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Opinion

What will your role be?

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OPINION Many of us in the Bay Area worked hard to elect Barack Obama. We made phone calls, knocked on doors, made donations — $5, $10, $200. We monitored the polls, gathered and loaded data, and/or otherwise spread the word to friends, relatives, and colleagues. And of course, we all voted.

The good news is we succeeded. We can now believe again in the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things in this country. That change has come.

But have we done what we really set out to do?

Have we remade our economy so that it is based on a strong core of working Americans who get their fair share of the fruits of economic growth, and not on house-of-cards accounting subterfuge that tends to benefit only those with the most? Have we achieved equal opportunity for everyone, so that CEO’s and other super-wealthy Americans aren’t hoarding tens of millions of dollars they don’t need while the working Americans who generated that income can barely make ends meet? Do we encourage workers to organize so that there’s a more level playing field in negotiations with employers, and real dignity and respect in every workplace?

Do we have affordable health care? Do we have energy independence? Sustainability? A responsible conclusion to a pointless and wasteful war? Enduring peace and diplomacy? Compassion for one another and personal responsibility for our actions?

Needless to say, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. Not even close. Not yet.

Although he may be our symbol of a change for the better and an inspiration to bring it, Barack Obama is not the change we seek. We are the change we seek.

Which means that if we don’t continue to act and make sacrifices, enduring change will not come.

So what will your role be in bringing about real change in this country?

For what it’s worth, I’ve started making some changes and sacrifices. I left my high-paying job as a big-law attorney protecting the corporate status quo in this country and have committed myself to a different course of serving public and community interests.

I’ll be selling my condo that I love so much because my commitment to public service on the one hand, and the size of my mortgage payment on the other, are inconsistent propositions at this point.

I am doing everything in my power to make sure the Employee Free Choice Act is finally made into law, because my grandfather, who worked on the assembly line at Chevrolet in the 1940s when the Taft-Hartley Act passed over President Truman’s veto, would have wanted it, and would be proud of me for doing it.

What will you change about yourself, your routines, your "comfort zone," so that real change comes to this country for you, your children, and grandchildren? What sacrifice will you make for a cause greater than yourself? Only you can answer these questions. *

Aaron Knapp is a lawyer, writer, and organizer living in San Francisco. He is the founder of the The Post Partisan. He can be reached at aarontknapp@gmail.com.

Why we waited — too long

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OPINION The California Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in May finally allowed same-sex couples their constitutional rights to marry. This was justice for the 4,000 same-sex couples issued marriage licenses in San Francisco from Feb. 12 to March 11, 2004. We were lucky to be one of those couples — but within five months the courts had voided all 4,000 licenses. I marched with hundreds to City Hall that day and angrily waved my nullified marriage license in the air. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon provided a balm, saying with a laugh, "Oh well, guess we have to go back to living in sin."

Over the past four years, we’ve continued to wear our rings and celebrate our wedding anniversary. When the County Clerk’s office offered us a refund for our marriage license, we requested the refund go toward the city’s legal battle over same-sex marriage. It appeared that San Francisco had won that battle on May 20, 2008.

But we decided not to remarry until after the November election, when we would know if California agreed with the state Supreme Court. Attorney General Jerry Brown assured us that these wedding licenses could not be voided, but the memory of seeing couples in tears on March 12, 2004, when we had just been married the day before, was reason enough to wait.

In our hearts, we knew that Proposition 8 was likely to pass; since 1980 we have witnessed California consistently shoot itself in the foot by voting for petition-driven propositions.

In the past three months, one of us has devoted nearly 60 hours in an effort to defeat Prop. 8. The irony is that back in January, Troy was precinct captain for Obama in the California primary. He most likely talked to a good portion of voters out in the Sunset District who voted in favor of Prop. 8. And while the Mormon Church funded most of the Yes on 8 campaign, it is now clear that their message got through to many of California’s minorities, who turned out in record numbers to vote for Barack Obama. The No on 8 campaign should have targeted those communities; instead it only showed white people in its television ads. Now we are the ones with a dream deferred.

Marriage was not something we always believed in. When you’re used to outsider status, sometimes you learn to roll with the injustices perpetrated upon you. When Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city offered us a taste of it back in 2004, it didn’t take much to realize how much we were missing. The marriage itself was one of the best days of our lives, and having it voided was a very, very bitter feeling I won’t soon forget.

To those of you so motivated to vote for Prop. 8, we can simply tell you this: in a world of massive problems, of great economic and environmental woes we are only now beginning to feel acutely, can we bring it upon ourselves to actually join together with all of our brothers and sisters and confront all hatred with an idea of a greater social good? Can we imagine a world where our children aren’t judged by the gender of the ones they love, but by the content of their character?

Yes we can.

Victor Krummenacher is a musician and contributing designer for Wired magazine. Troy Gaspard is a surly activist and frugal trader.

On the Obama campaign trail

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OPINION I live and have always lived in a bubble, isolated from most of America. I grew up in Los Angeles, where I attended a high school so liberal that almost the entire student population wore black the day after Bush won his second term. Now I attend UC Berkeley, a historically ultra-liberal university in one of the most progressive cities in the United States.

That’s why I decided to join 30 of my fellow UC Berkeley students and go to North Carolina to campaign for Obama the final week before the election. Not only did I want to make a difference I felt I couldn’t make from California, I wanted to experience first-hand what the rest of the country is like.

In some ways, North Carolina was exactly the way I expected it to be: full of white steepled churches, swirling autumn-colored leaves, and drive-through fried chicken restaurants called Bojangles. In other ways, it wasn’t. I thought I’d be talking mostly to undecided voters and people leaning toward the right. Instead I worked mostly with Democrats, making sure they know where their polling locations are and how to protect themselves against voter disenfranchisement.

I talked to all kinds of North Carolinians. I visited student dorms, low-income housing complexes, and beautiful Southern-style mansions. The Obama campaign was thrilled to have so many Californian volunteers at its disposal: there’s a large Hispanic community here, and few native North Carolinians speak Spanish. My Spanish isn’t perfect, but if I hadn’t gone around to Hispanic communities asking Ya esta registrado? on Nov. 1st, the last day to register in North Carolina, many people wouldn’t have gotten the chance to vote.

While I encountered a few ultra-conservative crazies (one man told me he wasn’t voting for Obama because he was "probably" the Antichrist), most people oozed Southern hospitality. I probably gained five pounds from all of the free food thrust at us at every polling station. One generous volunteer let all 30 of us stay in his house.

My cohorts and I snuck into a Sarah Palin rally one night. Unfortunately, we had to leave before she spoke (according to our campaign manager, there were more productive things for us to do than gawk at children carrying "Pro-lifers for Palin" posters). But I felt like I was a spy in an enemy camp, surrounded by people in pink "pitbulls with lipstick" T-shirts. I was definitely far away from my little liberal bubble.

Most satisfying was the feeling I got every time I inspired someone undecided to vote. I spoke with a man one day who was somehow under the impression that Obama was nine points ahead in the North Carolina polls. When I assured him that that was far from the case, he decided to vote. I’ve never felt so powerful before.

In completely unrelated news, I am no longer a vegetarian. I decided to sample a different fried chicken restaurant every night. I highly recommend the Bojangles fried chicken biscuit sandwich (with extra honey) if you’re ever in the area.

Guardian intern Katie Baker sent this piece from the campaign bus.

Yes on K is the Christian thing to do

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OPINION Why would a Christian minister support Proposition K, the November ballot initiative that would decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco?

There are many reasons. Prop. K would allow sex workers to organize for their rights and safety. It would enable them to report abuse in the industry without fear of prosecution. It would improve their chances of maintaining their health by lessening the stigma that prevents many from seeking the health care services they need. And it would do all this while still allowing law enforcement officials to investigate and prosecute human traffickers.

I also feel a kindred spirit with prostitutes. Like me, they are a stigmatized sexual minority in our culture. They, too, suffer due to stereotypes and prejudice because of who they are. As a lesbian, I know only too well what it is like to live in a world that is dangerous for me because of hatred and discrimination.

But there is another reason I support this measure. Prop. K has my vote because I believe that we who are created in the image of the Divine are both spiritual and sexual beings, and we need ample opportunities to nurture both parts of ourselves to be whole.

In the Bay Area we are fortunate to have access to a full range of spiritual practices and traditions. Whether we worship in a synagogue, mosque, church, temple, or at the altar of the Goddess, we have a plethora of opportunities for spiritual exploration and growth. Why shouldn’t the same range of offerings be available for the sexual aspects of our lives as well?

Human sexuality is an incredibly complex and wondrous thing. Some of us are able to find sexual satisfaction in long-term relationships. But limiting everyone to such a narrow path for sexual expression is like saying we all must be Christians to find God. Because we don’t limit our spirituality to such narrow expression (well, perhaps people like Sarah Palin do), why do we insist on forcing our sexuality into such a box?

Some of us like spanking. Some of us just want to be held. Some of us want to be told what to do. Sometimes we need sex without a long-term relationship. Many of us, because of our age, physical illness, or circumstances beyond our control, have a difficult time finding sex partners. Many find our most powerful spiritual places within ourselves through fantasies we cannot bring ourselves to share with our partners. I want to live in a world where we all have opportunities to experience those transcendent places without shame, and where the sex workers who can help us access those places may do so without fear of arrest or stigmatization.

I believe we must all work together to create a world in which no one is penalized, persecuted, or harassed for their gender presentation, sexual orientation, or sexual activity with consenting adults. Prop. K is one step closer to ensuring that the human rights of all sexual minorities are protected and promoted everywhere, which is why I will be voting yes. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just the Christian thing to do.

Rev. Lea Brown is the senior minister of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco

A real plan for safety in the Mission

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OPINION When I heard the news that Jorge Hurtado was shot and killed in the Mission District, I was doubly stunned. Not only was the 18-year-old my neighbor, he was shot on the same corner where Erick Balderas was killed a year ago.

Eleven years ago, Erick was a student in the fourth grade class I taught at Paul Revere Elementary in Bernal Heights. In fact, three of my former students have been murdered in the city in the last two years. None were gang members — and none of their attackers have been caught.

Violent crime in the Mission is on a huge upswing; the homicide rate is on track to double what it was a year ago. In just a few weeks there have been six killings in the Mission. It’s a tragedy that affects everyone: kids, parents, teachers, business leaders — the entire community.

That community has begun to take matters into its own hands after receiving no commitments from the Mayor’s Office. It’s going to take two things to overcome violence in the community: community policing to better prevent and solve crimes, and engagement around social problems that promote violence.

I am glad that Capt. Stephen Tacchini of the Mission Police Station will receive more reinforcements in response to these recent shootings. But it’s not enough. Beat cops get to know the people in the neighborhood, and vice versa. But it has to be done the right way: the officers have to be trained appropriately so that police and people in the community can feel comfortable interacting with one another. Especially in a neighborhood like the Mission, cultural competency training is critical.

In Chicago, the city creates incentives for police to live in the communities they patrol. We’re exploring new housing options for teachers in the school district, and we should expand the discussion to include police officers as critical members of the community.

We don’t need to go as far as Chicago, though, to find ideas that work: in District 5, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has pushed for foot patrols (the supervisors overrode a mayoral veto last year to make it happen). He has also gathered everyone around the same table — nonprofits, police brass, community leaders, city agency heads, small business owners — and these stakeholders have collectively worked on the problems. Because of these strategies, District 5 has seen a huge reduction in violence.

We also have to make sure that the organizations working with youth are engaged with one another, not competing for resources at the expense of getting the job done. There is $12 million available citywide for violence prevention, much of it spent in the Mission. But we’re not seeing results. Duplication of services, as well as filtering out the really troubled youth who are most at-risk, have diminished the impact of our CBO’s hard work.

I’ve already proposed that a Beacon Program be opened at O’Connell High School, which is near the heart of the violence. It would give kids a safe place to drop in as late as 2 a.m., where they could be referred to counseling services, if necessary.

Candlelight vigils are one way to help a community mourn their loss and begin to heal. But we won’t stop this endless cycle with vigils alone. Prevention needs to be our unified goal. *

Mark Sanchez is the president of the San Francisco Board of Education and a resident of the Mission District.

The Chronicle manufactures a crisis

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OPINION “Illegal Alien.” “Drug-dealing illegal immigrant youth.” “Criminal youth.”

How many times have these dehumanizing words appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in the last few months? Through unbalanced and sensationalist coverage of this handful of youth, the Chronicle is manufacturing a crisis in San Francisco. Writers like right-wing Chronicle columnist Cinnamon Stillwell and others are creating a mob mentality that is driving city policy and aims to distort and gut the intent of the Sanctuary City laws, which exist to preserve public safety in face of the challenging consequences of globalization.

Globalization has shown us that our world is a web of dynamic relationships. The consequences of the economic decisions made by governing bodies around the world include both the facilitation of movement for goods and services across national borders and the increased policing when that movement involves people; access to inexpensive products due to exploitative labor practices; and the exacerbation of global poverty, a form of systemic violence.

As we locally tackle the challenges imposed on us, we need to speak out against fearmongering journalism. Demonizing youth will not bring justice to families who have experienced loss from the actions of documented (or undocumented) individuals. That pain is real and cries out for redress. Individuals are accountable for their actions. While the Juvenile Courts are not perfect, they are where minors accused of committing crimes are held accountable.

The city needs to return authority over these children to the appropriate courts, which are legally mandated to consider the circumstances of each minor on a case-by-case basis to make a ruling, which may include placement in foster care, in a group home, release to a local family, or return to a family out of the country — and if the young person is found guilty of a felony, a transfer to federal immigration officials.

The unhappy reality is that there are undocumented, unaccompanied children in our community who resort to drug sales or other unsafe, illegal activities to survive and help support their families. The way in which queer youth seek sanctuary here from homophobic families parallels the struggles for survival of undocumented youth. The LGBTQ community recognizes our shared everyday struggle with immigrants, our right to exist in healthy, loving families, and as individuals with a healthy sense of self and dignity, even when those rights come under assault through the acts of individual, societal, and governmental bigotry, discrimination, and intervention.

The LGBTQ community recognizes that true justice requires that we transform social conditions. We call on all San Franciscans to stick to the ideals that underlie the democracy we so cherish, and call on our city officials to reassert our commitment to Sanctuary City and human rights.

Implementing the municipal ID program is a positive step. Any delays in its implementation undermine the public safety goals our city is attempting to achieve. As we seek to establish order in this mess — brought about through the criminalization of people’s movements — let’s stick to our principles, with the fullest regard for equal rights and due process for all of our youth.

Robert Haaland is a labor organizer with Pride at Work. Sofia Lee Morales works with the Queer Youth Organizing Project.

 

Newsom’s problem with affordable housing

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OPINION No mayor in modern San Francisco history has opposed more affordable-housing initiatives than Gavin Newsom. It’s time to make him pay the political price.

Newsom is the primary foe of Proposition B, which would create an affordable-housing fund in the city’s budget. At a time when fewer than 1 in 10 San Franciscans can afford the cost of a median-priced home and some 40 percent of all tenants spend 50 percent or more of their income on rent, the mayor’s position is a civic tragedy.

There’s currently only about $3 million permanently budgeted to affordable housing in the city’s $6 billion budget. Proposition B would increase that to about $30 million. Half of the funds would go to the construction of homes of two bedrooms or more for families with dependents, and 40 percent would be earmarked for homes affordable to people earning $18,000 a year or less (including seniors, people with AIDS, people at risk of homelessness, and our neighbors with other special needs).

The measure is supported by the Democratic Party, the Labor Council, the Sierra Club, and more than 50 other neighborhood, community, and environmental organizations.

Newsom’s opposition to Prop. B has to be placed in the context of his opposition to every major affordable-housing initiative proposed by either the Board of Supervisors or neighborhood residents over the past five years. Newsom and his administration opposed affordable-housing mandates for the Hunters Point Shipyard, proposals to increase affordable-housing fees for market-rate developers in the Market/Octavia Plan area, and increased affordable-housing fees for developers of the high-rise luxury condos at Rincon Hill. And, in a stunning display of arrogance and indifference, he refused to allocate some $30 million appropriated for affordable housing by the Board of Supervisors last year — and then held a campaign-style rally in support of that refusal, arguing that the city already spent enough on affordable housing!

Last month, Newsom’s Planning Commission passed on to the Board of Supervisors an Eastern Neighborhood Plan under which less than a quarter of the new units would be affordable to anyone earning less than $120,000. The city’s own General Plan says San Francisco needs nearly two-thirds of all new units to be affordable if the city is to house its own workforce — a key requirement in any green, "smart growth" development policy of the type the mayor says he favors.

Newsom claims his opposition to Prop. B stems from his concern about set-asides in the budget. Yet Newsom, as mayor and supervisor, has supported every other set-aside placed on the ballot. It’s just affordable housing that he opposes — even though Prop. B, which sunsets after 15 years, would account for less than 2 percent of the budget over that period and would leave some $47 billion in discretionary funds on the table.

The fact that Newsom has paid no political price for his continuous opposition to affordable housing is stunning. It’s time to change that — pass Proposition B with a resounding yes vote this November.

Calvin Welch is a member of the campaign for San Francisco Housing Fund — Yes on B and a longtime affordable-housing advocate.

A safe sanctuary city

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OPINION Amid a sea of reporters, I sat in a community meeting in the Mission District last week as city officials struggled to address the rash of homicides that have occurred in the past two weeks. As we listened to the endless chatter, I was greatly dismayed because we were avoiding the elephant in the room — the complete lack of trust between the police department and our communities of color.

I fear that that the relationship between communities of color and the police department has deteriorated beyond repair — in part because of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s xenophobic and inflammatory headlines.

It has been two months since the Chronicle began its skewed campaign of blame, pointing the finger at SF’s Sanctuary City laws as responsible for the rise in crime in San Francisco. The paper limited its coverage to the most extreme cases, such as undocumented homeless youth forced to traffic in narcotics. The stories failed to mention that immigrants are statistically less likely to become involved in crime — and when victimized, are less likely to report the crime.

Now we have gutted our sanctuary-city status with a new policy — one requiring police and probation officers to report detained youth to immigration officials if they even suspect that the detainees are undocumented. There are already reports that the police are arbitrarily stopping and ticketing young Latino males for trivial infractions such as "rosaries obstructing car views" as part of their Violence Prevention Traffic Unit work.

This new policy mandates that we refer immigrant youth charged with felonies to deportation proceedings prior to determining their innocence. What happened to due process?

As a community organizer, I have seen firsthand the tragedy inflicted on families when city officials send students in San Francisco public schools to deportation before determining their innocence or guilt. This regressive policy avoids any input from those most qualified to give it — the district attorney and the public defender.

Here’s the irony of it all — further attacks on the Sanctuary City policy will not produce a safer San Francisco. Indeed, wives and girlfriends in our immigrant communities will be less likely to report incidents of domestic violence for fear their loved ones (or themselves!) will be summarily deported. Conscientious neighborhood residents will be less likely to report vandalism or other youth mischief for fear that children in their community will be spirited away overnight by immigration authorities. And what about homicide? Undocumented people witnessed the murder of a youth and a father in the last two months, but have refused to come forward out of fear that the police will report them to immigration authorities.

Immigrants already live in the shadows of this great nation. They are the economic backbone of California — washing our dishes, picking our produce, and generally subsidizing all of our lifestyles. Police collaboration with immigration officials will force an already exploited population further underground, and engender even greater distrust of those institutions purporting to serve and protect them. *

Barbara "Bobbi" Lopez is a community organizer with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and a candidate for Board of Education.

Why SF needs Prop. H

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OPINION San Franciscans don’t need the Clean Energy Act for political reasons. We need the Clean Energy Act — Proposition H on the November ballot — because we should have a say in how our electrical needs are met. We need it because San Franciscans should be able to demand more clean, renewable energy. We need it to have input on how our electrical rate money is spent. We need it to get a dollar’s worth of service for a dollar’s worth of rates.

The current electric power provider in San Francisco has a monopoly. That provider, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., is not responsive to San Franciscans. And San Franciscans have little influence over PG&E. Here are some examples.

• San Franciscans have wanted more undergrounding of power lines. There’s a good reason for that — overhead power lines are a potential public hazard. Besides, they are just plain ugly. PG&E says it doesn’t have the money to continue undergrounding power lines. There is evidence to the contrary — but undergrounding is just not a priority for PG&E.

• San Franciscans have made it clear that they support clean, renewable energy. Yet PG&E, according to its own records, has a power portfolio that uses 68 percent combined fossil fuel and nuclear energy. And, as the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) has moved forward to prepare to put clean and green power into new developments at Hunters Point, it has been met with resistance by PG&E.

• San Franciscans have invested billions of dollars over the years building and maintaining the Hetch Hetchy power system. The SFPUC produces power in the high Sierra and transmits that power 140 miles to the Bay Area. PG&E charges a significant markup to transmit that power the last 25 miles to San Francisco. The result is that PG&E is charging as much for the last 25 miles as the SFPUC charges for the first 140 miles. And in 2015, PG&E is prepared to raise these transmission rates even higher. We are definitely not getting a dollar’s worth of service for a dollar’s worth of rates.

Opponents of the Clean Energy Act are raising the specter of freewheeling issuance of billions of dollars of revenue bonds without any public accountability. Their claim couldn’t be further from the truth: the reality is that revenue bonds cannot be issued unless they are approved by the mayor, the supervisors, and the city controller. Also, the financial rating agencies must review any potential bond issuance and rate its viability. If the proposal isn’t viable, the bonds won’t get sold.

Besides, the SFPUC, like many other municipal utilities, already issues revenue bonds for its water and wastewater systems — and remains financially sound. It proudly provides San Franciscans with a dollar’s worth of service for a dollar’s worth of rates by providing some of the best drinking water in the country and maintaining the highest environmental standards with its wastewater systems.

San Franciscans need the Clean Energy Act because it will bring about more accountability and less waste of ratepayer dollars. We need the Clean Energy Act because it makes economic and environmental sense.

Susan Leal

Susan Leal is a former general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Sanfranciscoism

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OPINION It appears the San Francisco Chronicle‘s editors have chopped "progressive" from the paper’s approved lexicon for local political reporting, replacing the term with "ultra-liberal" and "far left" to characterize politicians whose views they don’t share. Should we care? After all, the terms of political discourse have been so twisted, warped, and debased in recent years, one might be forgiven for not telling right from left or conservative from liberal. For most Americans, it’s all one big Babel of ideological tongues — confusing to be sure, but increasingly irrelevant.

But I think words do matter. Years ago, in Left Coast City, I took a stab at defining the city’s progressivism as "a system of values, beliefs, and ideas that encourages an expanded role for local government in achieving distributive justice, limits on growth, neighborhood preservation, and ethnic-cultural diversity under conditions of public accountability and direct citizen participation." The major problem with this working definition is that it’s local in scope and closely tied to San Francisco’s unique political culture, history, and setting.

We all know the ideological spectrum is left-shifted in San Francisco, and local politicians labeled as "liberals" or even "radicals" in faraway Washington, DC are often pilloried as moderates or even conservatives back here. Indeed, a major reason driving the use of "progressive" in the city’s local political discourse was precisely to differentiate anti-establishment political leaders from pro-establishment ones who were happy to serve and support a corrupt capitalist system while promising to reform it from within.

San Francisco is the nation’s vanguard city of political reform and social change. It is a working model of progressive community that leads all others in fusing the agendas of economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection.

All great movements must begin and radiate from some place. As Robert Wuthnow put it in his Communities of Discourse, a study of the origins and spread of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism: "None of these ideologies sprang into bloom on a thousand hilltops as if scattered there by the wind. They grew under the careful cultivation of particular movements that arose in specific places and that bore specific relations to their surroundings."

San Francisco activists must find a way to free their homegrown progressive ideology from its local context and scale it up to reach and persuade other Americans. Ironically, most of that scaling up is taking place now under the rubric of "San Francisco values," a derisive epithet originally coined by right-wing pundits but now proudly brandished by some city leaders and opportunistically embraced by others to fuel their political ambitions. By whatever name ("Sanfrancisoism"?), the city’s values have noisily infiltrated national political discourse and have pulled the ideological spectrum back toward the left. Gay civil unions, for example, suddenly seemed acceptable to national politicians, even George W. Bush, after Mayor Newsom began issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

So the term "progressive," although contested, works well in San Francisco. Don’t suppress it or throw it away. Outside the city, scale up with another term that average Americans can relate to and understand.

Rich DeLeon

Rich DeLeon is professor emeritus of political science at San Francisco State University.

The real crime issue in the Excelsior

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OPINION There have been eight murders in the Excelsior in the past 120 days. And Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who represents the area and is running for judge, has been the subject of press attacks for suggesting that gang injunctions in the Mission District may have driven crime into surrounding areas.

That debate misses the point.

Communities of color like the Excelsior have historically taken a back seat when it’s time for the city to fund programs for youth, crime prevention, and economic development. Yet these are the public investments we must make if we are to craft a long-term solution to the city’s crime problem.

To be fair, the city has started to invest in the Excelsior, and the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families has been supportive. But much work still remains — after all, the Excelsior has the most children and youth of any district in San Francisco. Working with Sandoval and other community leaders, the city remodeled the Excelsior branch library, and every park has a new children’s playground, a new play field or new recreation center, or is scheduled for upgrades. DCYF has also provided significant anchor funding for violence prevention, employment training/placement, and youth leadership development programs at the Excelsior Teen Center.

But the city is still not investing enough in our communities of color. When a 14-year-old boy was murdered recently on Persia Street, we had to rely on DCYF staff and the Mission District’s Community Response Network for assistance — partly because the city has not yet funded a similar network for the Excelsior. Had there been a similar emergency in the Mission, the MCRN would not have been able to provide vital services to that victim’s family.

That doesn’t mean an Excelsior CRN is the answer. But the demand for violence prevention and response programs is growing, leading successful organizations like the Mission YMCA and the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center’s Excelsior Teen Center to have to struggle harder for an ever-shrinking amount of city funding. What is the advantage of rebuilding a library or recreation center if we reduce funding for the services and programs those facilities provide?

The Police Department’s deployment of additional officers to the Excelsior in light of the recent surge in violent crime will help, as long as this strategy is coupled with an increase in funding for supportive services. Coordination between service providers and law enforcement — something we have modeled in Bernal Heights — has been successful in simultaneously reducing crime and reducing arrests. BHNC’s Youth Programs and Safety Network Organizer look forward to working with the Excelsior Action Group, the District 11 Council, the Filipino Community Center, Coleman Advocates, PODER, Sup. Sandoval’s office, and others to plan a town hall meeting at which the community will set priorities for short- and long-term action steps for residents, community-based services organizations, and city agencies so we can all work together toward an Excelsior that is a safe place for youth and families to live and thrive.

Joseph Smooke

Joseph Smooke is executive director of the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center.

JROTC is not a choice

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OPINION To hear proponents of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) talk, it’s a matter of personal choice for 14- and 15-year-olds to sign up for the Pentagon’s military recruitment program, which is being phased out of San Francisco’s public schools June 2009. The San Francisco Board of Education also recently voted to remove physical education credit from the program this school year. It had to: the retired military officers who teach the course don’t meet the educational standards of state law, and the course doesn’t meet state physical education standards.

Supporters of JROTC are taking the issue to the November ballot. Their initiative, albeit non-binding, would put San Franciscans on record as in support of the military program.

As Democratic clubs and other political organizations begin their endorsement process, progressives need to understand the importance of defeating this initiative. It’s not a harmless measure. If it passes, the new school board can use it to reinstate JROTC. If it loses, it’s less likely the board will change its course. Thankfully, last week the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) voted overwhelmingly not to endorse the measure.

JROTC is not summer camp or a harmless after-school activity. It is one more way the military finds bodies for its illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Denisha Williams can tell you that. The African American high school senior in Philadelphia told the City Paper that she left JROTC and opted out of the military having her contact info. It hasn’t made any difference: “I have received phone calls, e-mail, three letters and a 15-minute videotape. I even received a phone call from a female recruiter asking if I was still interested in the Navy. I told her I wasn’t and hung up. A week later I received another letter and the tape.”

Capt. Daniel R. Gager, commander of the US Army recruiting station in south Philadelphia, said he and other recruiters were ordered by the US Recruiting Command to put more time and energy into recruiting high school upperclassmen such as Williams.

In San Francisco, at least 15 percent of the cadets have been placed in the program without their consent. It seems the military will do whatever it takes to get in front of our youngsters in our public schools.

Pressuring kids to join the military is wrong. International law says kids under 18 should not be recruited at all, and the ACLU agrees (see www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen). Recruiters in every high school and at every mall in this country break that law every day.

Nationally about 40 percent of JROTC kids end up in the military. In San Francisco, proponents claim only 2 percent go on to military careers. They are wrong. According to the school district, no tracking of JROTC students is done.

Please work to defeat Proposition V, the pro-JROTC initiative.

Mark Sanchez and Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Mark Sanchez is President of the San Francisco Board of Education and an eighth grade science teacher. Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical queer activist and writer whose regular columns appear at beyondchron.org.

The new Muni plan

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OPINION Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to take a look at our public utilities and see if they are still managed and operated in a way that serves the goals we have for them. So it’s a good thing that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is assessing the effectiveness of Muni, 30 years since the last serious review.

The SFMTA’s Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP) has identified the root causes of Muni’s chronic reliability problems; gathered more data about ridership, system speed, and contemporary travel patterns than we have ever had; and, finally, proposed sweeping changes to make Muni faster and more reliable.

Muni’s routes have evolved from the extensive street- and cable-car system of the turn of the century. Back then, car use was minimal and transit service was profitable, so competing operators vied for the franchise to operate on city streets. Winning companies got their preferred streets, and runners-up laid tracks on adjacent streets.

We don’t need buses on adjacent streets anymore. We need core "trunk" lines that run service every few minutes. People need to know where to walk so that they can count on a bus always being there.

That’s one of the main ideas behind the TEP’s route proposals. It would also help deal with the problem of Muni buses being stuck in car traffic. Muni averages just 8 mph system-wide, a very slow speed that equates to higher-than-ever expenses. Speeding up buses by 25 percent is the same as providing 25 percent more service at almost no additional cost. Put another way, if a run that takes 60 minutes can be cut to 45 minutes, over three hours a single bus can cover that run four times instead of just three. The beauty of concentrating service on core lines is that Muni will be able to build "transit-priority" street designs to protect buses from traffic delays — something that is realistic to do on the core rapid transit network, but not on every street that currently has a bus line.

Not coincidentally, these main routes also serve the city’s most transit-dependent populations. The TEP proposes to almost double the service on Mission Street, including expanding the 14-Limited service to all hours of the day. The 9-X from the city’s southeast side will come every four minutes instead of every 10 minutes.

These improvements are only possible because resources are being reallocated from other routes — ones used by fewer riders but, of course, equally cherished. SFMTA’s planners are doing the right thing: putting service where it’s most needed today, not decades ago. And they preserved the philosophy of providing service to within a quarter-mile of every residence.

Some of us will lose a bus line. But we need to stay focused on the bigger picture: for the vast majority of people in the city, this new route plan will provide better, faster service. The kinds of changes recommended in the TEP are truly the only way Muni is actually going to be able to grow ridership significantly.

All of us who believe in public transit should support the proposals.

Dave Snyder

Dave Snyder is the transportation policy director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).

Cleaner power, cleaner money

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OPINION Nine months ago neighborhood leaders from the Potrero Hill and the Bayview districts were invited to stand and applaud at a press conference at Mirant’s Potrero Power Plant. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle: "One of the state’s oldest and dirtiest power plants … could shut down as soon as 2009, city leaders announced…. The mayor said the signing represented ‘an important day in the history of the city.’<0x2009>"

But now that signed agreement to close Mirant — through a decade-long effort to have the city run its own power-generating "peaker plants" as a replacement — is itself on the verge of extinction. Mayor Gavin Newsom, a probable candidate for governor and choosing political expediency over cleaner air, reversed field and claimed that the cleanest way to close Mirant … is to keep part of it running. And a number of environmental activists backed him up, claiming that the city-owned peaker plants would bring more pollution to southeast San Francisco than retrofitted combustion turbines at the Mirant plant.

How can that be, when even conservative estimates admit that the newer city-owned turbines run 30 to 35 percent cleaner than the 40-year-old Mirant turbines?

The answer is money.

The argument goes like this: the city-owned peaker plants are funded by $273 million in revenue bonds and a contract with the state’s Department of Water Resources that runs until 2015. After that, the debt remaining on the bonds would require the city to run the peakers for more hours and many more years of operation than retrofitted combustion turbines at the Mirant plant. The Mirant proposal would be financed by reliability contracts from the state’s Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) that essentially pay for the turbine capacity, not actual operation. That means fewer running hours, and no potential cost to the city’s budget. Therefore, the Mirant retrofit is less polluting, and the generators can be shut down sooner.

That’s been a persuasive argument so far, and it has stopped further consideration of the city-owned peakers. But the argument misses one important fact and one critical question. The fact is that the city-owned peakers don’t cost $273 million anymore; Cal-ISO agreed in June that the fourth peaker plant (to be located at the airport) wasn’t necessary, leading to savings of more than $110 million.

There’s an even more important question: why don’t we finance the city-owned peaker plants using Cal-ISO’s reliability contracts instead of the bonds and the DWR contract? Apparently no one at the Mayor’s Office, the Public Utilities Commission, or the environmental groups supporting the Mirant retrofit has asked this question. Yet it provides the cleanest answer to the dilemma of the peaker plants — it would give us the cleanest machines, under city control and policy, so they can only run when absolutely necessary and we can shut them down as soon as possible.

At the end of the day the proposal for a Mirant retrofit isn’t really about a retrofit at all — it’s a proposal to keep the city’s energy future in the hands of others. The choice facing us — at City Hall, in the environmental community, and in the neighborhoods — is between being smart about our energy policy or handing over that policy to a corporate boardroom in Atlanta.

Tony Kelly

Tony Kelly is president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association.

Pelosi backs Bush on Iran

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OPINION Has Nancy Pelosi signed off on the George W. Bush administration’s covert CIA operations in Iran? Yes, according to Seymour Hersh’s July 14 New Yorker article, "Preparing the Battlefield." Late last year, the White House submitted a Presidential Finding, a highly classified document signed by the president, to be cleared with the leaders and ranking intelligence committee members of both parties in both branches of Congress — a group that, by dint of her position as Speaker of the House, includes Pelosi.

According to a Hersh source, "Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding … the funding for the escalation was approved" — noting that congressional leaders authorized up to $400 million for increased efforts to destabilize Iran’s government.

When some Democrats became uncomfortable with the prospect of approving "potential defensive lethal action by US operatives in Iran," they conferred with CIA Director Michael V. Hayden who, Hersh writes, "reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm."

Nothing more than to shoot their way out? If President Bush were to reveal evidence of Iranian agents dropped into this country and authorized to kill Americans, we can well imagine Pelosi speaking forcefully about the outrage she and the House delegation would feel about such an egregious breach of our sovereignty. But how in the world does the representative of perhaps the most antiwar city in the country sign off on the United States doing this to another nation?

Then there’s the question of whom we’re funding. According to a former Middle East CIA operative, one beneficiary, the Baluchis, a Sunni Muslim group in the majority Shiite country, are "fundamentalists … you can also describe … as Al Qaeda." Another, Mujahideen-e-Khalq, has been on the State Department terrorist list for more than 10 years.

That the Bush White House would resort to arming known enemies in its frantic effort to create new ones is bad. Democrats signing off on it is even worse. But the fact that a representative from San Francisco, a city that has time and again demonstrated its opposition to these sorts of policies, might approve them is about as gross a distortion of the public will as you’re likely to find.

Hersh quotes an aide to one of the four Democrats notified of the Finding predictably arguing that it was "just that — notification, and not a sign-off on activities." But he accurately points out that Congress "has the power to withhold funding for any government operation," but chose not to.

The burden of persuading Nancy Pelosi that the Democratic Party should not approve such policies may lie primarily with her House colleagues. But if she, or they, think that this is what the Speaker needs to do, then she needs to leave that job behind — because funding a covert war in Iran simply does not represent the interests or the will of California’s 8th Congressional District.

Tom Gallagher

Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts state legislator who lives in San Francisco.

Outside the HRC dinner

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OPINION On July 26, the Bay Area’s gay and lesbian elite will gather at the posh Westin St. Francis to raise money for the Human Rights Campaign in the name of securing and protecting LGB rights. Despite flip-flopping its position on a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which should include protections for gender identity as well as sexual orientation, HRC will rake in money to further advance a version of human rights in the political world of Washington, DC in which transgender and gender-non-conforming people are apparently less than human.

Luckily, there’s a fabulous alternative. Outside the Westin St. Francis we’ll be throwing the "Left Out Party: A Genderful Gay-la" in support of an inclusive ENDA that protects gender identity. Leaders in the city’s progressive community will be partying in the streets in support of our transgender brothers and sisters.

Why outside? The not-so-fabulous truth is that in promoting a noninclusive ENDA, the Human Rights Campaign abandoned the values of equality and inclusion. Transgender Americans need employment nondiscrimination protections at the federal level. Period. A recent study of the transgender community in SF found that 70 percent of transgender women in San Francisco are unemployed. This points to the need for an inclusive ENDA.

When ENDA was being discussed in Congress last autumn, important discussions surrounding political strategy were raised: should we secure legislation that protects all LGBT Americans, or should we compromise the rights of those most vulnerable among us for the gains of many?

A unified front made up of every single prominent LGBT organization nationwide, more than 350 LGBT organizations total, answered in favor of protecting all of us.

Publicly, HRC Executive Director Joe Solomonese promised to transgender activists that the organization would oppose any attempt to introduce a noninclusive ENDA. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the nation’s supposed leading LGBT political organization worked to strip gender identity protections from the bill in the name of "political expediency" and "incrementalism."

Since that decision, trans activists have organized pickets at HRC’s annual dinner in Washington and at subsequent dinners in cities across the country. Here in San Francisco, we are raising the bar.

In our city, prominent local elected officials and political organizations came out in support of an inclusive ENDA. The San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee nominated HRC for its annual "Pink Brick" award. All of the city’s LGBT elected officials, as well as many allies such as City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, are refusing to attend the dinner.

HRC’s failed strategy on ENDA has needlessly divided our community at a time when we are poised to make great gains in civil rights. If any silver lining can be found in this debacle, it’s that a huge majority of queer progressive and even mainstream organizations have come forward to remind everyone that civil rights are not something that can be compromised. That’s a San Francisco value we’re all proud of.

Which is why you’ll find us outside the Westin St. Francis this Saturday — because we want to party with all members of our community. Come join the long list of trannies, queers, gender-fabulous performers, studs, twinks, soft butches, queens, shark femmes, and all fighters for social justice — outside!

SF Pride at Work

SF Pride at Work is an LGBT labor organization.

San Francisco’s undocumented children

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OPINION The recent news stories criticizing the city’s juvenile probation department for sending undocumented children home instead of handing them over to the federal immigration authorities has ignited a firestorm of negative attacks.

However, the stories missed a key fact: the city’s practice of transporting youth home was enacted with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service 12 years ago.

San Francisco’s 1989 voter-approved sanctuary law specifically forbids city officials from providing information to federal immigration authorities to aid in deporting noncitizens. While the law does not protect adult felons, it’s silent on the issue of what the city should do with undocumented children after their juvenile cases are concluded.

In 1996 the city’s Juvenile Probation Department drafted a set of policies declaring that undocumented children were entitled to due process of the courts. The policies stipulated that juveniles who wanted to return to their families would be given an airline ticket home after completing their sentences. Children whose families could not be located would be released to halfway homes or foster care, consistent with the way other minors were treated.

In 1993 the INS was sued in the class action suit Flores vs. Reno for unlawfully housing undocumented minors in juvenile correction facilities without access to their families or legal representation. The case settled in 1997 with the INS agreeing that detained children should be placed in the "least restrictive environment," and that every effort would be made to reunite minors with their families.

Prior to the Flores settlement, juvenile probation officials and an attorney for the SF Public Defender’s Office met with representatives from the regional INS office to review San Francisco’s policies.

In 2002 the INS was subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security and became Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While ICE was given the task of prosecuting undocumented children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, was given the responsibility of protecting these children. Unsurprisingly, in the post-Sept. 11 era, ICE took a more aggressive stance against immigrant youth, particularly those involved in the juvenile justice system.

Meanwhile Congress began debating what to do with unaccompanied children who are taken into ICE custody. In 2002, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced the Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act, stating that "unaccompanied alien minors are among the most vulnerable of the immigrant population." Feinstein noted that "many of these children have entered the country under traumatic circumstances … they are young and alone, subject to abuse and exploitation."

San Francisco’s solution of sending kids home to their families, while imperfect, served at least one purpose: of the seven children represented by my office who were sent home in the last 18 months, none have been rearrested in the United States. San Francisco’s reunification policy was legally justified, fair to youth and their families, and cost-effective.

Jeff Adachi

Jeff Adachi is San Francisco’s public defender.

McGoldrick’s privatization betrayal

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OPINION This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Most politicians break promises. That’s the nature of politics. But when someone signs a pledge — twice — saying he won’t privatize city services, when he holds himself out as a champion of anti-privatization and then goes directly against that stand —well, it kind of makes you wonder.

That politician is San Francisco Sup. Jake McGoldrick. In the past, he stood against privatizing services. He has fought for golf courses, for the Internet; heck, he even fought for horses when Mayor Gavin Newsom threatened to privatize the stables. During the Service Employees International Union endorsement process, he signed a pledge that he would not privatize work currently done by city workers. We endorsed him and even fought against the effort to recall him. But when the rubber hit the road for people, he screeched out of there.

Newsom has proposed contracting out the work of the Institutional Police, a group of workers represented by SEIU Local 1021. Institutional police officers work primarily at San Francisco General and Laguna Honda hospitals, but they also provide security at health clinics throughout the city. That security — not only for the workers, but for the community that these institutions serve as well — might soon be gone.

If you have ever been in SF General’s emergency room during a violent incident, you know exactly how bad a decision that would be. A nurse who met with McGoldrick described how bad it got on her shift one night. A man who had been shot was being transported to the ER, and the shooter was following closely behind, hoping to finish off the job. When the victim and assailant pulled up to General, the institutional police were there waiting with guns drawn. They disarmed the shooter and arrested him.

The nurse who told this story looked McGoldrick squarely in the eye and told him that the community would know immediately when the ER was staffed by private security officers, and that would endanger the workers and the patients there.

Even the union that represents the private security officers — whose members would get the jobs — told McGoldrick the work should remain with the institutional police.

Training for private security officers is minimal and inconsistent. Turnover is rapid. When private security officers are transferred to new buildings, they’re often not trained on its specific emergency procedures. There is little oversight to enforce existing state training requirements.

This shouldn’t be about money. A couple of weeks ago, during public hearings on the budget, the Controller’s Office reported on the exponential growth of six-figure salaried executive positions in the past few years; 55 new management jobs were created this year alone. McGoldrick, who heads the Budget and Finance Committee, could easily have moved some of that money around, as SEIU 1021 advocated, rather than leave the city’s health care facilities at risk. But he didn’t.

Unfortunately, it only takes one bad incident to expose the false "savings" of contracting out security to inexperienced and less-trained guards. Six supervisors appear to agree. What happened to Jake McGoldrick?

Robert Haaland

Labor activist Robert Haaland works for SEIU Local 1021.

Save SF’s campaign finance program

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OPINION In 2000, San Francisco voters approved a system of public financing of campaigns for the Board of Supervisors, which in 2006 was expanded to the mayoral race. By eliminating the need for candidates to raise large amounts of private money, the program has been extremely successful at helping sever the link between big money and political decisions. But now this flagship program is threatened: Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing to raid several million dollars from the public campaign fund.

Last September the mayor put forth a plan to take $6 million from the fund and give it to one of his pet programs: SF Promise. The cost of this program was only $525,000 the first year, begging the question of why the mayor was grabbing $6 million from the fund. Of course, Newsom had actively opposed public financing for the mayoral race, so it’s possible he wanted to defund the program. Supervisor Aaron Peskin wisely introduced legislation to fund SF Promise from the city’s reserve funds, thereby warding off the raid.

Now another proposal has surfaced to remove $5 million from the fund. According to Ethics Commission spending projections, removing $5 million will create a $1.7 million to $4.3 million shortfall for the next mayoral race in 2011 — and that’s just to meet minimum baseline funding.

The justification for this plan is that the city is facing a budget crunch and needs these funds. The mayor promises, promises, promises to return the funds later — but the only way to legally secure those funds is through a charter amendment, which the Mayor’s Office has declined to support.

This latest rationale rings hollow, and we only have to look across the bay to see why. Earlier in the decade, Oakland adopted public campaign funding, and after it was used in one election cycle, Oakland was hit with a budget deficit. The City Council decided to dip into the public financing funds in the gap. They promised, promised, promised that they would restore the funding once the deficit problems were resolved. Yet to this day Oakland still does not have public financing of campaigns — because, while it’s still the law, there’s simply no money in the fund.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, members of the Budget Committee seem to be prepared to vote in favor of this dangerous proposal as early as July 3. While Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly have wisely expressed opposition, Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who has been a public financing supporter in the past, has so far expressed support for the cut. McGoldrick could end up being the swing vote, joining with public financing opponent Sup. Sean Elsbernd and mayoral ally Sup. Carmen Chu to support this legislation.

Dipping into the public financing fund for any reason sets a terrible precedent and undermines the integrity of this valuable program. Just as politicians should not draw their own district lines because of a conflict of interest, they should not undermine previously established campaign finance laws.

Rob Arnow and Steven Hill

Rob Arnow and Steven Hill have been the architects of public financing for mayoral and Board of Supervisors elections. Steven Hill also is director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation. Contact them at info@voterownedelections.org.

 

Down with legitimacy

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OPINION We all remember Gavin Newsom’s stunt four years ago, when he emerged from a tight election race against Matt Gonzalez and promptly "legalized" gay marriage, sending his approval ratings soaring and guaranteeing him a second term. Back then 80-somethings Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon became the first smiling gay couple to marry in honor of La Newsom, before then a politician known mostly for cynical, anti-poor rhetoric (remember "Care Not Cash"?).

Now that the California Supreme Court has struck down the ban on same-sex marriage, everywhere we hear of couples who’ve been together 10, 20, or 30 years (or six months) rushing to tie the knot and proclaim: "finally … it’s … legitimate!" It’s hard to imagine a more wholehearted rejection of queer struggles to create defiant ways of living and loving, lusting for and caring for one another — methods not dependent on inclusion in the dominant institutions of straight privilege.

Gay marriage proponents now declare that finally gays and lesbians are "full citizens" — as opposed to half-citizens, one imagines, or — gasp — non-citizens! As Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts the biggest raids in history, the gay establishment celebrates its newfound legitimacy. Sure, for a few of the most privileged, the right to get gay married might be the last thing standing in the way of full citizenship. But there are certainly a legion of impediments for the rest of us.

Let’s step back for a moment and imagine what it means to be a full citizen of the foremost colonial power, bent on bombing rogue states to smithereens, exploiting the world’s resources, and ensuring the downfall of the planet. As same-sex marriage fetishists rush to stake their claim to straight privilege, who gets left behind? Oh, right — anyone who doesn’t want to follow an outdated, tacky, oppressive model of long-term monogamy sanctioned by a state seal.

Want health care? Get married (to someone with a good health plan). Need a place to live? Better get working on a spouse with a house. Need to visit your friend in the hospital? Forget it (unless you’re ready and able to tie the knot). Need to stay in this country, but you’re about to get deported? Should’ve gotten married while you had the chance!

Want to define love, commitment, family, and sexual merrymaking on your own terms? Honey, that’s so last century — this year it’s all about matching putf8um Tiffany wedding bands, the Macy’s bridal registry, and a prime spot on the Bechtel float in the Pride parade — now that’s progress!

While San Francisco has a long history of sheltering dissident queer cultures of incendiary splendor, the rush for status within the status quo threatens to delegitimize everyone who isn’t ready for the Leave It to Beaver lifestyle.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is most recently the editor of an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Her new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, will tantalize you this fall.

To surcharge, without love

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OPINION With the first linen pants of 2008, this city commenced collecting employer contributions to the Healthy San Francisco universal health care program. Employers that don’t provide insurance now must pay the city for the public health care their employees use anyway. A number of restaurants have added "Healthy San Francisco" surcharges of 2 to 4 percent to diners’ tabs. These surcharges are at best sour grapes and at worst a diabolical plan to thwart democracy.

Present spite notwithstanding, I spend all my discretionary income on dining. My economic stimulus check stimulated some duck confit and tarte tatin. I’d trade a kidney for dinner at Coi. My disaster preparedness kit includes a Zagat Guide. The stokers of my culinary flame deserve to be treated well. Our restaurant scene should attract the best, the brightest, the most ingenuously-tattooed epicureans. The people of San Francisco deigned to achieve this noble goal by providing a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave, and now universal health care. Oh, the decadence! We’re drifting dangerously close to becoming a civilized society, which could get us invaded. Don’t be surprised when Blackwater goes hunting for Tom Ammiano in a spider-hole.

Some disgruntled restaurants have decided to assess a surcharge rather than raise prices. But all prices fluctuate. When the cost of electricity or halibut goes up, menu prices rise. Regulation affects cost. We knew that when we passed the laws. A surcharge instead of a menu price increase is restaurant owners’ way of saying that workers are less valuable than halibut.

Let them have health care. I enjoy clogging my own arteries so much more when the people feeding me get their cholesterol checked.

Owners claim their profit margin can’t absorb higher labor costs, hence the price hike. Restaurants have high failure rates and run a tight margin.

But raising prices wouldn’t be Armageddon for fine dining in Baghdad by the Bay. Heck, it’s not even Shock and Awe. Maybe I’d notice if Bar Tartine raised prices by 4 percent. Maybe I’d be annoyed. But if my $60 meal became $62, I wouldn’t head to a taqueria. The amount surchargers would have to jack prices before surchargees stay home is quite high. Most of us eating at Bar Tartine can suck it up like so many amuses bouches.

San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer is wont to blame every restaurant closure on our labor largesse. But restaurants fail for any number of reasons. Could be labor costs, or it could be that Bauer panned them, or that their concept, food, and location were bad, or that the manager was on coke.

Some restaurateurs can’t abide the people of San Francisco reguutf8g them. But that’s life in a democracy. The same people excusing the surcharge as mere kindly consciousness-raising are currently appealing the Healthy San Francisco law. In fact, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association opposes any improvement in labor standards. The folks there hope that diners, our fury stoked by surcharges, will finally rebel against our labor-loving local legislators, stop imposing our so-called values on restaurants, and demand to be served by disease-ridden, malnourished indigent waiters as God and Milton Friedman intended.

Instead of an irascible surcharge, menus could note: "Our food is organic, local, and sustainable. And the cook gets his asthma treated." People who care will be happy, and people who don’t will blithely resume checking the NASDAQ on their iPhones.

So quit grousing. Enjoy the short ribs. See your doctor. Everybody wins. *

Nato Green is a San Francisco-based comedian who has meddled with the primal forces of nature and must atone.

Genetically modified mouthpieces

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OPINION In 2003, when I was working as an anchor for a San Francisco television station, newscasters and reporters across the country were asked by the White House to refer to the Iraqi invasion as Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). We were asked to call the war in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).

With press releases in hand, journalists repeated genetically modified words as if their DNA depended upon it.

Genetically modified language is when propaganda wins, journalism sells out, and the public loses. It’s when words are twisted and massaged and spun until an entire suit of lies is woven to cover the guilty and cloak the truth.

The genetically modified language, in the case of Iraq, was full of false bravado and moral superiority, wielded in attempts to turn lies into honorable causes our dear children were willing to go to war for.

Nothing caught on like the phrase "the war on terror." It was a White House propaganda bonanza. Whole networks built their news around swirling "war on terror" graphics and anchors began stories with "Today in the war on terror," while most of the world considered Americans the terrorists.

That’s when I pulled up lame and refused to dance the destructive dance. Most of us who complained are now gone.

The fourth estate, as the media is called, was created to watch the government and anyone else using lies to gain power and profit at the expense of the safety and security of the American people

Thinking journalists can now see that using the White House’s genetically modified language with unquestioning devotion is one of the many reasons why we lost the public trust five years ago.

I propose that journalists stop repeating genetically modified White House language, and go a step further.

On the very day it was leaked that Scott McClellan’s book reveals the country went to war based on known lies, the sweetest, shiniest, dimple-faced, airbrushed Bay Area Murdoch girl began a broadcast by announcing: "Another American has given his life for his country today."

I was once that girl. Today I know that soldier was one of thousands who bravely believed in what the president said — and died believing a lie the press helped promote.

What if this anchorwoman — and hundreds of others like her, all of whom I imagine to be nice people — read instead: "Another American has died in Iraq today. He was a beloved brother and child, and he was number 4,084."

Then perhaps follow that with the number of wounded Iraqi veterans: 30,329.

In an attempt at truly unbiased journalism, they could end with the number of Iraqis who have lost their lives: 1,217,892.

If this war, as McClellan says and dozens of other experts have pointed out, was based on a great lie, let’s honor those soldiers who were willing to believe the lie by bringing them home alive. Let’s stop repeating genetically modified words that glorify a conflict American journalists could have helped prevent by putting their pom-poms down.

Leslie Griffith

Leslie Griffith is a writer, award-winning television reporter and former KTVU news anchor. You can find more of her work at lesliegriffith.org.

Beyond the budget spin

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OPINION Local government is frozen. The mayor’s office and the Board of Supervisors have been engaged in open warfare for months. This week, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that in order to balance San Francisco’s budget, city services and community-based organizations will have to undergo draconian cuts.

In a preemptive move against embarrassing protests, the mayor’s press office did not reveal the location of the annual budget presentation to the news media until late Friday afternoon. Even the supervisors, who will be debating and voting on the budget during the month of June, were left in the dark until then.

While the mayor didn’t blame city workers for the financial crisis, he did suggest that Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents the low-wage, frontline, service-providing city workers, should "help out."

Well, we have. SEIU members stepped up to "help out" in fiscal years 2003–04 and 2004–05 by agreeing to wage freezes and self-funding our pensions. All the recent midyear cuts were in public health agencies and among SEIU-represented nonprofits.

Most recently we stepped up by helping draft and vigorously campaigning to pass Proposition B, which freezes city workers wages for two years and tightens eligibility for retiree health care benefits in exchange for a modest increase in city pension benefits.

The mayor’s budget director repeatedly has said that this is a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Talk about spin.

Moreover, in his June 2 budget presentation, the mayor made no mention of raising revenue as an answer to our fiscal problems. You could almost hear Gov. Schwarzenegger’s voice as Newsom presented a slash-services budget with a "no-new-taxes" slogan waiting in the wings for his next campaign.

Everyone knows it’s expensive to live in San Francisco. Paying city employees a wage that allows them to stay in the community they serve isn’t a budget "problem." It ought to be a basic part of what City Hall does and cares about. And if that means looking at bringing in new sources of money, we should have that conversation.

We believe there are various revenue sources that make more sense to explore than some of these service cuts, including a real estate transfer tax increase for high-level properties.

Fortunately, the mayor’s proposal is just a starting point. Soon we will be proposing specific alternatives.

Toward that end, the San Francisco Human Services Network and Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth have organized a citywide forum on the mayor’s proposed budget cuts. SEIU 1021 is cosponsoring this event. The San Francisco budget and revenue town-hall meeting will be held June 9 from 2-4 p.m. in the San Francisco Main Library’s Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin (at Grove)

Don’t get angry. Get organized.

Robert Haaland

Robert Haaland is a longtime San Francisco activist who works for Local 1021.

San Francisco, meet Joe Nation

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OPINION How would you like to be represented by someone who flacks for the insurance industry, serves real estate developers and landlords with zeal, opposes consumer privacy, and is a role model for corporate Democrats with a firm allegiance to big business?

You wouldn’t know it from the vague aura of his slick ads, but Joe Nation is hoping to be that someone in the state Senate. He’s the third candidate in the hotly contested race that includes two stalwart progressive politicians — incumbent Senator Carole Migden and Assemblymember Mark Leno.

Nation jumped into the Senate race in the 3rd District just three months ago. He’s trying to win in a sprawling district that includes half of San Francisco along with all of Marin and parts of Sonoma County. And he could pull it off.

The real danger of a Nation victory hasn’t been apparent to many San Francisco voters. Eyes have been mostly focused on the Leno-Migden battle, and Nation has never been on the ballot in the city before. But those of us who live in North Bay are all too familiar with Joe Nation.

When Nation’s campaign Web site trumpets him as an "advocate for universal health care," the phrasing is typical of his evasive PR approach. While in the state Assembly, Nation pushed for legislation that would force consumers and taxpayers to subsidize the health insurance industry. Meanwhile, he continues to oppose a single-payer system that would guarantee publicly financed health care for all in California.

Likewise, Nation leaves out key information when he calls himself an "international expert on climate change" for an "environmental consulting firm," ENVIRON International. He’s not eager to disclose that much of his work at the firm is for Coca-Cola, which excels at greenwashing its image to obscure its dubious environmental record.

In the Legislature, where he supported charter schools, Nation was problematic on public education. He earned distrust from the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, both of which endorsed Leno in the Senate race.

When lawmaker Jackie Speier put forward a tough bill to safeguard consumer information rather than allowing financial institutions to sell it to the likes of telemarketers, Nation worked to undermine the legislation.

In 2006, nearing the end of his six corporate-friendly years in the state Assembly, Nation launched a Democratic primary challenge to US Rep. Lynn Woolsey — who has strong support in the North Bay congressional district because of her courageous leadership against the Iraq war and for a wide range of progressive causes. Nation attacked her from the right. She trounced him on Election Day.

Nation’s long record of siding with powerful economic players inspired the San Francisco Apartment Association and other landlord groups to throw a big fundraiser for his Senate campaign a couple of weeks ago. To big-check donors with an anti-renter agenda, plunking down money for Nation is a smart investment.

Independent polls now show a close race between Nation and Leno, with Migden a distant third. As a practical matter, the way for progressive voters to prevent Joe Nation from winning the state Senate seat is to vote for Mark Leno. *

Norman Solomon is the author of many books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (Wiley, 2005).

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