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Opinion

Why Muni is in such trouble

David Talbot
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Why Muni is in such trouble

OPINION The Municipal Transportation Agency’s Web site states a goal of providing a "convenient, reliable, accessible, and safe transit system that meets the needs of all transit users" in San Francisco. I have a feeling that if you ask most Muni riders, few would use those words ("convenient," "reliable," "safe," "meeting the needs of all transit users") to describe Muni today.

Riders have been put in the untenable position of paying higher fares for less service. Yet Muni still faces a $17 million deficit (projected to grow to $55 million next year), which it proposes to close by again increasing fares and cutting services. When asked about Muni recently, Mayor Gavin Newsom pointed to a $179 million reduction in state funding as the culprit. And while no one can dispute the devastating impact of such a cut, there are a few questions that suggest that the state alone is not to blame for Muni’s troubles.

For one, we just learned that the MTA has not had a management and performance audit since 1996. Although it’s undergone a number of fiscal audits, a management audit is different; such an audit would actually evaluates Muni’s operations to determine if the system is run effectively and efficiently. How is it that an $800 million operation can go for 14 years without that type of evaluation?

Moreover, what does it say about how Muni is managed when the agency has consistently failed to control overtime costs? We just learned that Muni accounts for about half of the city’s overtime expenses. This fiscal year alone, Muni has spent $23.8 million in overtime, or 45.6 percent of the city’s total. What kind of management and operational practices allow an agency to function like this?

And why is Muni spending 9 percent of its budget ($67 million) on work orders (with other departments) for services that may or may not have much to do with its mission — including $12.2 million for the Police Department, $8.5 million for the Department of Telecommunications, and $6.9 million for the General Services Agency that runs 311? Since a quarter of the value of these work orders would suffice to wipe away its deficit, what, if anything, has Muni done about this?

And speaking of Muni’s deficit, why is it that increasing fares and reducing services seem to be the only tools in its tool box? As a number of transportation experts have suggested, there are several options that should have been on the table — raising parking fees, adding parking meters, charging for blue placards, and putting a revenue measure on the ballot, just to name a few. While some of these options may not be the answer, has Muni at least considered them? Did it consider them before proposing more fare increases and service cuts, including doubling fares for seniors, the disabled, and youth?

All this points to a more fundamental question — what about the MTA Board? Has the board provided the type of engaged and independent oversight needed to guarantee effective management? And is independent oversight even possible when all board members are appointed by one person, the mayor?

Because of these and other questions, I am proud that the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion I introduced asking the budget analyst to conduct an independent management audit of the MTA. Given the timing of the budget process, the first phase of the audit will be completed by May 1, with the remainder in the summer. The audit will evaluate key areas of Muni’s operations to shed light on whether it is truly following best practices. We owe it to the ridership to face these questions head on. We no longer have the luxury to wait for the state to do the right thing.

SF Supervisor David Campos represents District 9.

A very different approach to the sit-lie law

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A very different approach to the sit-lie law

By Gabriel Haaland


OPINION Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom introduced legislation that would make it illegal for anyone to sit or lie on the sidewalk in San Francisco’s commercial corridors. The move came after an intense media campaign by the San Francisco Chronicle, which once again created a “crisis” between young street people and other residents of the Haight, much as the paper did with immigrant youth.


The crisis? Youths are sitting on the sidewalk. As a long time resident of the Haight, the dynamics I see are far more complex than that. I understand that my neighbors feel overwhelmed and upset. They want options, want solutions, and, at first blush, it seems some want to get the youths off our streets. However, citing or jailing the kids will not make them go away or improve their relationships with the rest of the community.


The real frustrations my neighbors are voicing are not primarily about whether someone is sitting on the sidewalk, but over genuine concern about violence in our neighborhood. They are looking for safety and respect; however, this legislation does not create conditions for increased safety and respect.


Most experts recognize that the criminal justice system for youths has failed, and putting people in jail for a nonviolent crime doesn’t make a lot of sense. Most of the youths on San Francisco streets come from broken homes from around the country. Some of them, LGBTQ youths in particular, are forced out of their homes and come here because we are still a beacon of hope for those who are marginalized and discriminated against.


If the criminal justice system is failing these young people, how can we address that in a way that creates real, positive change for everyone involved?


I would like to suggest a different path, one that has been wildly successful working with young people. It’s based on restorative justice principles. Restorative justice refers to a growing number of practices around the world that set out to bring together those most affected by a crime or conflict in order to understand and address the harm that has been done. At their best, these practices also support changes in the conditions in which these actions or crimes are taking place, making them less likely to happen in the same way in the future.


One example of this is the Restorative Circle process, which I was introduced to by Dominic Barter, who began developing this process 15 years ago with others in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where drug gangs are the main employers and homicide is the most common cause of death for people under 25. The process has been used in pilot programs by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice for the last five years and shown to be very effective. And now Restorative Circle pilot programs are starting in other countries.


Restorative Circles bring together the three parties involved in crimes or other painful acts: those who committed the act, those most directly affected, and the community of those indirectly affected. After each party has a pre-circle meeting with a facilitator, they all come together using a dialogue process intended for each to speak and be heard about the impact the conflict is having on them and about what motivated them to choose the actions they took. With the new understanding established, all are invited to collaborate in devising specific actions, with doable timeframes, involving accessible resources, in an attempt to repair the harm done and restore the sense of dignity, security, and justice of all present, and the wider community.


In Brazil, people across the political spectrum acknowledge the success of Restorative Circles. I would ask people across the political spectrum in San Francisco to join me in creating a new paradigm of public safety in the Haight and across the city based on Restorative Circles, a model that will empower our communities and transform systemic problems into real solutions. *


Gabriel, a.k.a. Robert, Haaland is a 15-year resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and serves on the board of SF Pride at Work and the Democratic County Central Committee. This proposal was reviewed by Li Morales and by Becky Sutton, community outreach coordinator for Restorative Circles, North America. For more info, go to www.restorativecircles.org.


 

A progressive primary for District 6

David Talbot
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A progressive primary for District 6

By Supervisor Chris Daly

OPINION Ten years ago, the newly drawn District 6 (which includes the Tenderloin, South of Market, and North Mission) was thought to be politically up for grabs. With an aggressive grassroots campaign and a progressive sweep across the city, we won the seat. Despite small demographic shifts to the right over the years, we’ve built a clear progressive identity for our district. Community stakeholders and all of progressive San Francisco should be proud of this accomplishment.

In 2006, despite downtown’s major effort to unseat me, I held on with a nine point, or 1,600-vote, margin. I would guess that this is generally reflective of the current political dynamics in the district. In other words, District 6 is roughly a progressive +10 district.

But heading into the first open-seat race in the district in 10 years, we have to take care to not become victims of our own success. Already, four serious progressive candidates have declared for the seat and are now raising money, seeking endorsements, formulating campaign strategy, and assembling their teams.

Our system for electing supervisors allows voters to rank their top three choices. In other words, even if all progressive voters ranked three progressive candidates on every ballot, a certain number of those votes would not transfer to the strongest progressive candidate. In District 6, where the political contests have been pretty black and white for a decade, it’s a safe bet we’ll have more than our share of voters who only vote for one candidate. (In 2006, a number of voters even marked me as their first, second, and third choice.)Sensing an unexpected political opportunity, downtown is working to coalesce around a single candidate to steal away the seat and the progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors. We can’t afford to let that happen. Our 10-point margin of error is too small to risk moving forward on our current path.

That’s why I have asked all the major progressive candidates in the race to participate in a progressive primary early this summer. A central polling place will be open to all District 6 voters. We will have a ranked-choice ballot that will include the progressive candidates who have qualified for public financing (raised more than $5,000 in qualifying contributions.) Permanent absentee voters will be able to mail in their ballots. In most respects, the progressive primary will look like an officially sanctioned election.

The primary will give district voters an opportunity to signal their early preference in candidates and will give the progressive campaigns much-needed experience identifying and turning out their supporters. More important, it will give the rest of us a window into what otherwise could become a very confusing progressive cluster.

The winner of the primary will become the beneficiary of my endorsement and campaign support. It also will be a momentum-builder for the campaign that is already strongest within the district and will signal to all progressive voters that, even if they’ve committed to another candidate, they need to make sure they rank the progressive primary winner on their ballot.

As progressives continue to build our politics, we need to keep creating democratic forums and structures. I hope the Progressive Primary becomes a useful component of our political movement.

Supervisor Chris Daly represents District 6.

An open letter to the Transit Workers Union

David Talbot
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An open letter to the Transit Workers Union

 

By Gabriel Metcalf

OPINION Last week, the Transit Workers Union refused to accept a deal with San Francisco that would have modestly reduced major service cuts and eliminated another increase in discount fares at least for this year. The proposal would have involved two things: first, a one-time contribution by drivers to their own pension plans (worth $8.9 million for next year, almost precisely cancelled by the automatic raise of $8 million the drivers will receive next year); and second, a change in work rules that would have required drivers to actually work 40 hours in a week before earning overtime, which would have saved $3.8 million over the next 14 months.

Muni is facing a deficit of at least $17 million in the current fiscal year and around $55 million next year. Future years will be worse. Given these pressures, the TWU is getting ready to re-vote. I presume that, eventually, union members will accept the deal. But either way, given how utterly marginal this deal is for the riders, progressives need to begin a public conversation about what responsibility the union has for making Muni work better.

The problem is not that TWU salaries are too high. The problem is the work rules. These include: drivers not having to let their managers know how long they will be absent from work, making it impossible to set schedules; drivers earning overtime pay before actually working 40 hours a week; and perhaps most significantly, a set of rules that makes it virtually impossible to hire part time drivers. Currently, Muni is forced by the work rules to pay drivers at full hourly rates to sit around between the morning and afternoon peaks. That rule costs MTA about $11 million each year.

If the TWU is willing to give on just the overtime and part-time driver rules, MTA would save $12.4 million in next year’s budget — and this savings would grow in the future. Other work rule changes could save much, much more, while dramatically increasing service to riders.

Probably the underlying cause of Muni’s work rules is the fact that the TWU, unlike other bargaining units in the city, has its salary and benefits set by formula in the City Charter — which means that management has nothing to offer during labor negotiations. Friends of mine in the labor movement argue that TWU is just doing its job in trying to get a good deal for members. I would argue that TWU needs to do more than that, and needs to begin taking responsibility for building a transit system that works well and can grow over time.

Maybe this public sector union needs to take a page from the Swedish labor movement.

Early into the post World War II economic boom, the Swedish unions learned that, since they controlled the government and increasingly controlled the boards of directors of the corporations they had organized, they were essentially always going to get their major demands met. This forced a big shift in their culture, causing them to have to take responsibility not just for cutting a good deal for their members, but for ensuring the profitability of the companies. Labor could easily “win too much” and drive the companies out of business, thereby returning its members to unemployment. Once labor controlled the businesses, it had to come up with a proactive agenda for how to run them successfully.

Closer to home, we’ve seen the teachers union accept cuts and changes to their equivalent of work rules in order to prevent teacher layoffs. And we’ve seen the Service Employees International Union at the national level put immense resources into passing health care reform — something that will benefit all Americans, not just SEIU members.

Something similar needs to happen now at Muni.

Muni workers deserve a good wage. It’s a hard job under the best of circumstances. And as Muni tries to keep service on the streets without enough money for equipment and maintenance, workers on the front lines will bear the brunt of the bigger problems. But a lot of people resent the things the union has chosen to ask for in addition to a good wage.

Muni’s troubles are multifaceted. They involve bad management, bad street design, bad land use planning, and certainly insufficient funding. But work rules are undeniably part of the issue as well. It cannot be progressive for the TWU, in the middle of the worst financial crisis to hit our country since the Great Depression, to cling to the same work rules it has had in the past. Muni needs TWU to help it be successful.

Gabriel Metcalf is executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).

Newsom’s war on the public sector

David Talbot
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2
Newsom’s war on the public sector

 

By Calvin Welch

OPINION With the Feb. 10 release of the Controller’s Office economic analysis of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed tax cuts to businesses, combined with its December 2009 analysis of the Newsom administration’s proposed fee cuts to market-rate condo developers, we now have a clear and objective measurement of this administration’s response to the biggest economic collapse in San Francisco since the Great Depression: the mayor hopes to create 4,400 jobs (of the 39,000 jobs lost in San Francisco since the start of the downturn) and 40 to 50 new market-rate condos over the next two years at the cost of $72 million in lost tax revenues.

The plan includes no affordable housing — zero, zip, nada — below-market rate housing for moderate-income San Franciscans. Instead, the developer fees that fund parks, transit, and other critical neighborhood infrastructure projects promised for the Market Street, Octavia Street, and eastern neighborhoods plan areas will be postponed indefinitely.

Those impacts don’t include the loss of public sector jobs and services. The report rather coyly notes that “the potential impacts of the city revenue decline on public services, and indirectly on the economy, is not considered because the city could adjust to that impact in many ways.” The analysis warns: “However, if the stimulus does not directly incentivize job creation, it may not overcome the loss of public sector employment that the subsidy’s revenue would pay for.”

That last point that needs some attention.

Newsom’s “stimulus” is targeted solely at the private sector, with no requirement that the companies slated to get tax breaks and fee reductions actually perform — either through job growth or housing development. It cuts public sector employment and public sector-led infrastructure development — affordable housing, transit lines, parks and playgrounds — when it’s clear that both public employment and infrastructure development would be a direct stimulus to the local economy.

Quick, name the biggest employer in San Francisco. How about the second biggest — or fourth, sixth, or seventh? Well, they’re all in the public sector: the City and County of San Francisco, the University of California, San Francisco, the State of California, the San Francisco Unified School District, and the U.S. Postal Service top the list. As of 2008, some 85,000 jobs in San Francisco — 15 percent of all jobs in the city — were in the public sector. More than half were in education, and the bulk of the rest were in health and human services.

The Newsom administration’s war, and it is a war, on the public sector is economic suicide. We should look at stimulus as saving as many public sector jobs — especially in education and health and human services — as we can and finance as much local infrastructure development as we can afford. That’s real economic stimulus. What Newsom is proposing is the same old, inside-the-box, tried and failed trickle-down that got us in this ditch in the first place.

Calvin Welch has spent the last four decades working for sane economic development policies in San Francisco.

Progressives should care about pension reform

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Progressives should care about pension reform

OPINION In today’s failing economy, with double-digit unemployment and huge government deficits, progressives have a strong interest in ensuring that San Francisco’s pension system remains viable.

After years of working and contributing a percentage of their income to a pension fund, city employees receive a guaranteed annual pension based on an employee’s years of service and his or her pay level at retirement. In the private sector, most employees participate in a 401(k)-type of retirement plan, in which the pension is based on the amount contributed to the fund.

Under the city charter, the city is only required to pay into the pension fund when its liabilities exceed its income. When the fund loses money, as it has in recent years, the city is required to make up the difference.

In 2005, investments losses brought the fund below the break-even mark, requiring the city to pay $175 million in retiree pension and health premiums. Today, that number has grown to $525 million — an increase of 200 percent. Two years from now, in 2013, the amount will grow to $675 million, eclipsing what it costs to run San Francisco General Hospital for one year.

While headlines reporting pensioners who receive $100,000 or more raise the public’s ire, most retired city workers receive modest pensions. Still, there are abuses to the pension system that must be eliminated. A recent civil grand jury report found that some police and firefighters engage in pension “spiking” by promoting employees in their last year of service to increase the amount of their pensions. That practice has cost the city $132 million.

The question of how to address the city’s growing pension liability is now before the Board of Supervisors. A proposed charter amendment would change the contribution levels for police and fire employees hired after July 2010 from 7.5 percent to 9 percent and base pensions on the last three years of the employee’s salary to reduce pension spiking.

Some argue that the measure unfairly targets labor and city workers by eliminating pension formulas that have been used for decades. But with the city’s $522 million budget deficit, if San Francisco’s pension problem isn’t fixed, escalating pension costs will ultimately force city officials to confront this choice: make huge service cuts and layoffs or be unable to meet the city’s retirement obligations to its retired workers. That’s why we have to act now.

Other pension funds have faced this reality. One San Francisco union leader whose fund is paid by its workers told me that his union voted to reduce future pension benefits while increasing the amount of employees’ contributions. “It was a bitter pill, but we knew we had to do it,” he said.

The proposed charter amendment doesn’t go this far and only has a minimal impact on the city’s present pension liabilities since it only changes contribution levels for future employees. However, if the amendment reaches the June ballot, these modest reforms should not become a wedge issue.

Having a sustainable pension fund that protects the futures of workers without bankrupting the city is a progressive value. Progressives should also support ending pension abuses that only benefit a small number of workers at the expense of taxpayers and other workers who contribute to the fund. Pension reform is one step, among others, that must be taken to restore San Francisco’s fiscal stability.

Jeff Adachi is San Francisco’s public defender.

The problem with open primaries

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The problem with open primaries

OPINION California voters will see a ballot measure in June 2010 seeking approval for a "Top-two Open Primary" system. The measure would make it far more difficult for Californians to vote for any candidates other than incumbents and their best-funded challengers. It would also make it even easier for incumbents to get reelected.

Under the measure, all candidates for Congress and state office would run on a single primary ballot in June. Only the top two vote-getters would appear on the November ballot.

This system has been used in two other states, Louisiana and Washington. Louisiana used it for Congressional elections between 1978 and 2006. In all those years, only one incumbent was ever defeated for reelection (except that in 1992, two incumbents lost because they had to run against other incumbents, due to redistricting). Even Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) was reelected under the top-two system in 2006, although the FBI had raided his Congressional office in May 2006 after $75,000 in bribe money had been found in his freezer.

But when Louisiana switched its Congressional elections to a system in which every qualified party had its own nominee, Jefferson was defeated by Joseph Cao, a Republican. That only happened because a vigorous Green Party nominee, Malik Rahim, polled 3 percent, "spoiling" Jefferson’s chances. Democrats will probably reclaim the seat in 2010 with a better nominee.

During the years Louisiana used top-two, no minor party ever placed first or second in the first round, except once in 2006, and then only because the minor party candidate was the incumbent’s only opposition. Thus, in all the more than 30 years Louisiana used the system, minor party candidates were nearly always missing from the final round.

Washington used top-two once, in 2008. Out of eight U.S. House seats, 8 statewide state races, and 123 legislative races, only one incumbent was defeated in the primary.

The only real change in Washington in 2008 was the elimination of minor party and independent candidates from the November election. For the first time since Washington has been a state, no minor party or independent candidate was on the November ballot for Congress or a statewide state race.

When minor party or independent candidates are kept off the November ballot, they can’t campaign in the summer and fall campaign season. The California proposal even eliminates write-ins in November.

And if the measure wasn’t harmful enough to minor parties, it also changes the rules for how a party retains its state recognition; parties would need approximately 100,000 registered members to survive. Currently the Peace and Freedom Party only has 58,000, so it would lose its place on the ballot. That’s ironic, since in 2008 Peace and Freedom had its best showing for president ever in California — 108,831 votes for Ralph Nader.

The real impetus behind the top-two open primary measure comes from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been pushing this idea since 2004.

Schwarzenegger has shown repeatedly that he doesn’t care about political minorities and voting rights. Twice he vetoed bills that would have made it easier for voters to have their write-in votes count. Twice he vetoed the bill for a compact among the states that would have guaranteed (if enough states passed the idea) that the person who got the most popular votes would win the presidency. He even vetoed a bill to delete some obsolete laws, declared unconstitutional in 1967 by the State Supreme Court, that barred members of the Communist Party from working in public school districts.

Now he wants an undemocratic primary system. The voters should reject it.

Richard Winger is the editor of Ballot Access News.

State of the art displacement

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State of the art displacement

OPINION What does the loss of 11 residences and a few jobs matter if it means a state-of-the-art hospital will be built?

That’s the question Examiner columnist Ken Garcia asked Oct. 20. The line cut like sharp knives into my eyes and heart as I read about Sutter Health/California Pacific Medical Center’s proposal to put a billion-dollar hospital subsequently displacing elder and disabled tenants and low-income workers at Geary and Van Ness streets, on the edge of one of the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco.

As I read and reread the hypothetical question, I knew it could only have been written by someone who hadn’t witnessed countless low-income elders die or become seriously ill after they were evicted or displaced or hundreds of poor migrant workers and their families struggle and go hungry because they couldn’t find a steady job with a living wage.

How do you quantify the importance of even one decent job for a poor person struggling to survive? Or one business owned by a small business owner who treats his or her employees with respect and love? Or the loss of one long-term residence of a disabled and elder tenant?

How do you rationalize the pain of relocation and job eradication in lieu of the building of a huge structure supposedly there to “heal people?”

And then there is the question of the building of a “state of the art” hospital – read: rich people’s hospital – in a community where the majority of people are poor. And the issue of how the corporation funding the building made another, perhaps more devastating, decision to leach resources and support from St. Luke’s, a truly community-based hospital.

“I won’t be able to sit in Mama Dee’s chair anymore.” My six-year-old son looked down as he spoke. We were sitting in the Van Ness Bakery & Cafe at the corner of Van Ness and Geary, one of the many small businesses facing displacement.

When my son and I heard about the pending proposal to demolish and build, not only did we know that the spirit of my Mama Dee, cofounder of POOR Magazine who passed on her spirit journey in March 2006, was very angry with the demolition of her favorite spot. But more important, as someone who struggled with poverty, racism, and gentrification her entire life, I knew my mama was also mad, as I was, at the lie of California Pacific Medical Center, for proposing to build a hospital that isn’t really needed, in a community it isn’t really geared toward, and in the process dismantling the jobs, homes, and livelihoods of tenants, poor workers, and small business owners.

“This is a bad economy, and I really have no other job options. I don’t know what we workers will do” said Ruthie Seng and Oy, two of the workers at the family-owned and humanely-operated Van Ness Bakery.

As we consider granting the plans for this $1.7 billion dollar hospital proposal, perhaps we should reassess what hospitals are there to do and whom, they are doing it for.

Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia is a poverty scholar and daughter of Dee, coeditor of POOR Magazine and the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.

Am I illegal mama?

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Am I illegal mama?

OPINION "Am I illegal mama?" My mixed-race, Mexican, Chinese, Puerto Rican, and Irish six-year-old son gazed up at me with the largest of puppy eyes after we watched a corporate media television report on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s rejection of the legislation by David Campos that would give due process to migrant youth caught up in the criminal in-justice system.

After recovering from my sorrow at my son’s logical interpretation of our criminalizing, dehumanizing society, I went on to explain that as far as I was concerned no human is illegal — or an alien, for that matter. I told him that the whole concept of "illegal people" is rooted in our society’s attempt to create more products for the ever-hungry prison-industrial-complex by criminalizing poor youth of color, migrant workers, and houseless adults and elders in poverty for the sole act of being poor, seeking work not having housing, and so on. (Yes, I do talk to my son with truth and candor about such things because that is how my African-Boricua-Taina mama raised me.)

His discovery, albeit terrible, did not shock me. Rather, it was the final nudge I needed to release a public statement from all the multiracial, multicultural, multilingual mamas, grandmothers, aunties, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers I write with, make art with, co-mama with, co-teach with, and am in relationships with at POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE. We are people who believe that not only is no human being illegal, but that all these borders are false constructs of imperialism. We believe in the rights of children, if you believe that all children, and all people, deserve basic due process rights — which is all the sanctuary legislation by Sup. David Campos grants.

So Mayor Newsom, why reject this modest legislation? Have you become so blinded by your desire to be tough on crime that you don’t even recognize the voices and desires of your voting public in San Francisco, who overwhelmingly organized and spoke in favor of this?

But you can’t blame Newsom alone. Corporate media and corporate government fuels this notion of illegality in relation to human beings and has so ingrained the terms "illegal" and "alien" as ways of describing human beings that many people use these words without direct malice or intent to harm. So, like most insidious racially unjust policies and practices in American culture, these terms and notions roll along, gaining steam and power.

In an attempt to address this ongoing disinformation campaign about migration and immigrants, POOR Magazine launched the Voces de Inmigrantes en Resistencia Project to ensure that the silenced voices of immigrants in poverty are not only heard but are redefined as journalists, poets, media producers, and scholars.

After our talk, my son looked up at me and said, "Mama, I have an idea — if all us people, kids, and adults in the world all stand together holding hands, then they won’t be able to separate us or hurt any of us." Then he stopped and very slowly and carefully added, "Or crim-in-alize us." *

Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia is the coeditor, cofounder and co-madre of POOR Magazine. She is also the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, published by City Lights.

The case against Prop. D

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The case against Prop. D

OPINION Proposition D is a classic developer’s scam. It was written by a mid-Market Street property owner who is spending more than $250,000 million to push hollow propaganda pieces preaching the wonders of his bill. When you strip away the glossy photos and misleading language, Prop. D is an attempt by private real estate owners to put up huge, flashing billboards and keep virtually all the money for themselves.

There is all kinds of misleading information in this thing. Individual signs are limited to 500 square feet — but the legal text encourages property owners to cluster as many signs as they want to display a single, massive, synchronized, electricity-sucking advertisement. What really pisses us off about the campaign for Prop. D is how the backers market it as "for the kids." (Because what kind of monster would vote against helping the kids, right?)

But that’s all a bunch of non-binding fakery. The 20 percent to 40 percent of advertising revenue that doesn’t go straight into the property owners’ pockets would go to the Central Market Community Benefits District — a self-selecting, self-reguutf8g group made up of the very landlords who own the buildings on Market Street. Then the CBD would get to decide how to spend the money with no public input or regulation. There’s no definition of what the "youth programs" would be. The backers also plan on spending money on a new ticket booth and on their own staff and expenses.

Back in 2002, 77 percent of San Franciscans voted to ban new advertising signs anywhere in the city. The Planning Department has issued a brutal analysis of Prop. D, calling it an unprecedented power grab that would strip regulatory oversight of the billboards from the (public) Planning Department and hand it over to the private CBD.

The mid-Market area needs help, for sure. But Prop. D is not the way to do it. If you really want to clean up Market Street, it’s gonna require some actual elbow grease in the neighborhood, some community input, a comprehensive revitalization plan, and real solutions for homelessness. Prop. D has zilch. If developers are serious about helping the underserved youth of the Tenderloin, why is there no binding language requiring a mandatory minimum of money for community benefits? Since when have digital billboards ever improved the quality of life of anyone — let alone cured poverty or homelessness?

We’re pretty bummed at the miserable press coverage of this totally sneaky proposition. We’re joining with a diverse group of community leaders and organizations, including state Sen. Mark Leno, Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, Sups. John Avalos and Ross Mirkarimi, School Board Vice President Jane Kim, Community College Trustee Steve Ngo, SoMa Community Action Network, the Coalition on Homelessness, the Alliance for a Better District 6, Senior Action Network, League of Conservation Voters, Livable City, and others in saying a big "hell no" to Prop. D. If Prop. D somehow does pass, we plan on working to put something on the 2010 ballot that would put real community input and oversight into this clusterfuck.

Jeremy Pollock and Ali Uscilka are on the steering committee of the SF League of Pissed Off Voters, which empowers young people to become politically engaged and educated on the issues. Since 2003 we’ve been organizing broad-based coalitions to create permanent, progressive, grassroots change. Read our entire voter guide at www.theballot.org.

The plight of the insured

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The plight of the insured

OPINION How many horror stories will it take before Congress decides to act on the most ignored problem in the present healthcare debate, denials for people with insurance?

In September, San Francisco’s KPIX-TV reported the story of Rosalinda Miran-Ramirez of Daly City, who woke up one April morning with her left breast bleeding and her shirt soaked in blood.

She was rushed by her husband to the emergency room at nearby Seton Medical Center, where doctors found a tumor. Fortunately the biopsy was benign. Less benign was Miran-Ramirez’ insurer, Blue Shield which initially approved her emergency room claim, then denied it, demanding she pay the full charges, $2,791 under the dubious assertion she "reasonably should have known that an emergency did not exist."

After reporter Anna Werner called Blue Shield, the company decided to pay. Big of them.

We’ve seen this act before. In 2007, Cigna denied a liver transplant, recommended by her medical team, to 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan of Northridge. After national protests organized by Nataline’s family, community, and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Cigna relented — a week too late, and tragically Nataline died.

In a recent interview with New America Media, Cigna’s then-communications director, Wendell Potter, now an insurance critic, noted that "this is not an isolated case. People need to realize that there is a corporate executive who often stands between a patient and his or her doctor. That’s the reality."

Why? It pays. Insurance companies make money by selling policies they never intend to make payments on.

In August, researchers with the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee uncovered previously hidden data on the California Department of Managed Care Web site revealing that six of California’s biggest insurers have denied on average nearly one-fourth of all claims every year since 2002. For the first six months of 2009, PacifiCare rejected 40 percent of claims, Cigna 33 percent.

Predictably, the insurers went ballistic, issuing a stream of denials about their denials. It’s all paperwork, or merely battles with doctors and hospitals, they insisted. These denials don’t mean people are being denied care.

But, they are, every day. The insurers claim the procedure is "investigational" or "experimental" or the policy did not cover that procedure, or the patient had neglected to disclose some prior health problem.

Even if many of the denials the insurers themselves reported to the state are just "paperwork," they are a reminder that 30 cents of every private insurance healthcare dollar is wasted, much of it on warehouses of bean counters looking for reasons to deny claims.

Fortunately, California Attorney General Jerry Brown is now investigating the denial scandal.

But Congress and the Obama administration remain appallingly silent. Too timid to propose the most comprehensive reform — single payer — that would actually lift the hands of the insurers off our necks. Too timid to crack down on insurance company price gouging or denials of care.

Deborah Burger, RN is co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.

A new California tax revolt

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OPINION Don’t miss the struggle underway over the future of the University of California.

Some see it as just another chapter in the unfolding story of the state’s economic decline. That’s partly true. But what’s really interesting is what it could become.

If it’s played right, the showdown over university fees and salaries could inspire a revival of sorts of the California tax revolt. Except this time, the rebels wouldn’t be tax-haters, like we saw in 1978 with Prop. 13. This time, the protests would be coming from parents and future parents of UC kids, and future employers of UC graduates. They’d be protesting, alongside UC students and employees, the ever-steeper fee hikes — essentially an education tax — that threaten to make our public universities cost as much as any private school.

This pro-tax movement would force a rewrite of state law, arguing that higher education is a public good so important that property-owners and corporations are morally and economically obliged to chip in.

You already know the back story. The state and global financial crises have pushed the UC system into intense contraction, compounding years of rising student costs. Top UC administrators receive bonuses while issuing pay cuts, layoffs, mandatory furloughs, and sharply increasing student fees (undergraduate costs are rising by $2,500, to more than $10,000 next year, with more hikes likely soon).

Many people believe the fee hikes are inevitable. Is it true? Or have we been merely well-trained by the Thatcherian promise that there’s no alternative to a shrinking public sphere? In fact, the administration’s budget claims are impossible to verify because much of the university budget is, literally, a state secret.

What’s clear is that the UC system is less and less accessible to everyday Californians, who are already languishing in a flailing public school system. Meanwhile, the state’s economy depends heavily on UC graduates, who are both innovators and laborers in every economic sphere.

We know how we got here. Prop. 13’s budget-starving effects have intersected effectively with the prevailing inclination to privatize just about everything. The global financial crisis — and California’s particularly harsh variation of it — created the opening for long-imagined cuts across the board.

But the latest budget moves have jolted faculty and students awake. Bit by bit undergraduates, who are typically fairly mono-focused on their grades and individual futures, are paying attention. Graduate students from departments as diverse as English and chemistry are convincing colleagues to drop their dissertations (momentarily) to organize demonstrations.

If you know anything about academic life these days, in an age of constant budget cuts, economic restructuring, and individualistic competition, then you know how unusual this is. Widespread political mobilization on campus is rare. But on Thursday, Sept. 24, faculty are staging a systemwide walkout from classes. That same day, rallies, marches, direct action, and union pickets are planned in what could be the beginning of a season of protest on all ten campuses.

Let’s be real. In isolation these protests will simply be a marker on the steep downhill slide of our educational system.

But with broad and consistent community support, the campus insurrection could merge with tax-reform efforts already underway to form a California pro-tax revolt, a movement for property tax and budget reform to reverse Prop. 13’s ill effects. Pro-taxers could harness campus activism, arguing — perhaps even for the sake of the economy — to save public education in California. *

Rachel Brahinsky is a PhD candidate in the geography department at UC Berkeley. For more information, visit www.gradstudentstoppage.com/news-and-events.

Where would we be without rent control?

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news@sfbg.com

OPINION This year marks the 30th anniversary of rent control in San Francisco. On June 13, 1979, the Board of Supervisors passed a law that was seen by tenant activists as a fairly weak version of rent control. The supervisors were acting under pressure from landlords, who were lobbying them to hurry up and pass a law before the November election, when landlords feared San Francisco voters would enact a stricter version.

So the supervisors went with a middle-of-the-road measure, but its passage was still a milestone. Today, San Franciscans in rent-controlled apartments shudder to think where they would be without this basic protection. Many would be priced out of the rental market — and out of the city altogether.

The original legislation has been amended many times to limit annual rent increases, to expand who is covered by rent control, and to give increased protections from eviction to seniors, disabled people, the catastrophically ill, and long-term tenants. To curb the use of Ellis Act evictions by real estate speculators, buildings where seniors or disabled tenants have been evicted are now barred from condo conversion. In the past few years, we have worked to raise mandatory relocation payments for tenants, and added increased protections against landlord harassment.

Tenants are still being pressured to leave their apartments with supposed voluntary buyouts, a type of roulette in which speculators wave cash and tenants need nerves of steel to resist the threat of little money and no apartment — or more money and no apartment. But tenants keep organizing and holding on.

The San Francisco Tenants Union, Housing Rights Committee, St. Peter’s Housing Committee, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and the Eviction Defense Collaborative all work with limited staff and many dedicated, inspiring volunteers to inform tenants of their rights and represent them when they need legal assistance. Tenants Together, founded last year, is now organizing tenants statewide and making progress all over California.

Sup. Eric Mar is sponsoring legislation that would give eviction protection to families with children — currently an endangered species in San Francisco. Study after study has shown the negative effect of evictions on families with children. More than half of all families with children in San Francisco live in rent-controlled apartments. A recent nationwide report named San Francisco as the major metropolitan area with the lowest number of children. In addition to tenants groups, a broad coalition of education and health groups have given their support to the Mar legislation. If you haven’t already done so, write or fax your supervisor in support of the legislation.

Meanwhile, come celebrate the 30th anniversary of rent control by stopping by one of our tenants rights counseling booths Saturday, Sept. 19 between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. (see www.sftu.org for locations). Get info on our reduced price anniversary memberships and commemorative t-shirts. Then join us back at 558 Capp St., the Tenants Union office, for a barbecue, raffle, and Tenants Hall of Fame festivities where we can all celebrate 30 years of fighting for safe, fairly priced housing.

Susan Prentice is a San Francisco Tenants Union counselor/activist.

Too vital to fail

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OPINION The "too big to fail" rationale is a mystery to citizens forced to fund these billion-dollar ventures.

Suppose an entity is not too big but "too vital to fail"? Which power broker bestows standing to even ask for a bailout? I started thinking about "too vital to fail" when two seemingly unrelated incidents intersected in my consciousness, one a tragedy, the other simply heart-breaking.

The first incident happened in Oakland, eight blocks from where I teach journalism. A local editor was gunned down in a brazen daytime assassination. Chauncey Bailey was supposedly about to publish a story in the Oakland Post on the financial misdeeds of the local Your Black Muslim Bakery. Bay Area journalists (including the Guardian) formed the Chauncey Bailey Project, a group effort to dig up facts of the killing and keep the story prominent. Two years after Bailey’s slaying — with the shooter agreeing to testify against the man who ordered him to pull the trigger — the case is close to a trial date.

The second incident involved Daily Bread, a nonprofit for which I transported food each Tuesday from a Berkeley market to an AIDS center on Shattuck Avenue. In summer of 2008, the AIDS center closed, and reopened in new quarters on San Pablo Avenue in downtown Oakland.

The first day I delivered food I realized it was the old Black Muslim Bakery building, bought and renovated at huge expense by a local AIDS activist-philanthropist. Employees took pride in their new surroundings. Then came Tuesday, May 5. With my bags of food on the sidewalk, I tried the door and found the place locked up. "We’re closed," announced Peggy, executive director of Vital Life Services. "Today?" I asked. "For good," she replied. "Our funding is no longer there."

This was a staggering loss to the community, the clients, and the employees. We agreed to continue the battle for funds. I suggested renaming the building the Chauncey Bailey Center, to which Peggy readily agreed. It would be Bailey’s perfect legacy (not to mention the irony).

A week later the Oakland Tribune ran the center’s obit. I was amazed at just how vital this place was. "The nonprofit … provided critical support, case management, mental health counseling, hot meals, and much more in one location to low-income and homeless clients with HIV and AIDS," the article said. In fact, the center was saving Alameda County millions of dollars since it prevented AIDS- and HIV-infected people from going to a hospital emergency room, which cost the county $10,000 a day.

My first crack at fundraising led me to a celebratory video made when the center opened last September. Local politicians were on hand, smiling radiantly and welcoming this wonderful addition to the Golden Gate neighborhood. When the funding dried up, none of our "public servants" was to be seen. One more irony was noted in the Tribune article: the Congressional representative of the district, Barbara Lee, "has made the fight against AIDS one of her biggest issues."

I continue my battle for funding in these financially perilous times. Do I qualify as merely a citizen to get a hearing in Washington for a bailout? Will someone (or foundation) step forward and launch the Chauncey Bailey Center, a place "too vital to fail"?

(The center video and more can be seen at www.vitalcalifornia.org.)

Burt Dragin teaches journalism at Laney College in Oakland and is the author of Six to Five Against: A Gambler’s Odyssey. (bdragin@peralta.edu)

LSD as gateway drug

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OPINION I took my first acid trip in 1965 at Tim Leary’s LSD research center in Millbrook, N.Y. He was supposed to be my guide, but he had gone off to India. Ram Dass (then Richard Alpert) was supposed to take his place, but he was involved in preparing to open at the Village Vanguard as a psychedelic comedian-philosopher. So my guide was Michael Hollingshead, the British rascal who had originally turned Leary on.

When I told my mother about taking LSD, she was quite concerned.

"It could lead to marijuana," she warned.

Meanwhile, a whole new generation of pioneers was traveling westward, without killing a single Indian along the way. San Francisco became the focus of this pilgrimage. On Haight Street, runaway youngsters — refugees from their own families — stood outside a special tour bus — guided by a driver "trained in sociological significance."

On the day that LSD became illegal — Oct. 6, 1966 — at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon, a cross-fertilization of mass protest and tribal celebration took place, as several hundred explorers of inner space simultaneously swallowed tabs of acid while the police stood by helplessly. Internal possession wasn’t against the law.

On another occasion, folks from all over the Bay Area were ingesting LSD in preparation for the Acid Test at Longshoreman’s Hall, organized by Ken Kesey and his Band of Merry Pranksters. The ballroom was seething with celebration, thousands of bodies stoned out of their minds, unduutf8g to rock bands amid balloons and streamers and beads, with a thunder machine and strobe lights flashing, so that even the Pinkerton guards were high by contact. Kesey asked me to take the microphone and contribute a running commentary on the scene.

"All I know," I began, "is that if I were a cop and I came in here, I wouldn’t know where to begin…."

My next stop was determined by a press release from the campaign headquarters of Robert Scheer, a Democrat who was running for Congress in Oakland: "Usually informed sources reported today that an outlawed left-wing psychedelic splinter within the Scheer campaign will caucus with Paul Krassner at 2 a.m. Saturday night, at the Jabberwock. These authoritative sources reported that Krassner, who has just returned from Washington, will deliver a preview of the State of the Union Message for 1966."

Although decriminalization of marijuana was one of Scheer’s platform planks, he admitted to the audience that he wouldn’t smoke pot himself as long as it was illegal. I in turn announced that I wouldn’t stop smoking pot until it was legal. The previous year, before I emceed a teach-in at the Berkeley campus, Stew Albert of the Vietnam Day Committee had introduced me to Thai stick, and I became a dedicated toker.

"Now I know why there’s a war going on in Southeast Asia," I observed. "To protect the crops."

That simple quote was enough to land my picture on the cover of the Berkeley Barb, smoking a joint. But my mother was right. LSD did lead to marijuana. *

Paul Krassner was the founder of The Realist (an alternative press prototype), is the author of Who’s to Say What’s Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today and In Praise of Indecency: Dispatches From the Valley of Porn, and is a monthly columnist for SF Carnal Nation (sf.carnalnation.com)

How to help Iran without meddling

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OPINION Two of us, Penn and Erlich, traveled to Iran in 2005 and interviewed numerous ordinary Iranians. People were very friendly toward us as Americans but very hostile to U.S. policy against their country. We visited Friday prayers where 10,000 people chanted, "Death to America." Afterward those same people invited us home for lunch.

That contradiction continues today as Iran goes through its most significant upheaval since the 1979 revolution. Iranians are rising up against an authoritarian system, but they don’t want U.S. intervention.

Many Iranians believe that they have experienced a coup d’état, in which the military and intelligence services have hijacked the presidential election. Through vote-buying and manipulation of the count, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad guaranteed himself another four years in office.

In June more than a million Iranians marched in the streets of major cities across the country. The spontaneous demonstrations included well-to-do supporters of opposition candidates, but also large numbers of workers, farmers, small-business people, and the devoutly religious. They were fed up with 30 years of a system that used Islam as an excuse for breaking union labor strikes, stripping women of their rights, and repressing a nation.

The Iranian government responded to these peaceful protests with savagery, killing dozens of people. Some human rights groups put the number at more than 100. The government admits arresting 2,500 people nationwide and continues to hold at least 500. Most are being held without charges or have simply disappeared.

The repression hasn’t killed the movement. On July 17, more than 10,000 people came to Friday prayers in support of the opposition. Instead of chanting "Death to America," they chanted "Death to the Dictator," a reference to supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Police attacked them with clubs and tear gas.

Meanwhile in Washington, some politicians tried to use the crisis for their own ends. Sen. John McCain criticized President Obama for not taking a stronger position against the Iranian government. It’s ironic to hear McCain and other conservatives proclaim their support for the people of Iran when a few months ago they wanted to bomb them.

That doesn’t exactly build credibility among Iranians.

President Obama faces tough choices on Iran. If he speaks out loudly against Ahmadinejad, he is accused of meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. If he says too little, then right-wingers in the U.S. accuse him of being soft on Ahmadinejad.

In reality, the U.S. has very little ability to impact what has become a massive, spontaneous movement for change. And it shouldn’t. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, bringing the dictatorial shah back to power. George W. Bush’s administration attempted to overthrow the Iranian government by funding and arming ethnic minority groups opposed to Tehran.

The U.S. government has no moral or political authority to tell Iranians what they should do. Iranians are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves.

That’s why citizen diplomacy is so important. Iranian demonstrators welcome the support of ordinary Americans. Joan Baez recorded a Farsi-language version of "We Shall Overcome" that has shot around the world on YouTube. She sang it July 12 at San Francisco’s Stern Grove.

Iranian activists are holding a hunger strike in front of the United Nations in New York from July 22 to 24, demanding that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon send a special commission to Iran.

With hundreds of thousands of Iranian-Americans in California, it would be unconscionable to ignore the nonnegotiable right of peaceful dissent by millions of people in Iran. Join us in the San Francisco Civic Center plaza on July 25, from noon to 4 p.m. Stand in solidarity with Iranians and against U.S. intervention in Iran (www.norcal4iran.org). *

Sean Penn is an actor, director, and writer who visited Iran in 2005. Ross Mirkarimi is a San Francisco supervisor, the first elected Iranian-American to hold that office. Reese Erlich is a freelance journalist and author of The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis.

The massage parlor mistake

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OPINION Taking advantage of the recent turmoil over the huge city budget cuts, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Carmen Chu, have pushed though malicious legislation imposing criminal charges and restrictions on massage parlors. Many are outraged that this costly legislation was prioritized — we want to know why it was, and how much it will cost to implement. Lawyers are questioning its legality.

Under the guise of concern for women’s safety, Chu and Newsom falsely claimed that the law would stop sex trafficking. We’ve heard these lies before. Politicians who want to increase the criminalization of sex workers confuse prostitution, which is consensual sex for money, with trafficking, which is forced and coerced labor, sexual or otherwise. The reality is that most parlor employees work consensually and often collectively, without force or coercion. In Rhode Island, where indoor prostitution is legal, similar legislative maneuvers are in the works, also using the pretext of trafficking to make criminals of women working indoors.

Chu and Newsom claim they are targeting parlor owners, but by pushing the industry further underground, their legislation makes workers, many of whom are immigrant women, more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Workers will suffer most from the increased raids, arrests, and criminalization. Fearing arrest and/or deportation will mean fewer women will report rape or other violence and exploitation when they occur.

What is the real political agenda here? Chu and Newsom have said that the proposals "could make it easier to close the 50 or so city-licensed parlors suspected of selling sex." If and where sex is being sold, parlor closures would force women onto the streets — where it is 10 times more dangerous to work. Those who are arrested are likely to end up in prison — to the devastation of their children — or deported. What good reason is there to endanger women’s safety and break up families this way, especially during hard economic times?

San Franciscans question why, when most trafficking cases occur in the agricultural, construction, clothing, and domestic industries, anti-trafficking measures target immigrant sex workers working of their own free will. We suspect racist gentrification policies are behind this legislation. Developers will be allowed to seize land in the Tenderloin and downtown areas if massage parlors are forced to close. This deceitful, profiteering law imposes huge fines, criminal charges, and has a punitive clause making the parlors pay for unspecified enforcement charges against them.

Considering that not long ago, police were exposed for taking thousands of dollars from massage parlor workers, involving them in the licensing process creates fertile ground for increased corruption.

What is wrong with selling or buying sex if both parties consent? After all, 42 percent of San Franciscans voted last November for Proposition K, which would have decriminalized sex work, despite a campaign of fear mongering and misinformation by the mayor and district attorney. New Zealand successfully decriminalized prostitution six years ago to "promote occupational health and safety" and "protect from exploitation." There has been no increase in prostitution, pimps, or traffickers, and women are more able to report violence and insist on their rights. It’s time for San Francisco to do the right thing and stop criminalizing sex workers.

Rachel West works with the U.S. PROStitutes Collective.

Lennar’s shipyard: more toxic than you think

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news@sfbg.com

OPINION "So, what do you want us to do?"

That was the question from a staff member at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) after he passed along reports of Lennar Corp.’s latest repeated releases of toxic dust containing asbestos, arsenic, lead, and other metals into the air in Bayview-Hunters Point, one of the last remaining African American communities left in San Francisco.

After grudgingly levying more than $500,000 in fines against Lennar in 2008 for earlier brazen violations (after fierce community pressure), why is BAAQMD’s enforcement of clean-air standards against a notorious corporation on a dangerously toxic site still a negotiation?

After years of broken promises and half-hearted mitigation, the toxic partnership between the city and Lennar to develop the shipyard continues to threaten public resources and poison our communities in more ways than one.

In the last few months, with the help of the Mayor’s Office, Lennar is backing away from the promises it made in Proposition G. Instead of making 32 percent of its housing at the shipyard "affordable" to city residents (never mind that this definition of "affordable" is still well out of the reach of the great majority of Bayview residents), Lennar is now placing responsibility back on the city to build the affordable housing. As the Mayor’s Office prepares to use public money to subsidize Lennar’s broken promises, this revised arrangement blows a huge hole in the budget of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and threatens to destroy 30 years of efforts to create and preserve affordable housing elsewhere in the city.

As reported by Sarah Phelan last week ("Eliminating dissent," 6/17/09), state Sen. Mark Leno has legislation that seeks to trade 25 percent of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area for small strips on the shipyard so Lennar can build condos on the parkland (see "Selling the park" in this issue).

With the consent of City Hall, the Navy and Lennar continue to make deals in a backroom, with no public participation. The plan for development of the shipyard is getting even more toxic than you think, and its dangers threaten everyone in San Francisco.

That’s why a large coalition of grassroots organizations is joining forces for a community protest at the front gate of the Hunters Point Shipyard at 1 p.m. Tuesday, June 30. If the government won’t protect our communities from contamination and corporate greed, then we will do it ourselves.

For details, call Greenaction at (415) 248-5010 x107. *

Kelly is president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association. Schwartz is co-director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER). Harrison is a community organizer at Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. Brooks is the campaign coordinator for Our City.

A bailout for the middle class

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OPINION I don’t need to remind you that our economy is in trouble. The current banking crisis has demonstrated to all of us just how fragile and susceptible to manipulation our current system is. President Obama has spent billions of dollars and untold hours trying to bail out our failing banks and financial institutions. Whatever your opinions about his efforts, I think we can all agree we should also be helping out American workers — the real engine of the economy. The Employee Free Choice Act, currently being debated in Congress, offers needed help.

In 1979, 23 percent of the American workforce earned the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $20 an hour. This level of pay, about $41,000 per year, is generally considered the minimum necessary for a family of four to live something like a middle-class lifestyle. I wish I could say that progress marched on, that every year after 1979 the percentage of workers earning the minimum to support a middle-class family grew. In fact, the opposite happened — today only 18 percent of American workers earn enough to support a family of four.

What happened to the other end of the spectrum during that time? In 1978, American CEOs earned 35 times what the average worker earned. Over the next 10 years, this ratio grew, so that in 1989 the average CEO was earning 71 times what the average worker was earning. By 2007, the ratio had grown to an unbelievable 275.

The causes of this imbalance are many, but one is declining labor union membership. In 1983, 17.7 million workers were members of unions, accounting for 20.1 percent of America’s workers. In 2008, only 16.1 million workers were unionized, accounting for 12.4 percent of our nation’s workforce. These numbers are critically important because union membership makes a large difference in the well-being of America’s workers. In 2008, the average union worker earned $886 a week, while the average nonunion worker was paid only $691.

With all the effort we’re putting in to a bailout of the banks, we need to be discussing a bailout of the middle class. We don’t have to wait for the Treasury Department to come up with the plan — it’s sitting there in Congress and is called the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill would give workers a fair, direct route to forming a union without illegal interference from corporations.

Unfortunately, the middle-class bailout is stuck in Congress. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the other shills for mega-corporations have turned up the pressure and succeeded in preventing the Employee Free Choice Act from moving forward in the Senate. Our own Sen. Feinstein recently said she wouldn’t vote for the bill because of the economic downturn, even though she cosponsored the legislation last year.

With the current state of our economy, we need a middle-class bailout — and we need it soon. Feinstein has the ability to make that happen. She should deliver the one bailout we all really need. *

Debra Walker is a San Francisco artist and progressive activist.

FOR THE RECORD


The caption for last week’s dine review should have referred to Fly, not Terzo.

The deadbeat church

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news@sfbg.com

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco is trying to duck paying as much as $15 million in city taxes, according to documents filed by the city assessor’s office.

Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting argues that the archdiocese, which governs a collection of churches, schools, parking lots, commercial buildings, and other real property in the city, shifted 232 parcels of land from two church-held corporations to another church corporation in April 2008, triggering real estate transfer taxes.

The legal issues are complicated, and church lawyer Philip Jelsma wouldn’t return our calls, but the city officials say the deal amounts to this: The archdiocese is moving valuable property out of the hands of a corporation that might be liable for legal claims and into a separate entity that would be exempt from those claims.

And the church is taking two contradictory positions on the reorganizing. According to documents from the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, when the archdiocese is discussing the protection of its assets from litigants, it claims that the legal entities in question are separate and distinct under civil law. However, when the city comes calling for much needed transfer tax dollars, church officials argue that the entities are merely interdenominational under the common banner of the Roman Catholic Church and that the transfers are considered "gifts" under canon law.

The issue comes before the Transfer Tax Board of Review on June 16. If the board, made up of the controller, the tax collector and the head of the Department of Real Estate, upholds Ting’s position, the city will be able to collect between $3 million and $15 million, depending on the assessed value of the transferred parcels.

Major corporations in San Francisco have a long history of using bogus property transfers and shifts in corporate ownership to avoid paying property and transfer taxes. But this case is a bit more curious: why is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, self-proclaimed champion of the poor, fighting tooth and nail to keep the city from collecting tax dollars that would help fund public welfare programs? *

A hard look at the prison budget

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OPINION Last week’s grim budget news from Sacramento reminded me of Edward Lorenz’s often-quoted maxim, according to which the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas. California’s budget, which we have consistently ignored and abused since the passage of Proposition 13, turns out not to have been limitless. And many residents, for whom our prison system had been invisible, may have found out for the first time that our correctional apparatus constitutes more than 7 percent of the state’s annual budget. Perhaps we are finally ready to become aware of the impact of our prisons on our wallets — and our lives.

Californian prisons are at nearly 200 percent capacity; 170,000 people are kept behind bars, and many more are under parole or probation supervision. The prison medical system has been declared unconstitutional by the federal courts and handed to a receiver. Among the many reasons for this catastrophe are our irrational sentencing scheme, a collage of punitive voter initiatives approved since the 1980s, and our deficient parole system, which leads 70 percent of those released back into prison for largely technical parole violations. Not only is this system inhumane and counterproductive, it’s also expensive: it costs about $40,000 dollars a year to keep a prisoner behind bars, and much more to treat aging, infirm prisoners who are in the system due to legislative constructs such as the three strikes law.

The silver lining of the budget crisis is the opportunity to rethink our social priorities and reassess how we may transform them to make the system less expensive and cumbersome. The indications of this transformation are everywhere: the resuscitated debate on marijuana legalization (and taxation); prioritizing violence and public harm over other offenses; a reinvigorated public discussion regarding the usefulness, and costs, of the death penalty; avoidance of expensive prison expansions; the national crime commission initiative, propelled by the failure of the War on Drugs; and the California Sentencing Commission Bill, which will soon come before the Assembly for a third reading.

Californians may not be as punitive as voter initiatives suggest. When informed of the existence of prison alternatives and of their costs, the public tends to choose less punitive options. Our current mentality of scarcity presents, therefore, a remarkable chance to decrease the size of our inmate population. This would lead not only to immense savings, but also to the release of many people who don’t belong behind bars. How we use this opportunity, however, depends on our ability to imagine, and implement, a new set of priorities.

We must understand that short-term, emergency measures of mass releases will be ineffective unless we use this opportunity as a catalyst to rethink our beliefs on corrections. Without a strong set of rehabilitative and reentry programs, many of those released under the new policy will return to the prison system. If we want to avoid more expenses, and a revolving prison door, we must reform and rationalize our sentencing regime to conform to sensible, fact-based principles, rather than political fads and panics.

Such measures are the flaps of the proverbial butterfly’s wings, and if we act not only swiftly, but deeply and wisely, we may be able to escape the tornado.

Hadar Aviram is associate professor of law at Hastings College of the Law and the author of the California Corrections Crisis blog, www.californiacorrectionscrisis.blogspot.com.

Racial justice: A to G spells victory

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OPINION On Tuesday, May 19, poor and working-class families of color packed the San Francisco School Board with a powerful message of hope, opportunity, and justice: we want the right to a secure future in our own city. To get a good job here, we know we need a high quality education that prepares us for college, career, or union trade — not poverty or prison.

After a year of research, organizing, and talking to thousands of families, collecting 3,000 postcards, and mobilizing hundreds of parents and youth, our proposal — that every San Francisco student have access to the so-called A–G classes — was approved, setting the stage for a systemic change in our public schools that could dramatically improve the lives of tens of thousands of students of color over the next few years.

A–G describes the high school coursework that state colleges require for admission. Setting A-G as part of the graduation requirement will finally give low-income black and Latino students access to high expectations and our state college system.

We will have to stay on top of the district and monitoring will be intense and long-term, but we have parent and student leaders ready for the task, because their own lives are at stake.

Our experience is that thousands of parents and students get the issues, but that so many San Franciscans, even progressive ones, just don’t. In San Francisco, 75 percent of children are black, Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander, and more than 80 percent of those families are low income. A full 90 percent of the students in public schools are students of color. This means kids’ issues in San Francisco are issues of racial and economic justice.

Our issues are often not the ones that make front page news. Education outcomes for black children — right here in San Francisco — are the worst of the state’s urban districts. But this gets lost in the inside baseball reporting about City Hall politics, the flinging about of political self-righteousness, and frankly, issues like JROTC.

We believe that organizing families for racial equity in our public school system is core to a progressive agenda in the 21st century. Consider the following.

•<\!s> Young people’s future in the 21st century San Francisco economy now requires a college education. More than 50,000 blue-collar jobs that paid a living wage without requiring a degree have disappeared from SF over the last generation.

•<\!s> Only one in three students from SF schools graduated from high school prepared for a four-year university in 2008. Without access to college and career-ready A-G classes, most graduating students weren’t even eligible for either the U.C. or California state universities or prepared for a union apprenticeship exam.

•<\!s> Most black, Latino and Pacific Islander students do not have access the A-G college, career, and union trade path in San Francisco. In fact, five out of six Latino students and 9 out of 10 African American students graduated without the A-G classes required to even be eligible for a U.C. or state university.

This new school board policy might be one of the most important steps toward racial equity in a generation. Join our work to make San Francisco public schools a vehicle of economic opportunity, racial justice and democracy. *

N’Tanya Lee is executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth.

How to fix public transit

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OPINION As San Franciscans deal with the shock of ever-worsening budget cuts, it’s time we look to fundamental structural changes in the way government does business. That’s a scary thought because, as Naomi Klein warns, free market ideologues use shocks to accomplish a very damaging type of structural change that cuts public service, increases privatization, and strengthens class division. Those of us who support collective responsibility and a strong public sector had better work together to propose our own structural change.

In transportation, to reduce driving — which accounts for 47 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in this city — we must increase public transit ridership dramatically. Yet the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is cutting its budget by 16 percent. The solution is simple, but not easy: car transportation will have to cost more, in terms of money and time. Transit, walking, and bicycling will have to be easier, faster, and safer. We can use the funds from increases in driving costs to fund improvements to other forms of transportation.

The alternative is an abandonment of the great equalizer that is public transit — and a kind of privatization that provides the automobile as an option for the middle class but at the cost of miserable transportation for the 30 percent of San Francisco households who don’t have cars.

For this to work, public transit must be not just a little bit better, it must be a great deal better. It must remain affordable for families and serve the whole city efficiently, at all hours of the day. Residents should need cars so rarely that transit costs, plus occasional car-sharing and car rentals, are cheaper alternatives than car ownership.

With a higher gas tax and tolls on freeways (measures a recent San Francisco Planning and Urban Research analysis shows to be among the most cost-effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), we can make public transit work better. SFMTA should implement its proposed rapid network on the routes that carry 80 percent of Muni’s passengers, speeding up the vehicles by at least 20 percent. That will cost car drivers some time: mixed traffic lanes will have to be converted to bus lanes. Turns will have to be restricted and parking will have to be removed.

The city also must make bicycling safe and easy. Our bikeways need to be safe for 8-year olds, who need systems that forgive mistakes and allow for slow and easy riding, and seniors, who are not physically able to ride fast and cannot afford to make emergency stops that may cause a fall. That means we need effective 18 mph traffic-calmed zones and a system of car-free bike paths, including one down Market Street.

Transportation is a regional issue that San Francisco cannot solve on its own. We must do a better job of matching our regional development patterns to our needs to promote walking, bicycling, and transit.

To make all this work, we must stop sprawl immediately and concentrate growth in cities and existing suburbs. More density in cities means more people to support transit (through fares and a higher tax base) and more people to support local shops so that walking to your grocery store is an option for more people.

Dave Snyder is transportation policy director at SPUR.

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