streets in a state of visible gender ambiguity can still get you kicked in the face.
There is no set point on the continuum from safe but stifled to “kick me” that I can recommend you find and cleave to, never again to stray. I do not think it would be very smart to dress your boy up and parade him around near the base at bar closing on a Saturday night; nor do I think those of us who fail to conform in every particular to local community standards for gender performance need cower at home forever for fear of attracting a disapproving glance. Somewhere between “don’t frighten the horses” and “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” lies the perfect level of public self-expression for you two as individuals of your particular place and time. Find it. Also consider finding some fellow gender traitors with whom to make your scene, even if that scene is no more transgressive than going out for fish and chips (I’m pretty sure that’s what I ate at your local brew pub while waiting for our truck to be fixed so we could get the hell out of there) and the late showing of Snakes on a Plane. I think you’ll be OK. I wouldn’t recommend the Starbucks-and-ball-gag excursion, but that’s because it’s in bad taste, not because it could get you killed. You’ll have to use your common sense. If you haven’t got any, I really do think you’d better stay home.
Love,
Andrea

An Unhappy Anniversary for Labor

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It was 25 years ago this month that Ronald Reagan struck the blow that sent the American labor movement tumbling into a decline it’s still struggling mightily to reverse.
Reagan, one of the most antilabor presidents in history, set the decline in motion by firing 11,500 of the overworked and underpaid air traffic controllers whose work was essential to the operation of the world’s most complex aviation system.
Reagan fired them because they dared respond to his administration’s refusal to bargain fairly on a new contract by striking in violation of the law prohibiting strikes by federal employees. What’s more, he also destroyed their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).
Public and private employers everywhere treated Reagan’s action as a signal to take an uncompromising stand against the unions that they had accepted and bargained with, however reluctantly, as the legitimate representatives of their workers.
At that time, one-fourth of the US workforce was represented by unions. Today, largely because of employer actions since then — often openly illegal actions — the percentage of workers with union bargaining rights is less than half that.
Ironically, PATCO had broken with other AFL-CIO affiliates to endorse Reagan’s successful run for president in 1980. The union did so because Reagan had promised to “take whatever steps are necessary” to improve working conditions and otherwise “bring about a spirit of cooperation between the president and the air traffic controllers.”
Yet PATCO negotiators were rebuffed a year later when they asked for a reduction in working hours, lowering of the retirement age, and other steps to ease the controllers’ extraordinary stress, plus a substantial pay raise and updated equipment.
PATCO had no choice but to abandon its demands or strike to try to enforce them. And when the union struck, Reagan, certain of broad public support because of his great popularity, issued an ultimatum to the strikers: return to work within 48 hours or be fired and replaced permanently by nonunion workers.
Faced with millions of dollars in fines for vioutf8g Reagan’s order and the antistrike injunctions that his administration and airlines had sought and stripped by the administration of its right to represent the controllers, PATCO declared bankruptcy and went out of business.
Although Reagan’s ban on rehiring strikers was later lifted by Bill Clinton and a stronger, new union now represents controllers, safety experts say the air traffic control system remains understaffed and the controllers still under far too much stress.
That’s unlikely to change during the administration of George Bush, who’s as antilabor as was Ronald Reagan. The Bush administration, in fact, has imposed a new contract on the controllers that cuts their pay and pension benefits.
Neither is it likely that other employers will abandon the crippling antilabor practices that were inspired and furthered by Reagan.
Firing and permanently replacing strikers, previously a rare occurrence, has become a common employer tactic. It’s now the strike — an indispensable weapon for workers in collective bargaining — that only rarely occurs.
It isn’t just strikers who face penalties for exercising their legal rights. Employers also have taken to firing or otherwise penalizing workers who seek union recognition, despite the law that promises them the right to freely choose unionization. Many employers have also hired “ management consultants” who specialize in Reagan-style union busting.
“For all practical purposes, Americans have lost the freedom to form unions,” notes AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. “Our labor laws are so weak and so feebly enforced that workers join the union in spite of the law.”
It’s no coincidence that as union ranks have shrunk under the relentless antilabor pressures first applied to air traffic controllers a quarter century ago by Ronald Reagan, the ranks of the American middle class also have shrunk — as has the ordinary American’s share of the country’s wealth. SFBG
Copyright © 2006 Dick Meister, a San Francisco–based writer who has covered labor issues for four decades. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com.

Public power returns

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EDITORIAL Just when it looked like the public power movement had stalled, along comes the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission with a surprise announcement that it will create a public power demonstration project in the most appropriate part of town and reinvigorate efforts to kick Pacific Gas and Electric out of the city.
The agency has tentatively cut a deal to provide power directly to the 1,600 housing units and businesses that Lennar Homes is about to start building on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard — bringing clean, green (it comes from city hydroelectric and solar projects), affordable public power to a part of town that has long been besieged with environmental injustices.
We commend director Susan Leal and the rest of the SFPUC for this project and their promise to do the same thing on Treasure Island, once that property is officially in San Francisco’s jurisdiction. SFPUC officials say they’ll be able to beat PG&E’s rates while delivering power that is more environmentally sustainable than what we’re getting from the company’s aging fossil fuel plants.
The agency is now finalizing details with Lennar and waiting for PG&E to sign an interconnection agreement to transfer city power to the site, something that federal law requires the company do for a “reasonable” fee. If all goes well, the contract will go to the Board of Supervisors for approval in a couple months, creating the first living example of how the city would be better off without PG&E.
As such, we fully expect the company to try to sabotage the deal, so we urge all city officials to help shepherd this one to completion. Mayor Gavin Newsom should help make sure Lennar doesn’t get cold feet, City Attorney Dennis Herrera should be ready to fight if need be, and the SFPUC should be on the lookout for more such projects. Good work! SFBG

Don’t call the feds

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EDITORIAL It’s bad enough that the federal government is aggressively infringing on the rights of three Bay Area journalists, the sovereignty of California, and the freedom of San Franciscans to choose — through the elections of our district attorney, sheriff, and mayor — how laws should be enforced in this city. It’s even worse that the San Francisco Police Department has actively invited the feds in to abuse the city’s citizens.
Now is the time for Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong to strongly, clearly, and publicly spell out when the officers under their control are permitted to federalize investigations rather than turning them over to the District Attorney’s Office. Particularly during this dark period when the Bush administration has shown a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, those in positions of public trust within San Francisco must safeguard the rights and liberties that generations of Americans have fought hard to win.
Specifically, Newsom and Fong should join the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in calling for a federal shield law similar to the one enshrined in the California Constitution, which allows journalists to protect their sources and unpublished notes and other materials. Until that happens, it should be the policy of San Francisco to refuse to cooperate with federal prosecutions of journalists, an action that would be similar to existing police policies of refusing to take part in raids on marijuana dispensaries or in operations targeting those suspected of vioutf8g immigration laws.
Instead, in the case of videographer Josh Wolf — who has been jailed for refusing to turn over his work to a federal grand jury — it appears that the SFPD was the agency that used a dubious interpretation of the law to bring in the feds for this unconscionable witch hunt. This is a disgrace and an affront to local control and basic American values.
As Sarah Phelan reports in this issue (“The SFPD’s Punt,” page 10), the cowboys who run the SFPD have been so intent on nailing those responsible for injuring an officer during a protest last year that they have deceptively morphed the investigation into one involving a broken taillight on a police cruiser. The idea was to argue that because some federal funds helped purchase the cruiser, then it was legitimate to turn this case over to the feds — which was simply a ruse to get around the California shield law. Perhaps even scarier is that it was done under the guise of fighting terrorism, even though the cops knew they were talking about homegrown anarchists who have legitimate concerns about US trade policies.
Over and over — in openly defying local beliefs about drug and sex laws and the death penalty — SFPD officers have shown contempt for San Francisco values. Even Newsom and Fong said as much during last year’s police video scandal, when they chastised officers for making videos that mocked Bayview residents, the homeless, Asians, and transgender people.
Yet that incident wasn’t as obscene as the decision by the SFPD to turn the murder investigations of Bayview gangs over to the feds rather than allow them to be prosecuted by District Attorney Kamala Harris, with whom the SFPD has feuded. The still-high murder rate in this city is a problem that will only be solved when we come together to address it as a community, rather than simply calling in heavy-handed outsiders.
It’s no wonder that communities of color in this city don’t trust the SFPD, which bypasses the black woman we’ve elected as our district attorney in favor of the US Justice Department and its facilitator of empire, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Newsom has already demonstrated that he’s willing to stand up to unjust state and federal laws, as he did on same-sex marriage, pot clubs, and illegal wiretapping by the Bush administration. Now it’s time for him to say that we’re not going to invite unjust federal prosecutions into this proudly progressive city. SFBG
PS We also must strongly condemn the federal prosecution of Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada. They are facing jail time for refusing to reveal how they obtained grand jury information that indicated San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds knowingly took steroids. Journalists must be allowed to fully investigate important stories, particularly those involving public figures, without fearing they will be jailed for their work. Again, this case strongly begs for a federal shield law.
PPS Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition summed up the argument well in a commentary now posted on the Guardian’s Web site, www.sfbg.com, calling the prosecutions “a wholesale usurpation of state sovereignty. The Bush administration, which has been justly criticized for attempting to enhance executive power at the expense of Congress, is now eviscerating states’ rights in order to expand the power of the federal government. William Rehnquist, the conservative former chief justice of the US Supreme Court and intellectual champion of American ‘federalism,’ is no doubt turning over in his grave.”

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› steve@sfbg.com
There’s an intriguing confluence of anniversaries coming up that together offer an opportunity for societal awakening.
This week I’ll be among thousands of Bay Area residents leaving for Burning Man and the 20th birthday of the most significant countercultural event of our times. Five years ago, right after my first Burning Man, the Sept. 11 attacks ushered in radical changes to US foreign policy and political dialogue. And last year during the festival, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, another event of international significance, which New Orleans writer Jason Berry explores in this week’s cover story commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Burning Man, Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina — aside from the timing of their 20th, 5th, and 1st anniversaries, what’s the connection? Before I answer that, let me layer on a more personal anniversary: this summer marks my 15th year working as a reporter and editor for various California newspapers.
I got into the business mainly because I felt like the American people were being duped, at the time about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a war used by the first President Bush as a pretext for establishing permanent US military bases in the oil-rich Middle East.
American bases in Saudi Arabia caused Osama bin Laden to threaten a terrorist war against the United States unless we withdrew — a threat that we seemed to ignore while he carried through with a series of attacks that culminated in Sept. 11. Rather than reevaluating our relationships with oil and the Islamic world, this Bush administration upped the ante: invading and occupying two more Islamic nations, adopting energy policies that increased our oil dependence, and withdrawing the United States from international accords on global climate change and human rights.
Then Hurricane Katrina hit, opening up a second front of attack on the choices this country is making. I was already at Burning Man, in an isolated bubble of ignorant bliss that was eventually popped by the news. As we left the playa, burners gave significant money, supplies, and people to the relief effort. An eight-month cleanup and rebuilding encampment turned into a movement dubbed Burners Without Borders, which is still developing ambitious goals for good works and greening the event.
I believe Burning Man will be using its 20th birthday as a transition point. We’ve built our community and allowed it to mature, and now we’re talking about where we go from here. Most of those discussions are happening right here in San Francisco, where Burning Man was born and is headquartered. There is tremendous will to use our creation as a force for good.
Progressives will use the anniversaries of Sept. 11 and Katrina to urge our government to reevaluate its relationships with oil, other countries, and its own cities and poor people. Unfortunately, San Francisco isn’t where those decisions will be made.
But if there is a will to change this country’s direction, what better place to launch that movement than here? And what better army than Burning Man’s attendees, expected to number more than 35,000 — people known for their resourceful ability to build a city from scratch, clean it up, and leave no trace?
We’ll be back in a couple weeks, ready for what’s next. SFBG

A sister fears Halloween in the Castro

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OPINION Any attempt to organize an official Halloween in the Castro is a terrible idea, maybe even a deadly one. But before I rant, let me give a little history. In the wake of the Oct. 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake, a BBC story reported that “a massive rescue effort is now underway in what experts believe is the second biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States.”
More than 3,500 people were injured and 100,000 buildings damaged. For this reason, a few members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made a spontaneous decision to stand in the Castro among the drag queens and costumed folk that Halloween to put on street theater and collect donations for the mayor’s relief fund for the victims of the earthquake. A brilliant move. We collected thousands.
This put a bee in our bonnets … er … wimples to use Halloween as a fun fundraiser the next year. A tremendous success. Each year the caliber of entertainment drew more people and brought in more donations, enabling us to entertain the otherwise unruly crowds while collecting donations for AIDS charities. The events were a hit, until we saw attendees getting hit — with bottles, bats, and other deadly weapons — by drunken gay-bashers out to get their kicks. The next year we saw that police checking for weapons had collected garbage cans full of baseball bats, hammers, knives, axes (none of these were the rubber kind), and many blunt instruments that could harm people. I saw someone with a mask running a gas-powered chain saw. But when police told us that among other weapons they had confiscated an AK-47 assault rifle, that was the year the Sisters were through with Halloween in the Castro, frightened that an event we had sponsored might bring about death.
So we tried something different. Luring people away from the Castro and into a private club, we turned the Pleasuredome in SoMa into a Halloween-themed party space with ornate All Hallows Eve–oriented backdrops and props. We had stellar entertainment, and the door charge went to AIDS and cancer charities. There was only one rule: you had to be in costume. The event was called HallowQueen, with the slogan “Evolve with the Sisters as Halloween moves to the next level.” It was successful in getting people out of the Castro and into a safe space, but we couldn’t afford to do it again on our meager budget.
The attempt to move the party to the Civic Center did not work because of poor planning and insufficient advance public relations. And since the Castro was still gated off, the queer-bashers thought that was the better locale in which to be violent. There were several stabbings that year.
There should be no official gathering in the Castro. No gates set up to make it look like an event. Police should infiltrate the area to keep peace but not harass the costumed folk. And something must be scheduled by the city outside the Castro and managed well to draw the crowd away to safety. Then perhaps the Sisters will get involved again. Then maybe the Sisters will MC and run a stage. But as it is now, the cordoned-off section of the “official” Halloween will end at Market and Castro. That is potentially deadly — inviting bashers and spoilers to assemble right at the very entrance of the Castro. Boo! SFBG
Sister Dana Van Iquity
Sister Dana Van Iquity is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

COMMENTARY

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A freelance documentary filmmaker is in jail in Dublin, CA, for refusing to comply with a subpoena to turn over to federal prosecutors the out-takes of his filming of a 2005 street demonstration that turned violent. And two San Francisco Chronicle reporters are packing their bags for jail while they appeal contempt judgments for refusing to reveal to federal prosecutors their sources for evidence given the grand jury in the BALCO investigation.

If I were Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or California Chief Justice Ronald George, I would be deeply troubled by these developments—not only because of the First Amendment issues at stake, which are huge, but because these federal actions against journalists in California represent a wholesale usurpation of state sovereignty. The Bush administration, which has been justly criticized for attempting to enhance executive power at the expense of Congress, is now eviscerating states’ rights in order to expand the power of the federal government.

William Rehnquist, the conservative former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court–and intellectual champion of American “federalism”—is no doubt turning over in his grave.

California, like the District of Columbia and every other state except Wyoming, has enacted a “Shield Law” to protect the news media’s independence from government and to assure public access to information about wrongdoing in high places. (Memo to media: stay the hell out of Wyoming.) California’s Shield Law, enacted both as a statute and constitutional amendment, protects the press from subpoenas demanding access to confidential news sources and unpublished information. State shield laws, however, don’t apply in federal proceedings–and the feds have no shield law of their own.

The U.S. Justice Department, in these two California cases and others, had a choice to make: It could defer to the nearly unanimous judgment of the states, or it could decide–states’ rights be damned–that the federal government would insist on enforcement of subpoenas that would be void or illegal in nearly all state courts. It chose the latter.

And so Josh Wolf, the freelance filmmaker whose unused digital film California voters clearly meant to protect from compulsory judicial disclosure, is in jail. And Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance
Williams, the Chronicle reporters who wrote about the BALCO case, will soon be in federal detention unless the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit can be persuaded to change course.

The Justice Department’s enforcement proceedings don’t just undermine a valid state policy, they completely nullify it. This is so because reporters and their sources have no way of knowing, at the time of an interview with a source or the filming of a news event, whether a subpoena will issue from a California state court–in which case it can be safely ignored–or from a federal court, in which case it will be enforced through fines, jail, or other sanctions. Since the only safe strategy is to assume that one could end up in front of a federal judge, the state shield law is effectively voided.

To appreciate the extent of federal usurpation of state authority, imagine that the feds were disregarding, not state shield laws, but the attorney-client privilege (which is also a creature of state law). The reason for the privilege, which is recognized in all states, is to encourage people to seek legal advice and to fully disclose relevant information to their lawyers, who are bound to secrecy.

If the U.S. Justice Department took the position that the attorney-client privilege did not apply in federal proceedings, most legal clients, not being able to predict where and how their communications with their lawyer might be sought, would behave as though the states’ attorney-client privilege did not exist. They would not seek legal advice. They would not speak openly with their lawyer.

The feds’ takeover of state sovereignty is especially egregious in the Wolf case. The street demonstration that was caught on Wolf’s video camera involved self-styled anarchists who, in a July 8, 2005 rampage through downtown San Francisco, destroyed property, resisted arrest, and assaulted and injured at least one San Francisco police officer. The persons responsible most certainly should be prosecuted–in state court by state prosecutors and under state law (including the shield law).

How did this quintessentially state law matter become a big federal case? According to their pleadings in U.S. District Court, federal prosecutors assert federal criminal jurisdiction based on damage to a police car, which had been purchased partly with federal assistance. I’m not joking. And the damage to the police car, which is disputed, may have been limited to a broken taillight!

Bad enough that California’s authority is neutered by the feds. Far worse that it is neutered in a case in which a genuine federal interest is nonexistent–indeed, where the putative federal interest is, patently, a pretext for an end-run around California’s shield law.

It’s time that the federal courts wised up and put an end to this. The current appeals of the Wolf and Chronicle cases to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals provide an opportunity for the federal judiciary to rein in the Bush Justice Department, reassert the primacy of state law in the area of evidentiary privilege, and highlight the importance of a news media that is–and is seen as–independent of government investigators.
———-
Peter Scheer, a journalist and lawyer, is executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition,

It’s criminal what Congress has done to the working poor

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OPINION Congress’s Republican leaders belong in prison. They have openly violated one of our most basic laws, the 68-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act. It requires Congress to set the minimum wage high enough to guarantee a standard of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being.
The current rate of $5.15 an hour comes nowhere near to doing that. Even those who manage to work full-time make only $10,700 a year – $206 a week or about $900 a month, minus taxes and other deductions. They and the 15 million other Americans who are paid at or near the minimum – more than one-third of them provide the main or sole support for their families – are by any reckoning poverty-stricken and barely surviving.
The law allows states and local governments to adopt minimum-wage rates higher than the federal rate. Although California and 20 other states, San Francisco and 139 other cities and counties, and the District of Columbia have done so, the higher minimums cover only about half of the country’s workers.
Democrats have argued long and hard in the current session of Congress for a higher federal minimum, as they have in every other session since the $5.15 rate was set in 1997. But the Republicans who’ve been running Congress have higher priorities – raising their own pay and cutting the taxes that are such a burden to their wealthy supporters.
Oh yes, the GOP leaders did introduce a bill that would have raised the minimum. But the measure made that contingent on cutting the estate taxes of the very wealthy – a linkage, opposed by even some Republicans, that guaranteed the bill’s defeat.
They’ve raised congressional pay in every session since 1997, while doing nothing for the working poor. That’s added more than $31,000 to the minimum wage of congressional members, currently $165,200, with a $3,300 raise scheduled for Jan. 1. Unlike minimum-wage workers, who rarely have fringe benefits, members of Congress also get free health care, pensions, and other expensive extras.
The minimum wage for ordinary people would have risen to $7.25 an hour over the next two years under the latest Democratic proposal blocked by the GOP’s congressional leaders. Its main proponent, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, promised that the fight to raise the wage “will continue all across America.”
It is certain, in any case, that Democratic candidates will make it an issue in this fall’s election campaigns. They are well aware, certainly, of polls showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor a minimum-wage increase.
So why in the world are Republican leaders so adamantly against it?
Because their big-money backers in the restaurant business, who employ about 60 percent of all minimum-wage workers, are against it, as are many other business and corporate interests. The opponents have even formed a group, Coalition for Job Opportunities, to spread the fiction, much favored by the GOP, that a higher minimum would force employers to eliminate jobs.
Actually, the number of jobs has grown after each of the 19 times the minimum has been raised since it was initially set at 25 cents an hour in 1938.
The job growth has been spurred primarily by the increased spending of those whose pay has increased. Like all low-wage workers, they must spend virtually every cent they earn, thus raising the overall demand for goods and services and creating the need for new employees.
Think of the general benefits to society if the minimum-wage workers who now must depend on government assistance could earn enough to make it on their own.
Think of the benefits to employers. As several studies have shown, raising workers’ pay raises workers’ morale and, with it, their productivity, while decreasing absenteeism and recruiting and training costs.
Think of the benefits to small retailers. Opponents of a raise say they’d be hurt the most by a higher minimum wage, but it’s far more likely that they’d be among the greatest beneficiaries. For minimum-wage workers have no choice but to spend most of their meager earnings in neighborhood stores for food and other necessities. SFBG
Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and political issues for four decades as a reporter, editor, and commentator. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com.

Fun with AOL data

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Last week AOL did another stupid thing, but at least it was in the name of science. The giant Web portal released a data chunk containing three months’ worth of queries to its search engine taken from roughly half a million users. Gathered during the months of March, April, and May, the data shows queries, their date and time, and which Web sites the user ultimately visited. The idea was that this information might be of some use to researchers.
To protect user privacy, AOL replaced the log-in names of searchers with numbers. So you could still see everything that searcher #4356 looked for, but you wouldn’t know who #4356 was, except for one problem: it’s incredibly easy to figure out who people are based on their searches, because they tend to look for themselves, family members, and things in their immediate geographical vicinity. The New York Times did a great story in which reporters examined searches done by user #4417749 and within hours managed to locate their author, a nice old lady in Georgia who now plans to cancel her AOL subscription.
Bloggers and privacy advocates have pointed out that the information AOL released contains more than just the online search patterns of innocent Georgia ladies. It’s unclear what law enforcement might do with the thousands of searches for illegal drugs and pornography. It’s equally unclear what the feds will make of the handful of searches for “Muslim death rituals,” “Muslim brotherhood,” and “Islamic militant web forums.” In a nation where the government is seriously contemputf8g blanket warrants for online surveillance, it’s hard to imagine there aren’t law enforcement types combing this treasure trove of prepackaged personal data. Imagine getting enough dirt on somebody to haul him or her in for questioning just by downloading 400 megabytes of stuff from AOL! That’s like free candy.
After public outcry reached a crescendo, AOL apologized and took the data down. Of course, privacy advocates like the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Marc Rotenberg and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl remain pissed off. Why? Because this is the Interweb, folks. Data never dies here. In fact, you can search the records yourself via Dontdelete.com.
Once I visited Don’t Delete, I couldn’t leave. There’s a button you can click to get the search terms from a random user, and every time I hit it, I got another gem. My favorite was user #4206444, obviously a college student trying to cheat quickly on his or her exams in order to get around to the more important things in life. Search phrases like “does social darwinism persist in social welfare policies and in the attitudes of the general public about social welfare” were followed by “free essays on adolescent depression and suicide risks” and “free essays on Charles Dickens Hard Times.” In between these queries were hundreds for “sailor moon pictures,” “pokemon pictures,” “sonic x,” and “selena pictures.”
As blogger Thomas Claburn (www.lot49.com) points out, there’s a kind of poetry to some of the queries. He excerpts a dozen lines from the 8,200 queries made by user #23187425, all of which seem to be a sort of conversation this person was having with the search engine — he or she never actually clicked on any links but just kept querying with plaintive phrases like “i have had trouble,” “i want to change,” and “i know who i am.”
I’m torn. I love having access to this data, both for its touching human qualities and for the kinds of anthropological information it could yield. But as someone who believes strongly in digital privacy, I simply can’t sanction what AOL did. It would be different if I had faith that discovering all those porn searches would somehow inspire people to accept that sexual curiosity is normal. And it would be different if I thought that law enforcement would consider that the people searching for “Islamic militant web forums” might simply be trying to understand the world. But I don’t. This data will be used to “prove” that the Internet is crawling with child pornographers and terrorists.
Someday AOL’s information should be put into the public domain for anthropologists and cultural researchers of the future. That future, however, is probably decades if not a century away. The data is too close to us now — too easily weaponized. Nevertheless, I hold out hope that one day our search queries will illuminate us and provide for another generation a digital outline of our daily desires. SFBG

Milkbone

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Do you think lactation is sexy? My sister just had a baby, and her husband finds the breast-feeding all very erotic, and I told her there was something wrong with him. I said she should tell him to see a shrink, but she told me it didn’t really bother her. I’m worried he is brainwashing her. Do you know of any books I can give her? What should I say to keep her safe? Should I call child services if she doesn’t snap out of it?
Love,
Fretting Sis
Dear Sis:
Yikes! Are you serious? If anyone’s going to do any snapping out of anything, it had better be you. I did mention recently that I don’t find lactation or its accompanying equipment at all sexy, but my opinion here matters barely more than yours does; if it isn’t a problem for your sister, it isn’t a problem, period. I see that you want some drama and to get to be the hero and all, but too bad. Go find a stray kitten to rescue and leave your sister’s family alone.
It’s no surprise to me that the husband, incidental beneficiary of nature’s bounty, should appreciate his good fortune. Men like boobs! News at 11. Nor does it shock me that the occasional woman quite innocently experiences some sexual sensation while breast-feeding. We only have so many body parts and so many physiological responses: breast-feeding, orgasm, and emotional bonding, for instance, all release or respond to the same hormone, oxytocin, which also induces labor. For most people the pleasurable (orgasm) and the nearly unbearable (labor) could not be further apart, but individuals are not “most people.” Susie Bright, for instance, wrote about using a vibrator during labor and (I think) claimed to have had an orgasm while delivering her daughter. Pretty unusual, granted, but hell, it’s got to be better for you than an epidural.
We’ll never know how many women have felt a harmless little buzz while breast-feeding, and considering the attitudes out there (yours, for instance) we never will. It’s not just disapproval, either. Every once in a while there’s a story about a woman who’s admitted feeling something vaguely sexual while breast-feeding actually losing her kids. (OK, in the most famous of these the kid was three, which does change things, but still.)
It may be difficult to establish the requisite distance when there’s a baby involved, but it would behoove you to learn the difference between “I think that’s weird” and “I think that’s wrong and dangerous and I have the responsibility to do something about it.” Or try it this way: if you hear that your brother-in-law is turned on by the baby, then by all means freak out and panic and leap into action. If, on the other hand, you hear that he’s turned on by his own wife’s breasts, well, shut up and go home.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I told my husband that I got hit on at the grocery store. I told the guy I was married and I walked away. Well, my husband apparently felt the need to prove to me he’s desirable too. So he tells me how he was “joking” with this cashier, asking, “Do you want to go for a ride?” “In your truck?” she asked. He replied, “I didn’t say anything about my truck.” She wanted to take him up on it, but she wasn’t getting off work for a few hours. He shrugged and said that he had to go, never once telling her that he was married.
We don’t wear rings; I know I’m married and I make sure any guy who tries to hit on me knows too. I’m kinda upset with my husband now. He doesn’t understand why. What do you think?
Love,
Check Me Out
Dear Check:
I think he’s kind of a tool or was at any rate behaving in a tool-like manner. It isn’t merely that he was playing a nasty little game with you, although I’d think that would be bad enough, but what about the cashier, whom he was using as a cheap prop or pawn? He behaved caddishly toward her as well. One can only hope that she was playing him right back, planning to amuse her girlfriends later with the story of that horn-dog married guy at the store today, what a tool.
It’s not his childish insistence on getting you back that bothers me most, though. He was obnoxious to the cashier and toolish to you, but not understanding why you’d mind these things makes him an idiot, and that is pretty close to unforgivable.
You will forgive him, of course, after explaining one more time exactly what he did wrong. You pretty much have to, since you don’t, I assume, want to have to get a new husband. It’s hard enough to get a new grocery store, and I don’t see either of you going back to the old one, do you?
Love,
Andrea

Vote to impeach

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EDITORIAL Mainstream media reporters and pundits, as well as our cynical colleagues at the SF Weekly and the rest of their corporate alt-weekly chain, love to bash the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the city councils of other Bay Area cities for passing resolutions on big questions like war, human rights, or impeachment.
We don’t share that view. Resolutions take almost no time or effort to pass, yet they are important barometers of popular political sentiment, tools that are particularly important given how both major political parties have shown more willingness to listen to their corporate backers than their lowly constituents. People need avenues to make their voices heard without the filters imposed by the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties.
That’s why we’re happy that citizens in both San Francisco and Berkeley will get a chance to vote this November on the question of whether Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings against President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for their many high crimes: fraudulently leading the United States into war, illegally spying on Americans, torturing enemies, claiming unconstitutional executive power, vioutf8g binding treaties, and engaging in war crimes and profiteering, among others.
Berkeley and San Francisco will be the first major American cities to allow a popular vote on this question. The Guardian in January was one of the first publications in the country to lay out in detail the impeachable crimes of the Bush administration (“The Case for Impeachment,” 1/25/06), joining a chorus of activists, scholars, and legal experts who say this is the only way to slow the country’s slide into empire and penetrate the Bush administration’s veil of secrecy.
Our congressional representatives have been terrible on this issue, showing more concern with seeking partisan advantage than upholding the Constitution. Rep. Nancy Pelosi has said the Democrats won’t pursue impeachment even if the party retakes Congress this fall. But maybe they’ll listen to the people directly telling them that we want Congress to finally launch a serious investigation into the many crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration.
This is a vote that the world wants to see us take. We commend the Berkeley City Council and SF supervisors Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, Tom Ammiano, and Jake McGoldrick for giving the people this opportunity to be heard on the most important issue of our time. SFBG

Can Werbach reform Wal-Mart?

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EDITORIAL Those with power rarely use it to help the powerless: workers, foreigners, or the planet. That’s why we’re fascinated by the green noises that we’re starting to hear from übercorporation Wal-Mart and with its decision to hire our hometown environmental heavy hitter Adam Werbach, a move that reporter Amanda Witherell explores in this week’s cover story (see “An Unbelievable Truth,” page 15).
We’re skeptical of Wal-Mart’s motives and commitment to putting the planet before profits, so we truly hope that Werbach hasn’t been co-opted into a greenwashing effort. But because of the positive potential in this arrangement, we’re willing to trust Werbach’s judgment. In turn, we urge him to remember his roots and expect him to document his experience inside Wal-Mart and blow the whistle if Wal-Mart isn’t honoring its promises.
Let’s take a minute to look at the timing and potential of this. Wal-Mart is on the ropes even though it’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The activists and communities that oppose it are banding together like never before. And they’re getting bolder in that opposition, such as when the city of Hercules earlier this year used eminent domain to seize land from Wal-Mart rather than allow a store in its community.
Wal-Mart has also lost some political clout. First it lost its most supportive Democrat when fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton left the White House. The Republican Party it sponsors is also likely to lose ground in the midterm elections, just as the country’s trade deficit hits record levels.
People are also waking up to the fact that Wal-Mart’s poverty-level wages and lack of good health insurance end up being subsidized by taxpayers. And there very well could bubble up a backlash against the kinds of obscene wealth-hording being pushed by Wal-Mart’s Walton family and others, as reporter George Schulz also details in this issue (see “Shackling the Tax Man,” page 11).
Finally, consider two high-profile media moments from this summer that put more pressure on Wal-Mart. The Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth has succeeded in placing global warming near the top of people’s concerns. This pressing environmental problem is made much worse by Wal-Mart’s practice of importing and distributing goods all over the planet.
The other was a widely circulated essay in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Breaking the Chain,” which made a strong case for the federal government bringing an antitrust action against Wal-Mart and smashing the chain to pieces. The article focused not on the widely discussed environmental and labor arguments, but on how Wal-Mart’s market power and the way it wields it hurts the economy and other businesses because it can dictate terms to all of its suppliers, a concept known as monopsony power.
So we all have good reason to believe that Wal-Mart executives and their newfound concerns for the people and the planet aren’t just motivated by altruism. And this corporation has a long way to go before anyone should believe its executives intend to transform it into a force for good. We simply don’t trust Wal-Mart and don’t think anyone else should either.
Ah, but what if? That’s the question that will cause us to hold our fire for now and watch to see whether Wal-Mart’s actions follow its rhetoric. Given Wal-Mart’s monopsony power over suppliers and near monopoly power over consumers, this corporation has the power to force substantial changes in the wasteful and overly consumptive habits of the average American. The potential here is phenomenal.
Is Werbach the guy to help them realize that potential? Maybe. He’s been an inspiring and effective crusader for economic and social justice for most of his life, which is why we were thrilled when Sup. Chris Daly snuck him onto the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
But in that role, he hasn’t been the bold visionary that we’d hoped for. Community Choice Aggregation, that baby step toward public power, moved way too slowly and didn’t go far enough, largely because Werbach failed to lead. And the movement for real public power has long been stalled, even on a commission that should be focused on kicking Pacific Gas and Electric out of San Francisco, although we’re pleased by the latest sign of life: the SFPUC is trying to offer public power from renewable sources on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard property (see “Public Power Play,” page 10).
Werbach needs to be a forceful and uncompromising advocate for Wal-Mart to radically change its business model, and if he hits serious roadblocks, he must be willing to quit and talk about his experience with the Guardian or another publication, no matter what the personal cost. SFBG

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› lynn@sfbg.com
There was no better place than the Castro Theatre to watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which kicked off the 70mm Series on Aug. 11. (Future delights in store: South Pacific and Tron!) The timing wasn’t bad either: among the film’s many viscerally unsettling images (see: bludgeoned animals; HAL’s omnipresent glowing red eye; an astronaut jerkily struggling for oxygen, then floating off into deep space), one in particular for me managed to mainline a vein of depression and fear concerning where world events — and US foreign policy — are taking us, ceasefire notwithstanding. That would be the moment (melodramatic, yes, but provoking dead silence in the theater) when ape-man moves beyond territorial posturing and realizes that he has the technology to bring home dinner and brutally slaughter his neighbors.
On a less dismal note, go check out our blogs — www.sfbg.com has spawned a whopping five of them in the wake of our Web site redesign, and we’re quite enjoying our adventures in 21st-century-style online media. We’re a little creeped out to find ourselves in the company of late bloomer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, we learned at press time, just posted his first entry on his own blog (a punishing 2,000-plus words in English). But we feel good about the fact that we got the jump on the Iranian president by at least a month or so.
Ahmadinejad’s first post is packed with autobiographical tidbits and railings against, yes, US foreign policy — much like our own content! But we’ve also got Kimberly Chun’s report and pics from the Bleeding Edge Festival on our music blog, Noise. In Pixel Vision you’ll find Cheryl Eddy’s musings on the fact that, per court order, Ted Kaczynski’s copy of The Elements of Style will soon be on the auction block — plus the extended mix of Eddy’s interview with Snakes on a Plane snake handler Jules Sylvester. And in the Bruce Blog, you’ll learn what happens when a national glossy business mag has the unmitigated temerity to refer to Guardian headquarters as “grungy” in the lead paragraph of its cover story. Read all about it in “Why People Get Mad at the Media,” parts one through six. SFBG

The case against the JROTC

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OPINION Make no bones about it: the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) is a program of the US Department of Defense. Its purpose is clear: to recruit high school students into the military. Two years ago, 59 percent of San Franciscans demonstrated their disapproval of that sort of recruiting by supporting Proposition I. It’s time for the Board of Education to follow the wishes of those voters and phase out the JROTC in favor of a nonmilitary program.
On Aug. 22, it’s very likely that the San Francisco school board will do just that. Before the board is a proposal to not only ease out the JROTC but also form a blue-ribbon panel to find an alternative.
It’s not a new idea. In the mid-1990s, a similar board proposal failed by a 4–3 vote. This time the vote will probably be reversed. Phasing out the JROTC in San Francisco should be a breeze. Two years ago, a measure to put the city on record as wanting to bring the troops home from Iraq passed by 64 percent. Since Sept. 11, hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans have protested the wars in the Middle East. There’s no other city in this country with so much antiwar activity. So what’s the problem?
It’s the kids. The JROTC has successfully organized scores of young people (mostly white and Asian) to attend school board meetings to testify about the benefits of the program. A few LGBT kids have said that the local chapter of the JROTC does not discriminate, which JROTC officials confirm. What they don’t talk about is the fact that a queer kid can’t be out (or found out) in the armed forces. Since 1994, when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was first implemented, more than 11,182 queers have received the boot. There are also beatings and harassment to contend with in the military if you’re suspected of being queer. It’s not a pretty picture.
The JROTC doesn’t tell kids that a lot of what the recruiters promise is a lie — the kids might not get the educational benefits and job training promised in all the promotional materials. As Z Magazine reported (August 2005), 57 percent of military personnel receive absolutely no educational benefits. What’s more, only 12 percent of men and 6 percent of women who have served in the military ever use job skills obtained from their service. As Lucinda Marshall noted in an Aug. 24, 2005, article on ZNet, “According to the Veterans Administration, veterans earn less, make up 1/3 of homeless men and 20% of the nation’s prison population.” Be all that you can be?
Education was never the point of the military, of course. As former secretary of defense Dick Cheney once said, “The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars…. It’s not a social welfare agency, it’s not a jobs program.”
Let’s not sell our youth short. Or make them fodder for oil wars. Or subject them to antiqueer discrimination and hate crimes. Let’s give them all the skills they need to make their lives the best they can be. We can do that without the military. SFBG
Tom Ammiano, Mark Sanchez, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca
Tom Ammiano is a queer former school board president and current supervisor of District 9. Mark Sanchez, the only queer member of the current San Francisco Board of Education, authored the current anti-JROTC resolution. Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a queer antiwar activist who was recently honored by the American Friends Service Committee.

Shackling the tax man

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Late last month, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times managed to get a story about IRS layoffs picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and placed on page three. That’s no small challenge, even in one of the most politically charged cities in the nation. It was not a sexy story, neither to liberals nor to conservatives.
But the story’s timing was impeccable.
Johnston reported that the IRS was poised to lay off 157 of its 345 estate- and gift-tax attorneys working at agency offices throughout the country — a division of investigators that generates more revenue for the federal treasury by catching tax cheats than any other group of auditors, about $2,200 for every hour that they work.
Dismantling the estate tax has been among the most aggressive crusades taken up by the Republican Party and its friendliest contributors for at least the last decade. Leaked to the Times by IRS whistle-blowers, the story about the layoffs surfaced just days before Congress rejected for the fifth time since 2001 an attempt by fiscal conservatives to get rid of the estate tax. The legislation failed despite Republican control of both the House and Senate. Even tempting Democrats with the first federal minimum-wage hike in 10 years couldn’t do the trick.
So how could defending the estate tax and the right of the IRS to collect it survive two branches of the federal government dominated by a political party that holds most taxation in contempt? It’s because families awash in seemingly infinite wealth are the only ones who get hit by the tax — despite false claims made by the GOP that the estate tax kills small businesses.
California filed more estate-tax returns in 2001 than any other state in the country by a margin of thousands. The only state that came close was Florida, and California still filed around 6,000 more returns, according to the most recent IRS numbers.
In other words, the Golden State is filthy, stinking rich and more vulnerable to the estate tax than other states. GOP party leaders in Washington insist the issue will return in the form of a new bill, and the IRS is behaving as if the estate tax has already disappeared. If it does, the richest families in the United States — highly concentrated in California and the Bay Area — stand to collectively save billions of dollars.
The Bay Area contains within its sloping hills and mammoth upstart tech firms higher income levels and more general wealth than almost anywhere else in the country. In fact, the San Francisco metropolitan area is the fourth wealthiest in the nation, according to Merrill Lynch, and two tiny cities between here and Mountain View, where Google is based, have the highest per capita median income in the United States. Those two cities, Atherton and Hillsborough, have a combined population of about 17,000, and while many of these techie tycoons are young, the day will come when they die and pass millions of dollars on to their descendants. Will there be enough tax investigators available to audit those estates? Will there even be an estate tax?
Following Johnston’s revelations, a Times editorial suggested the layoffs were a politically motivated attempt by the Bush White House to circumvent the legislative process. What it can’t accomplish through Congress it can do by handcuffing the tax police.
“This is an election year issue,” said Jay Adkisson, a private sector tax lawyer from Laguna Niguel who documents egregious cases of fraud on his Web site, Quatloos! “They’re trying to appease Republican voters who were angry over the failure of Congress to do something about the estate tax.”
The story of the IRS layoffs didn’t just catch the attention of readers. Congress responded too. Twenty-three lawmakers — including, somewhat predictably, Democrat Tom Lantos of California’s 12th District — immediately fired off a letter to Bush-appointed IRS commissioner Mark Everson demanding to know if the agency could now effectively investigate estate-tax avoiders.
None but the most obscenely wealthy Americans pay even a dime in taxes when they earn an inheritance upon a death in the family. Estates aren’t hit with taxes until they reach a value of $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple. Only estates exceeding those amounts are assessed any tax, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
And if the family hires a savvy tax attorney or estate planner, those nontaxable values could easily rise to $10 million, according to Adkisson.
A research director at the Brookings Institution named Diane Lim Rogers opined in the Chronicle last May that because of current exemptions, about one half of one percent of dead people will actually be followed to the grave by the tax man. Besides, it’s the beneficiaries of an inheritance who pay. Despite grand claims made by Republicans that the beneficiaries of an estate will be paying half of what they’re handed in taxes, even the estates eligible for taxation see on average a 20 percent rate, according to the CBPP, which relied on the IRS for its statistics. For those who do pay estate taxes, deep discounts are available through charitable donations.
“The argument made about lots of people being ‘burdened’ by estate taxes is that they go through lots of convoluted tax-planning strategies in order to avoid the estate tax, so even if they don’t end up paying any estate tax, they are still adversely affected [burdened] by the existence of the tax,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.
But even considering the cost of estate planning, Rogers said, no one would rationally spend more avoiding taxes than they would actually paying them.
Keith Schiller, a respected private sector tax attorney based in Orinda, earns princely sums teaching millionaires how to take advantage of loopholes in the federal tax code. He’s not opposed to the estate tax on principle; he just wants to simplify the way his clients pay their dues.
“I do believe the estate tax serves a social function of breaking down generational dynastic wealth,” he said in a phone interview.
Schiller said the IRS is conducting nowhere near the estate-tax audits it once did and that may be the only justification for laying off auditors. Still, the knowledge required by agency investigators to analyze and understand complex estate-tax avoidance schemes is immense. About 50 estate- and gift-tax attorneys based in Southern California and the Bay Area exclusively handle returns filed for the IRS from inside the state.
David Dean, president of the San Jose–based National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Local 238, said it’s not clear which offices will have layoffs. All 350 estate-tax auditors are being offered buyout deals that include their pensions plus up to $25,000, or $13,000 after taxes.
Dean and the NTEU, which represents the auditors and opposes the layoffs, insist the IRS isn’t entirely sure how much money is hidden from the agency each year through either elaborate trusts or simple refusals to file. It’s known as the “tax gap,” and three days after Johnston’s story appeared, the inspector general of the IRS, J. Russell George, told Congress that the agency’s estimated figures for delinquent estate taxes hadn’t been updated in years. His report described a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the IRS expressed no desire to update the figures because “consideration is being given to eliminating or reducing the number of people required to pay estate taxes.” The last estimate was about $8 billion, but that figure is for the most part unreliable, he testified.
But the law still exists, regardless of whether an anti–estate tax agenda eventually succeeds in Congress.
“If a law is on the books, you still have to close down on the cheaters,” said JJ MacNab, an estate planner who spent 18 years in the Bay Area working for tech clients. “If you don’t enforce a law on the books, no one’s going to have faith in the system.”
MacNab now lives in Washington and as a hobby assists people who buy into tax-avoidance schemes that turn out to be illegal. She said these days, it’s low-income earners who are likelier to be audited, a conclusion Johnston also came to in his 2003 best-seller, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else. The book shows how the recent layoffs are a small part of a larger movement to weaken the IRS’s investigative capabilities.
And that movement begins with those who can afford to fund it. Who are they? Well, they’re not your average farmer.
Consistently during the debate over estate taxes, the GOP has co-opted the populist language that once dominated America’s agrarian communities by claiming that the “death tax” bleeds poor farming families dry. It’s a spectacular rhetorical tool, but it’s an ugly distortion.
In fact, it’s the nation’s wealthiest families who have led the charge to dismantle the estate tax, not its small farmers, according to an April report put together by two groups, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy. The analysis identified a handful of enormously wealthy families that stand to save more than $70 billion if their lobbying efforts succeed. And that lobbying effort, the report notes, has amounted to around $490 million in direct and indirect lobbying expenditures since 1998.
The list includes Ernest Gallo of the E & J Gallo Winery, based in Modesto, and John A. Sobrato of Sobrato Development, listed by Forbes as one of the largest commercial landlords in Silicon Valley, with a familial net worth of approximately $2 billion. The Gallo family is reportedly worth about $1 billion.
The rest of the list is in part a who’s who of America’s billionaires: Wal-Mart’s Walton family; Charles and David Koch of the nation’s largest privately held company, the Kansas-based Koch Industries (also benefactors of libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, founded in San Francisco); and the Dorrance family of the Campbell Soup Co.
Ernest Gallo’s participation in antitax measures is particularly well documented. Elected officials he has supported with contributions in the past sponsored federal legislation in the ’70s and ’80s that allowed for millions of dollars in estate-tax exemptions for the Gallo family. One bill was even dubbed by estate-tax supporters the “Gallo amendment.”
The Public Citizen report links the Gallos to anti–estate tax lobbyist Patricia Soldano and her Orange County–based Policy and Taxation Group (PTG), which has spent $4 million lobbying solely against the estate tax since 1998. While the authors are unable to pinpoint exactly how much the Gallos had given to PTG directly, both the Sobratos and the Gallos are listed as clients of the group. The Gallos have reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars supporting individual candidates.
It’s doubtful that very many people who actually paid estate taxes last year would know how to repair a grain harvester. In 2001, Johnston of the Times famously challenged the anti–estate tax American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bush administration to find just one example of a farm estate being sold to pay the taxes on it. Johnston reported they were unable to do so.
Estate planner Schiller likened opponents of the estate tax to medieval villagers who complained of gout to prove how well nourished they were.
“People want to believe they have an estate-tax problem,” he said, “so they can feel successful.” SFBG

Topping the hoop

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› culture@sfbg.com
“Wowza, how’d you get that gnarly bruise?” wide-eyed oglers at the office, in line at the taquería, or on my MySpace blog would ask with awe after peeping the five-inch-long trophy wound on my hip.
“Oh, this old thing,” I’d sniff. “No big deal. Just picked it up in hula hoop dance class.”
“Hula hoop dance class?” my friends back home would reply incredulously, their tiny brains atrophied by played-out calorie burners like hiking and cycling. “You got that from hula hooping? [Guffaw, guffaw, insert joke about pitiful lack of physical endurance here.]”
“Yes, friend, you see, I’m doing an article about this new fitness trend, hoop dance, and …”
“HULA HOOP DANCE CLASS!?!? Only in California, dude, only in California.”
Well, yeah, bitches. That’s right: California. Utopian birthplace of an endless array of revolutionary fitness regimens. Jazzercise. Tae Bo. Heck, according to Wikipedia, Jack LaLanne invented the jumping jack right here in California.
It’s true, though, that when it comes to wacky-sounding physical fitness, it’s been a while since the Golden State unleashed any new trends upon the world. Opportunities for women to get their saucy swivel on have been dwindling — spinning’s hardly saucy, girlfriend — with nary a Curves-free shimmy in sight in some parts of the country.
So yes, indeed, I say thank heavens for the hula hoop, God’s sexiest training wheel. Not only is the hoop helping to polish the state’s tarnished gym-class cred, it’s also spawned hoop dance, a swayin’ and slithery new workout aimed at squeezing the inner juiciness out of average dames like you and me (or possibly your girlfriend or even your mom).
The practice has already gained a healthy following in San Francisco, thanks to inspirational instructor Christabel Zamor, a.k.a. HoopGirl (winner of the 2006 Guardian Best of the Bay Award for Best Personal Trainer). But what about my hoop-deprived friends back East? When and how will they ever get their jaded swivel on?
Good news for all: having wisely determined that despite her effervescent charm and spiritual buoyancy she simply can’t be everywhere at once, HoopGirl’s now passing her hard-earned knowledge along to a bevy of women from all over the country who seek opportunity in this brand-new industry. After all, what better way to sneak erotic exercise into the red states than via the seemingly innocuous hula hoop, Trojan horse of the fitness world?
The 10 women who attended Zamor’s first weekend-long teacher certification workshop in June formed a broad career spectrum: a nurse, a raw food chef, an elementary school teacher, a massage therapist, an architectural assistant, and, of course, a handful of professional fitness instructors. All possessed the requisite hoop skills, and a few even had teaching experience.
What they came to learn, however, was the nitty-gritty of the hoop dance biz, something that Zamor did not have the benefit of knowing at the beginning of her own career. In fact, Zamor’s first exposure to hoop dance came while she was pursuing a career as an anthropology professor at UC Santa Barbara.
“When I was studying anthropology, I loved teaching, but I was really interested in ethnic dance and music traditions,” she says. “The academic environment only contextualized these things in terms of their own preestablished academic jargon. I had been very naive going into graduate school. I really thought it was about exposing myself to the beauty of dance.”
She found herself entranced by hoop dancers at a rave outside of Los Angeles. Disillusioned with the academic environment, she committed herself to learning hoop dance. She returned to Santa Barbara with a hula hoop and started practicing in the park.
“It was a new field, based on no other cultural dance form,” she explains. “And all of a sudden people were beating down my door for hoop dance.”
After struggling in an environment in which she was constantly forced to defend the legitimacy of studying African dance traditions, Zamor found herself at the epicenter of a dance revolution. Within three months of her first hoop dance experience, she found herself teaching group classes.
Today, the hoop dance teacher certification course is the latest addition to Zamor’s hula-shake empire, which includes group classes, private lessons, instructional DVDs, and performances. It’s also a crash course in running your own business.
Over three days, students learn everything they need to effectively teach a hoop dance fitness course, including how to clearly explain and demonstrate the key principles of hoop dance (squat and shimmy, very important); how to make use of imagery and metaphors (“Reach into the honey pot!”); the physiological and psychological benefits of hooping (“Did you know that the most beautiful sound in the world is the sound of a hoop hitting the floor? That’s the sound of learning and growing.”); class structures (hoop jam!); and how to deal with the top five difficult situations (a cranky, clumsy reporter in your midst, perhaps). The course also leaves students with a sense of marketing savvy and all the esoterica involved in operating a small business, such as insurance, liability waivers, pricing, and property rental.
“I really respect Christabel as an artist and a business woman,” says Candice Schutter, a movement facilitator and life coach from Portland. “She’s given us a workable structure that can be used right away to create a thriving business.”
But Zamor said she hopes the women take away much more than technical know-how. “The most important thing that I want the teachers to exude, so that other people can absorb it, is confidence,” she says. “It’s the key to learning hoop dance. It’s a feeling. It’s not something people can memorize. You just have to believe it.” SFBG
The next HoopGirl teacher-training course will be in San Francisco, Oct. 6–8. To register or for more information, go to www.hoopgirl.com.

Get your herb on

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› culture@sfbg.com
“There are few things in the world as pleasurable as taking a nap on a chamomile patch,” says herbalist Joshua Muscat. “It’s an herb that doesn’t get a lot of respect. It smells good. It looks good. The flower is cute.”
It’s a hot Sunday morning in west Berkeley, and Muscat is leading a workshop called Local Medicinal Herbs and Your Health. This session is one of the classes offered by the EcoHouse, a unique residence designed to demonstrate sustainable building and gardening techniques. Wearing a white T-shirt, maroon pantaloons, and Crocs, Muscat has a down-to-earth demeanor and a boundless gusto for herbs. He’s been a student and practitioner of Western herbal medicine for the past 11 years, and his five-hour class covers everything from harvesting herbs to practicing holistic health care to preparing medicinal tinctures.
Twelve students gather on stumps, benches, and stones in the EcoHouse’s invitingly rambunctious garden. We’re here for a variety of reasons. Several people express dissatisfaction with mainstream medicine, while others want to enhance their home gardens by adding beneficent native herbs. One man is preparing for a stint at a Buddhist monastery by planting an organic garden. Another says he’s here simply because “the EcoHouse is always inspiring to me. I just like to come here and get a little bit of that.”
Babeck Tondre, a permaculture activist and resident of the EcoHouse since its inception, acquaints us with some of the special features of the site. Native plants and edible species grow in garden beds and containers in the ample yard. Bamboo shoots and ginger plants stretch into the air, towering leafily over the flowering parsnip and varietal poppies. A bathtub fountain burbles peacefully beside a straw bale toolshed designed by a local landscape architect.
There’s a rustle in the yard and a wiry man with glasses and an outdoorsy look rushes up to Muscat, trailing a freshly plucked specimen of the herb of the hour. As we pass the chamomile around, Paul Johnsen dives back into the foliage to search for another plant. Johnsen knows the garden well. A horticulturist, he became a part of the three-person EcoHouse-hold last year and works with Tondre to continually upgrade the site. Almost everything in the garden has a teaching function, including hand-built structures and animal life, which are part of the garden’s ecosystem. The toolshed roof will be renovated during an upcoming workshop on planting a living roof garden. Even the ducks will have their day.
Frances and Nate are brother drakes who waddle about the yard quacking amicably at passers-by on the long stretch of sidewalk that borders the garden’s west-side fence. Parents and children greet the two birds by name. In addition to winning the Mr. and Mr. congeniality award, the ducks keep the slug and snail population to a minimum. This month Frances and Nate will star in a workshop about raising ducks and chickens in your yard. Omelet aficionados have doubtless already sniffed out another potential benefit of raising female fowl: harvesting eggs. The EcoHouse did, at one point, foster a female duck, who purportedly laid large and delicious eggs throughout the yard. She died, though, so there won’t be eggs in the garden until the mail-order chicks arrive.
But other organic edibles abound, and during the lunch break Tondre encourages us to “forage in the yard.” There are low-water apple trees that yield a tart, green fruit and quince trees and raspberry bushes. Someone passes a basket of freshly picked gooseberries around the class. Their papery sheathes enclose a berry the size of a cherry tomato, and the intensity of the sharp, sweet flavor is akin to having a pellet of freshly cut grass applied directly to the taste buds.
Refreshed by garden goodies, we’re ready for more learning. Muscat talks about the importance of harvesting herbs responsibly. As medicinal plants such as echinacea and goldenseal gain widespread recognition and use, wild sources can suffer from overharvesting. Muscat recommends patronizing small businesses such as Lhasa Kharnak in Berkeley (www.herb-inc.com) or Scarlet Sage in San Francisco (www.scarletsageherb.com), which utilize sustainably grown or harvested plants. A group called United Plant Savers (www.unitedplantsavers.org), dedicated to preserving native medicinal herbs in North America, provides a list of endangered herbs, as well as one of responsible plant purveyors.
The best way to ensure a good source is to grow herbs in your own garden. Since space is a limiting factor for many of us, Muscat encourages urban gardeners to think collectively when deciding what to plant. As in, I’ll grow yarrow in my container garden if you grow lemon balm in your window box.
Devising tactics and sharing resources like this is a primary goal of the EcoHouse, according to Tondre. “Karl would want me to say how this project fits into the larger community,” Tondre says. The Karl he’s referring to is the late Karl Linn, a community activist and landscape architect who spearheaded the EcoHouse project in 1999. Though Linn passed away last year, his vision and presence remain vividly felt here.
Classes at EcoHouse are $15 and no one’s turned away for lack of funds. Expanding its community reach and resources, the EcoHouse recently joined forces with the Ecology Center, a well-known Berkeley nonprofit that offers a wealth of green resources to compliment the action-packed EcoHouse workshops. The center acts as an umbrella organization that hooks green-minded volunteers up to relevant activist organizations and also operates an information desk that answers such practical questions as “Where can I get worms for my worm bin?” The center also houses the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL), which offers seeds for free; the price tag is a promise to bring seeds back to the library the following year. Beck Cowles, program director at the Ecology Center, speaks enthusiastically about the partnership with EcoHouse. “One of the neat things is that because it’s a demonstration site, people are able to come and get hands-on experience in learning to live more sustainably in the city.”
Back to the herbal-medicinal course at hand: just spending time in the garden will help fix what ails you, Muscat says. He opposes the quick-fix, pill-happy culture of mainstream medicine. Muscat advocates for Western herbal medicine as an alternative or compliment to mainstream medical practices. “It just doesn’t work within a capitalist framework,” he says. While herbal applications can remedy certain short-term problems (lemon balm: great for soothing herpes sores!), Muscat says that his holistic approach is more effective in treating long-term ailments, such as chronic fatigue and sinus allergies. Putting his mugwort where his mouth is, Muscat runs the San Francisco Botanical Medicine Clinic (www.sfbmc.org), an organization that provides low-cost treatment using herbal remedies and a holistic approach to health care.
After several sun-beaten hours among the plants, our fog-accustomed bodies are responding with proto–heat stroke. So Muscat pitches a canopy and retires to the dappled shade of a prune tree to gleefully demonstrate the mad-scientist-meets-celebrity-chef aspect of herbal medicine: preparing tinctures. His working surface is made up of a warped wooden table, upon which rest a heavy-duty blender, two quart-size bottles of Everclear, and an “I [Heart] My Guru” mug.
As Muscat blends, sifts, measures, and shakes, I inadvertently engage in the ancient practice of urtication, otherwise known as flogging with nettles, as I brush against a prolific member of the genus Urtica growing next to my stump seat. For a moment I ponder seizing the bull by the horns or, um, the nettle by the hair?, and continuing the flagellation. Relieving rheumatism, after all, is one possible application of the plant’s medicinal properties, according to herbalists.
And those who find pleasure in pain (including certain members of the kink community and perhaps of Opus Dei) are well acquainted with the nettle’s saucy sting. It’s just one more example of symbiosis between people and plants. It turns out that plants too can thrive on a bit of rough play. As Shakespeare penned in Henry VI, “The Camomile; the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows.” SFBG
ECOHOUSE
1305 Hopkins, Berkeley
(510) 594-4308
ecologycenter.org/ecohouse
ECOLOGY CENTER
2530 San Pablo, Berkeley
(510) 548-2220
ecologycenter.org

Spiff your licks

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› culture@sfbg.com
Painting, welding, playing the xylophone … these all seemed like mildly entertaining pursuits to me, but they didn’t quite inspire the level of intense passion needed to get me off my ass and into a classroom. If I was going to invest my valuable time in any course of instruction, it had to involve something I truly wanted to learn. Drinking, smoking, shoplifting … I was way too good at that stuff already. No, what I needed by way of education was something I could really get a hard-on about. That was it — I could definitely stand to learn more about the activity that gives me the biggest hard-on of all: going down on my girlfriend. Couldn’t we all? Join me, then, as I gently ease back the hood of our city’s sexual instruction resources in search of my very own cunnilingus guru.
Embarking on this quest had me feeling a little like Frodo: small, hairy footed, and bristling with trepidation at the thought of meeting a true cunnilingus master. Don’t get me wrong (I say in typical straight-guy fashion), I’m OK at what I do. But how would I ever convince the woman or man who was to teach me that I’d be a worthy pupil? Yet I knew I had to continue. Perhaps my libido was in charge. Perhaps somewhere in my heart, I knew my girlfriend deserved better than what I had been giving her. Whatever the case, I was determined to fix my licks for better kicks.
Finding my ideal tongue tutor wasn’t as easy as I thought. Most sex educators don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages, nor are they easily googled. And I’m a little leery of gaining sexual insights from the Learning Annex — I might walk away with my entire life savings invested in yoga retreats and Trump towers. To find someone to teach me how to orally astound, the first thing I needed to do was head to a respectable sex shop. In San Francisco that means go to Good Vibrations on Valencia Street.
There at the service counter, on an events calendar dotted with workshops on spanking, sex after 60, toe sucking, lap dancing, and whatever other sex acts you can imagine, I found the course that shot a twinge of excitement through my loins: Tracy Bartlett’s “Oral Majority” workshop. Alas, I’d missed it by a month — but didn’t despair: Tracy was due to come around again soon, I was assured by the counterperson. In the meantime, it was recommended that I read Bartlett’s bible, The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus (Cleis Press, www.tinynibbles.com) by Violet Blue.
If The Ultimate Guide works for a professional like Bartlett, I knew it would help me, so I purchased a copy and headed home. There in the cozy corner of my bedroom, I sat for the next three hours reading erotic fiction, techniques for mind-blowing orgasms, and helpful advice on proper pussy-eating etiquette. From the proper utilization of butt plugs to the pleasures of doggy-style licking, Blue’s book offers the sound advice of one who has braved the bush many times. Not only did it hone my cunnilingus skills, but it also provided me with a possible reason why my search for a teacher was proving difficult. “Most sex instructors,” Blue reveals, “are heterosexual females. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — unless you want to know what it’s really like to lick a pussy. Heterosexual women don’t know, so they tend to gloss over or skip cunnilingus in their classes.”
A bell went off in my head. I knew exactly whom I needed to find: a woman who teaches cunnilingus classes and actually licks pussies.
After reading Blue’s book, I could find the clitoris in two seconds flat. I could also judge the correct moment to introduce a well-lubed finger into a hesitant anus and could expertly perform a down-tempo version of “the ice-cream lick.” I was ready to meet my swami. But where was I to find her? After some more, perhaps embarrassingly persistent queries at Good Vibes, I struck gold. Bartlett had passed the local licks-pertise torch down to her top pupil, Koko West of www.sexysexed.com.
For the past two years, Koko has been making home visits and hosting parties for up to 40 people at a time. She’s queer identified and female, and teaches both fellatio and cunnilingus classes (one and a half hours for $250) and sex classes for couples (two hours for $300). Perfect! I set up a demonstration meeting with her and held my breath (while compulsively brushing my teeth). The next morning I headed to a local park where my pussy guru was patiently waiting on a checkered picnic blanket.
There on the knoll she sat, barefoot and draped in a polka-dot dress, her glistening tray of cucumbers and a silky pillow by her side. Without saying a word, I walked up, dropped to my knees, and prepared to imbibe the lessons of a true master. With tears streaming down my face, I begged her to teach me all she could. Her hands came down from the heavens to push the hair from my sweaty brow. “Shhh,” she said, “Koko’s gonna make it all better. Tell me what you want to know.”
My first question was obvious and the answer surprising; “What is the best way to perform cunnilingus?” I blurted. “First of all,” she said, “I find the word cunnilingus a bit unsexy. I like to say ‘going down’ or ‘licking pussy.’ And honestly, there’s no tried-and-true way to go down on a woman. She may love something one day and yearn for something completely different the next. The key is talking.”
“What do you mean,” I asked naively, “like, talk into her vagina or something?” Koko looked at me disapprovingly, took a breath, and said, “Uh … no. Communication between lovers is the key. Usually when people get over the initial discomfort of talking about sex, they find conversation extremely beneficial and hot.”
Yes, I thought. That’s what my girlfriend needs. A man who can talk and perform “the crooked tongue whip” at the same time. Shit, I had some serious work to do.
We sat for hours talking about the best way to ease a lover, how to use toys, and so on, but it wasn’t until evening approached that we got to the good stuff: cold hard sex tips. Koko flipped over the odd-shaped pillow she had been leaning on. On the other side were lips, a clitoris shrouded in a satin hood, and many, many folds. “This,” she said, “is the ‘Wondrous Vulva Puppet,’ from the House o’ Chicks [www.houseochicks.com], and you’re going to lick it with your hand.”
My arm became a mock tongue as Koko guided me through her repertoire of swirly techniques, flicking motions, penetration, and more. I could have played with Koko’s pussy puppet for days, but she eventually grew weary of my puppyish enthusiasm, packed up, and left. Still, she was only an e-mail away, and I knew that although I may not have earned my master’s in munching, I was no longer just whistling in the dark. SFBG
GOOD VIBRATIONS
603 Valencia, SF
(415) 552-5460
www.goodvibes.com

Fixin’ to ride

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› culture@sfbg.com
Lately, I’ve been feeling like a gearhead dilettante. The realization that there is indeed a gap between acquired knowledge and wild conjecture has been nagging me — particularly in regards to my beloved bicycle. Said beloved bicycle, once such a pleasure to ride, has recently taken to dragging its vulcanized heels every time we start up Potrero Hill, gasping, “I think I can’t, I think I can’t.” Does the problem lie with my bearings, my rims, my gears, my chain? Should I have been filling my tires more than once every six months? Do I need to invest in a Shimano 105 RD-5501 Triple Rear Derailleur? (Full disclosure, I don’t actually know what that is.) I’m embarrassed to turn up at a bike shop and admit that although I once traversed the pays Tamberma of northern Togo on a single-speed clunker, I can’t even fix my own flat. And frankly, judging from the way I’ve seen some of you court death with your squealing brakes and your red blinkies in the front, I don’t think I’m the only bike enthusiast in San Francisco lacking the fundamentals.
Question is: where can we go to gain some mad cycle skills of our own?
I naturally begin my search with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Andy Thornley, the boundlessly encouraging SFBC program director, provides me with a list of fix-it-yourself resources that astounds me with its paucity. I’d rather expected that a city with as flamboyantly visible a bike culture as San Francisco would have a greater emphasis on the DIY. But a little list is still a list worth checking out, especially if it promises to save me some coins and squeals.
Thornley also clues me in that although SFBC doesn’t offer anything in the way of bike maintenance, it does give a free 10-hour, 2-day course on road safety for urban cyclists of all levels. The course, certified by the League of American Bicyclists, includes instruction on “riding in traffic, necessary equipment, crash avoidance, and legal rights and responsibilities.” He recommends registering for the class online, where it’s also possible to sign up for weekly e-mail updates on events, bike-related news, and volunteer opportunities.
On to my FYI FIY list. First stop: the Freewheel, a Western Addition fixture since 1978. The current course instructor, Wayne Brock, ushers me into what was once a health food and hardware co-op, and points out some of the amenities of the community workshop: four bike stands in the center of the room (plus two others for classes against the wall), a big blue solvent tank, a wheel-trueing stand, and a wall of shop-quality tools. A row of new hybrid cycles lines the far wall, but the emphasis here, unlike at the Freewheel branch on Valencia Street, is less on retail than on repair and custom building. Brock, 31, is a science teacher by day and actually acquired his own basic skills at Freewheel eight years ago.
“The curriculum has been ironed out over a long period of time,” he says. “Really boiled down to the essentials that will get you going.” These essentials, taught over two four-hour sessions, begin with flat repair, then continue with wheel-trueing, brake adjustments, hub overhaul, crank removal, drive train cleaning, chain maintenance, and derailleur adjustments. Already I’m a little overwhelmed. Which part is the crank? Fortunately for class participants, a take-home cheat sheet covering all of the above is provided and the $100 course fee includes a six-month Freewheel membership, with unlimited access to the community work space and tools during regular business hours.
One former student I talked to praises the Freewheel technique for “demystifying” the bicycle for her, though she admits to not availing herself of the membership benefits. She does, however, keep her bike much cleaner and better-lubed than before and feels more able to perform minor repairs on her own. Classes, generally held on Mondays, are limited to six students, and an absolutely nonrefundable $50 deposit guards against no-shows. To get on the waiting list, it’s best to go directly to the shop, deposit in hand. Your bike should already be in good repair, since the object of the course is familiarization, not parts replacement. Still, with complete in-store tune-ups going for $120, the value of a class that gets you even partway there seems like a good deal.
Over at San Francisco Cyclery in the Upper Haight, shop owner Heather Bixler, herself a former Freewheel instructor, is pioneering a schedule of classes with an emphasis on specialization. After a free class in basic maintenance, participants have the option to take one or all of a series of successive one-hour, $15 classes focusing on one component at a time: brakes, shifters, bearings, and wheels. Sometimes an additional class in roadside repair is offered, and graduates of all of the above may take a final class in complete tune-ups. Not coincidentally, the Cyclery’s female-facilitated workshops attract many women, though the classes are open to everyone. The emphasis is “to really get your hands dirty,” Bixler says, though, as with Freewheel, your cycle should be in working order prior to the course. Classes range in size from five to six people and are normally held on Wednesdays or Thursdays. A $15 deposit is required to hold your space (except for the free class), and booking is best done over the phone.
While Pedal Revolution in the Mission District has a community membership workbench plus occasional free seminars on a variety of repair topics, the nearby Bike Kitchen offers sliding-scale courses with a bit more regularity. I drop in on a wheel-building class ($30–$60 plus parts purchase) and watch as five newly threaded wheels are tried and trued. Instructor Brian Cavagnolo circulates while his students, including a former bike messenger and an editorial intern from a local luxury magazine, squint intently at their trueing stands, spinning their wheels. I’ve been frustrated by the Bike Kitchen in the past when trying to get on the repair class waiting list, but Cavagnolo seems optimistic that this will be less of an issue after its big move from the Mission Village Market to Mission at Ninth Street. (The grand opening is Aug. 19.)
“It’s a smaller space,” explains Cavagnolo. “So we’re going to have to be more organized.” Due to be streamlined is the build-a-bike program, which allows one to earn bike parts through volunteer labor and use Bike Kitchen tools to construct a working two-wheeler. In 2005, the volunteer-run Bike Kitchen was awarded a San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Golden Wheel award for its contributions to bicycle culture in the city, and the newbie wheel builders seem pleased with the experience they’re gaining.
“I took a wheel-building class [in Berkeley],” the magazine intern says, “and it was totally useless. I watched a guy build a wheel.” He rotates his self-made wheel with satisfaction. It hisses against the fork of the wheel-tuning stand as he reaches over to tighten another spoke. Cavagnolo recommends keeping abreast of class schedules via the SFBC newsletter or by visiting the Bike Kitchen Web site and e-mailing info@bikekitchen.org to get on the waiting list.
My survey at an end, I ride my still-recalcitrant yet soon-to-be-purring steed home, my head spinning like a newly tuned wheel. I stop by Needles and Pens and pick up “A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance,” a slim but informative bike zine compiled in Portland. With clearly labeled diagrams of various bike parts, some simple repair methods, and the tools I’ll need to get started, I already feel one step closer to bicycle demystification. Now all I have to do is sign up for my first repair class … and you folks with those screeching brakes and front-mounted red blinkies should probably consider doing the same. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO BICYCLE COALITION
995 Market, suite 1550, SF
(415) 431-BIKE (2453)
www.sfbike.org
FREEWHEEL
1920 Hayes, SF
(415) 752-9195
www.thefreewheel.com
SAN FRANCISCO CYCLERY
672 Stanyan, SF
(415) 379-3870
www.sanfranciscocyclery.com
PEDAL REVOLUTION
3085 21st St., SF
(415) 641-1264
www.pedalrevolution.com
BIKE KITCHEN (NEW LOCATION)
1256 Mission, SF
www.bikekitchen.org
NEEDLES AND PENS
3253 16th St., SF
(415) 255-1534
www.needles-pens.com

Learning from leaks

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› deborah@sfbg.com
Brace yourself. What you are about to read might go against what you think is the general wisdom of conservationists: if it’s pee, don’t let it be. Now, I’m not advocating that you should flush. What I’m about to suggest emerges from the world of permaculture, and you’re about to find out all about it.
Permaculture is an approach to sustainable living that entails close, spiritual observation of nature and its inherent patterns and rhythms. Through contemplation of the land — a backyard, an entire city, Yosemite’s wilderness — humans can learn how to interact with the environment in a balanced and harmonious way. According to its adherents, permaculture design can integrate the vast spectrum of biological diversity into a functional system that naturally replenishes what it depletes. It seems fundamental that imitating the cycles of nature would produce a less wasteful way of living, but permaculturists insist that we’ve strayed so far from that course (for example, by farming miles and miles of wheat and using limited sources of energy) that it’s time for a full-on return to basics.
But permaculture is more than just a lesson on the how-tos of composting. And it’s more than simply a call to turn back the clock of industrialization. As Guillermo Vásquez, a Mayan from Central America who has been running the Indigenous Permaculture design course around the Bay Area since 2002, puts it, “It’s about how local communities can use their resources in the city in a sustainable way.”
Though geared to the urban environment, Vásquez’s classes use farming techniques drawn from native rural communities in El Salvador, South Dakota, and Guatemala. As a demonstration of how some of these techniques can be applied to everyday situations for the typical city dweller, he talked to me about the patch of bereft soil that is my backyard. Local permaculture courses such as the one Vásquez teaches introduce students to a holistic way of gardening that goes beyond throwing down some dirt, plugging a tomato seedling into the ground, and then turning on the hose. I mentioned that I should probably wait until winter to plant, in order to take advantage of the spring rains, so that I don’t have to wastefully water the yard so much, to which he responded, “you’re right, but first you have to find out what’s in your soil.” His classes give practical lessons in such things as testing the soil for lead and rotating crops and adding trees that retain water and recycle nutrients.
Vásquez’s class is taught on a shoestring budget. He organizes the course with elders from native communities in Central America and the United States. The staff includes specialists in water, soil, and green business. Employees of local nonprofits and people from underserved communities are invited to take the course for free, so long as they make a solemn commitment to do permaculture work in their communities for at least a year after the training. “We have a really teeny budget. Sometimes we work with nothing. We do this because we believe in hard work. We don’t get a salary. We organize the students to work with no money. We prove to them and show them that we can do positive things in our community with no money.”
Permaculture courses were developed in Australia in the mid-’70s when it first became obvious to environmentalists that the planet was in serious trouble due to monoculture farming. These environmentalists believed that we should value the earth’s bounty and endeavor to not hog all of its resources. Then they looked for ways to draw upon the interconnection between earth, water, and sky. One should meditate upon a site for as long as a year before farming, permaculturists advise, making note of all the connections observed. You might notice the sun’s path through the area or how water is leaking away from the site instead of being absorbed into it.
Besides ecological sustainability and environmental relationships, most permaculturists focus on creating social sustainability, recognizing cultural and bioregional identity, and building creative activist networks to implement “placemaking” and “paradigm reconstruction practices.” Not surprisingly for such an interactive philosophy, permaculture has found a huge following on the Web — sites such as permaearth.org and permacultureactivist.net host lively online forums.
Permaculturists also believe that humans should not interfere with the wilderness and that our only interaction with it should be to observe and learn from its ecological systems. The permacultural interactivity of humans and the environment is usually organized and described graphically as a system of concentric zones, like a mandala, beginning with “home” and extending toward “community,” so that the patterns of our social worlds can be put into balance.
Permaculture instructor Kat Steele of the Urban Permaculture Guild got into this kind of holistic approach because she wanted to combine her graphic design background with what she learned about sustainable living while traveling. She took a permaculture design course and started a landscaping business, then moved on to teaching certification courses. (In most cases, permaculture certification allows graduates to teach and participate in larger projects). The Urban Permaculture Guild uses “nonheirarchical decision-making” as one of its principles, and its members, in between contributing to the guild’s operations, have been involved in such large-scale projects as working with Jordanians to green their heavily salted deserts and transforming water recycling policies in Australia.
Steele discussed the guild’s training course with me while on a break from a six-week course conducted at the education facility of Golden Gate Park’s botanical garden. (It’s the first time the park has offered the course; the educational director hopes to develop the program further with Steele.) As in Vásquez’s class, students learn about the principles and concepts of permaculture and put them into practice in gardens. They learn from guest lecturers about soil enrichment and gray water (any water except toilet water that’s been used in the home). Both Vásquez’s and Steele’s classes follow the guidelines of the Permaculture Institute of Northern California and offer certification to students who successfully complete the course. They can be beneficial to yard gardeners like me, architects who wants to consider the best way to orient a building in order to make use of the sun and shade, and civil engineers looking for different approaches to water use and recycling.
During my conversation with Steele, she indicated how the concepts of permaculture could translate to social systems. “In our social landscape, we want to look at where energy is leaking. Typically in most businesses there is an organizational structure that is sort of top-down, and we can create feedback loops from energy or information that might be stored in areas that aren’t being used, so that it all can come back to decision makers. So creating flows that mimic cycles in nature in our business structures can help that.”
So learning from leaks is a key practice of permaculture design. Before we finished our interview, Steele got me thinking about how much I leak at home and that flushing isn’t just a gross misuse of water, it’s a waste to send all that pee down the drain. Turns out pee, when diluted in, say, a backyard pond fed by rain runoff from your roof, is excellent for your garden. SFBG
INDIGENOUS PERMACULTURE DESIGN COURSE
Aug. 26–Sept. 13
20 hours a week, dates subject to change after first class session
Free with one-year commitment to community work
Ecology Center
2530 San Pablo, Berkeley
www.indigenous-permaculture.org
URBAN PERMACULTURE GUILD
Check Web site for upcoming sessions in the Bay Area
www.urbanpermacultureguild.org

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