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Politics Blog

Prison report: The lap of luxury?

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Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in the California state prison system. His reports run on Mondays and Thursdays; you can read earlier pieces here and here. It’s not easy to communicate from inside a state prison, so if it takes a while for him to respond to comments, be patient.

By Just A Guy

While there are many things and topics to be discussed about prison, I would like to talk about the little things that are de-humanizing or just plain silly and disrespectful. I don’t want this to be construed as whining, but want it to be understood that these are things we deal with every day, that the culmination of these things can be overwhelming, frustrating, and the wrong way to treat human beings.

Let’s start with laundry. We are allowed to buy our own sweatpants, shorts, shirts, socks, t-shirts, and undergarments, and are supplied with clothes as well. We are also allowed to buy our own laundry soap like Tide, so we can wash our clothes — but then then but we’re not allowed to hang our laundry so that it obscures a guard’s vision of us.

Now, remember that some of us live in dorms and there is no privacy whatsoever. A lot of us used to hang our towels up to dry after taking a shower, but if that towel is preventing an officer from seeing a one-and-a-half foot area of your bed, the guards will come and take it down or tell you to take it down. The same is often true of our just-washed-by-hand laundry; we are told we can hang it from our locker doors — which are a foot wide by two and a half feet long. So basically, there is no where to hang our laundry to dry.

The funny thing is that they say it’s a security issue because they can’t “see” us. The problem with this is that unless you are on a top bunk, the guards can’t see in your bunk anyway; how is it a security issue?

Short-sighted solar

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By Tim Redmond

The supervisors voted yesterday to continue for one week the proposal to let a private company build a solar plant on the Sunset reservoir. I’m glad the supes didn’t approve the project, but a week’s delay isn’t enough. This contract has real problems, and needs to be sent back to committee for a complete overhaul.

Harvey Rose, the supervisors budget analyst, pointed out one flaw that he urged the board not to accept: The deal would require the supes to waive their right to oversee annual appropriations for the project, essentially locking the city into spending money on it every year for the next 25 years.

The Sierra Club is pushing this, arguing that right now the city doesn’t have the money and only a private contactor can make this sort of project happen. I disagree: The city has the ability to float bonds for a project like this, and a solar bond act would pass by about 75 percent in San Francisco, and if local officials think there’s no way to lverage some federal money for this, they aren’t trying hard enough.

In fact, the appropriations deal means that the city will be financing the project, anyway, for all practical purposes. The vendor, Recurrent Energy, wants to use the contractual guarantee of annual funding to convince lenders to support the project.

Why is San Francisco so insistent on letting the private sector run our energy business? Oh, I can think of one reason: I see campaign video now.

“Gavin Newsom built the largest solar energy project in any American city — without taxypayer money.”

Great campaign line when you’re running for governor. And by the time the taxpayers actually get stuck with the bill, this mayor will be long gone.

Size (of sea level rise) matters

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Text by Sarah Phelan.

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission has released detailed color maps that show the low-lying areas around the Bay in danger of flooding from global-warming related sea level rise. And while the maps look awfully pretty, the impacts likely won’t be.

Using U.S. Geological Survey data, the maps show the extent of inundation on each section of shoreline and
and can be enlarged to show a pretty high-rez image.

You can see the impacts of a predicted 16-inch rise, (predicted in 40 yeas) on say, the Central Bay here, a 55-inch rise (predicted in 90 years,) and, perhaps most revealing of all, a composite of the two.

First used in a BCDC draft report, Living with a Rising Bay: Vulnerability and Adaptation in San Francisco Bay and on the Shoreline, released earlier this month, the maps show that 180,000 acres of shoreline are in danger of flooding by 2050, increasing to 213,000 acres by 2100.

“This means that 84 percent of the area that will be flooded in 90 years will already be under water in 40 years,” said BCDC’s executive director Will Travis in a press release. “Most of this area is low-lying flat land that was created when shallow parts of the Bay were reclaimed by land fill projects in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Or as Leslie Lacko, the principal author of the BCDC sea level rise report on sea level rise, put it, “The areas that will be flooded by high tides at mid-century are already within the 100-year floodplain, where currently there’s a one percent chance of flooding every year. By 2050, the chance of flooding in the same area will be 100 percent every year.”

Soft (or smart) on crime?

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By Tim Redmond

So the Contra Costa County district attorney is driving everyone crazy with his vow to stop prosecuting minor crimes unless the county supervisors rescind his budget cuts.

Now, he’s suggesting that burglary and reckless driving won’t be prosecuted any more, which is probably not the smartest thing to say; CoCo county has a bad reckless driving problem, and announcing that burglars are free to come and go might not be so nice for the welathy homeowners with their big-screen TVs nad abundant jewelry in fancy subdevelopments.

But imagine if the DA in Contra Costa (and DAs in San Francisco and Alameda Counties) instead pledged to stop prosecuting, say, simple drug posession cases? Suppose small-time sales were included, too, along with prostitution. The counties would save a ton of money, millions of dollars that’s wasted every year putting people through the court system, and sometimes into jail, for offenses that shouldn’t be criminal anyway.

You could still bust the burglars and the people who run over old ladies. But you’d save even more money and the streets would be safer. No?

Send the solar project back to committee

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By Tim Redmond

We’re all in favor of buidling a solar-energy generating station on the Sunset reservoir. But the plan that’s coming before the Board of Supervisors today is deeply flawed. At best, it ought to be amended to ensure that the city winds up with the power plant after seven years at an affordable rate; at worst, it ought to be scrapped and the city should start over again, with the idea that this is and ought to be a public-power project, built and run by the city.

“I don’t understand how we can keep talking about public power while we give these resources over to private businesses,” Sup. David Campos told me. He’s right.

He and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi are trying to slow this thing down. Sup. John Avalos voted for it in the Budget Committee, but told me he’d consider sending it back for more discussion. I hope he does that; this thing isn’t ready for approval at this point, and the progressives on the board ought to stick together and make sure it’s a better contract.

Otherwise we’ll wind up with a private company controlling local energy resources, and Gavin Newsom trumpeting it as his latest environmental triumph.

Newsom’s kitchen

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By Tim Redmond

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Okay, I know this is totally unfair, since the real-estate agents typically do a staging setup for these photos, but if this is really Gavin Newsom’s kitchen, I have to ask: Does he ever eat there? Nothing in the scene suggests that anything is ever cooked here. No knives, no pans, no cutting boards … on the other hand, that there is one hell of a well-stocked liquor cabinet — and since the mayor doesn’t drink, he must be quite the host. (One advantage of brown — it doesn’t show the spills.)

Blocking California’s sunshine: Proposed legislation would limit access to public information

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By Rebecca Bowe

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The California Public Records Act guarantees the right to be able to request government documents that are part of the public record. But proposed legislation heard today by the Assembly Judiciary Committee would restrict access in certain cases. The bill, titled AB 520 and introduced by Assemblywoman Wilmer Amina Carter (D-Rialto), would authorize a superior court to limit the scope of requests a member of the public can make if the court determines that the requestor is seeking information for an “improper purpose.” The text of the bill leaves the definition of “improper” open-ended, specifying only that it is “including, but not limited to, the harassment of a public agency or its employees.”

The bill is still in the early stages, but sunshine advocates are watching closely and weighing in. Californians Aware (CalAware), the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA), and the Freedom of Information Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter have all come out against it. Letters of opposition pointed out that even without this new restriction in place, government agencies are often slow to release public records. “Every audit performed by Californians Aware, the California First Amendment Coalition, or CNPA member newspapers such as the Contra Costa Times or Stockton Record, has shown abysmal compliance with the law,” CNPA noted in a letter to Assemblywoman Carter.

Others characterized the proposed rule as an erosion of the principles of open government that are embodied in the state constitution. “The ultimate principle arguing against AB 520 is that like the right of speech itself … the right to obtain information found in public records is so fundamental to informed democracy that certain expressions of that right, while they may be deplored as an excess of license, must be tolerated as a cost of liberty,” CalAware’s opposition letter reads.

In the context of a new presidential administration that has professed a commitment to government transparency, and even delivered on it, AB 520 looks like a giant step backward.

Prison report: Rehabilitation is a joke

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: This is the second blog post by Just A Guy, our correspondent in the California prison system. His letters from the inside will appear on Mondays and Thursdays, and he welcomes your comments and questions. It’s a little tricky communicating with inmates, since they don’t have acces computers for email, so be patient if it takes us a while to get his responses posted.

Let’s talk about rehabilitation this week.

There is a great misconception that prisoners spend a large part of our time in rehabilitative programs, and that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is putting a massive effort into the rehabilitative process. But the effort isn’t plainly evident to me.

To my knowledge, the only program for drug addicts and alcoholics is called SAP (substance abuse program), but this program is compulsory for those that fit the criteria. The problem with this is that the criteria seem to be a criteria of convenience in order to receive the per inmate funding granted by AB 900.

Some institutions have NA and AA meetings, but the availability of these meetings is dependent on the availability of staff to supervise the the meetings. I find it ironic that you have to sign up for a meeting that is supposed to be anonymous. The truth is that there is very little help offered to those that really want it — and it is forced upon those that don’t want it.

Newsom video, corrected

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By Tim Redmond

Gavin Newsom went to Sacramento this weekend to once again take credit for what others (particularly Assemblymember Tom Ammiano) have done.

But at least there’s a video now that corrects the record. Check it out.

Tell BART what you think

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By Tim Redmond

BART’s holding a public meeting (!) to hear concerns about civilian oversight of the BART police. The place ought to be packed — and the message I would send is that BART can’t be trusted to do its own civilian oversight and ought to support the state legislation by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano.

Show up Saturday, May 2 at 1 pm, John P. Bort Metro Center auditorium, 101 8th Street, Oakland.

Prison report: letters from the inside

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. He’s going to be sending us regular reports on conditions behind bars, discussing the myths and realities facing the 170,000 people who the state of California has locked up. There’s not much reporting on what goes on inside, since the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has always tried to keep the press from reporting honestly on prison conditions. We hope this helps shed some light on the gigantic taxpayer-funded California prison system. You can post questions in the comment section, and Just A Guy will try to answer them. (If it takes a while to see responses to your comments, be patient — Just A Guy has to communicate with us from prison, and the lines out aren’t always easy.)

He suggests you might get yourself in the right mindset by listening to this first.

I’m sitting on my bunk in my dorm that is over 80 degrees and humid, because it’s in the 90’s outside today and there is no air conditioning. In fact, there is no air conditioning in most prisons run by CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) — yeah, seriously, rehabilitation. … But this is nothing like what the temperature will be like in the buildings in August and September, I have seen as high as 94 degrees on the thermometer in the building.

You have all probably seen shows on TV and think you have a general idea of what it’s like in prison in California. You don’t have a clue.

You have been misinformed by the media, which has been mislead by CDCR and the prison guard’s union as to what prisons and prisoners in California are like. Believe it or not, we’re not all axe murdering, rapist, armed robbers frothing at the mouth with your children in our sights. In fact, the largest percentage of us are addicts and alcoholics in prison for the possession or dealing of drugs or crimes related to the pursuit thereof.

Being in prison makes one abundantly aware of the need for prisons. But it’s also very frustrating, because it makes one abundantly aware of the need for someone to be the voice of the prisoner and let the public know what it’s really like, beyond the fantasy that’s been sold to you by the media and the powers that be. If you knew what it’s really like, and if you came to see prisoners as people, then your voices might yearn to speak out a little bit against the reported “reality” that isn’t.

My aim here is to provide you with a forum to ask questions about prison life. I have nothing to gain nor am I getting paid to do this, but feel moved to report from the inside because I can’t bear the lies being told to, and believed by, the general public.

Here are a few untruths I would like to clear up:

Sunset solar project moves forward

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By Tim Redmond

The Examiner claims the Sunset Reservoir solar project has run into problems, but actually, the supervisors Budget Committee sent it forward to the full board yesterday on a 2-1 vote. That means the board will vote on it this Tuesday.

I’ve got problems with the project — I’m not sure it’s a good idea to sign a long-term contract with a private company to do something the city ought to be able to do itself. And I have a suspicion that 15 years from now we’ll look back at this as a bad deal.

At the very least, the city ought to take the position that it intends to exercise its right to buy the plant in seven years. But it’s going to be harder to amend language like that into the contract at the full board.

Interestingly, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who sits on the Budget Committee, has been opposed to the current deal and wants it amended; he asked the chair, Sup. John Avalos, to continue the item, since Mirkarimi, whose son was born Tuesday, was a bit distracted this week. Avalos got Sup. David Campos, who is also a critic of the project, to take Mirkarimi’s seat for the hearing.

But when the vote came down, Avalos voted to send the matter forward without a recommendation. “The room was full of people who had come to speak on this, and I didn’t want to send them away thinking we’d just continued it,” Avalos told me. “I thought we should act on it.”

Avalos said he’s not gung-ho on the deal, but is a “soft supporter.” He promised that he would look at it again at Tuesday’s board meeting and consider resending it to commitee.

That’s what ought to happen — there are two many issues on this to just approve it without more discussion and amendments.

Homeless rally against budget cuts at City Hall

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housing sign city hall 4 22.JPG

By Rebecca Bowe

Proposed cuts to homeless-services programs drew a crowd of around 200 homeless people and service workers to the steps of San Francisco City Hall this afternoon. The Coalition on Homelessness, the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, Tenderloin Health, the SRO Collaborative and other organizations set up an outdoor drop-in center and handed out bagged lunches to rally participants. A line of tents that had been set up on the lawn was labeled as the city’s homelessness plan.

“These are not times to cut any services,” said Laura Guzman, director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, which assists homeless people by providing case management, housing or shelter placement, and other needs. Her organization has seen some 1,500 additional visits per month since the recession hit, Guzman noted, and that they’re constantly at full capacity.

“There’s just not enough bed space to go around,” noted Mission Neighborhood Resource Center staffer Cyn Bivens.

Ammiano for governor?

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By Tim Redmond

I don’t see why not — after all, Tom Ammiano as a supervisor was responsible for the two main accomplishments Mayor Gavin Newsom takes credit for in his slick campaign video.

Newsom says that San Francisco is “well on our way to universal health care.” Yes, that’s true — and it’s because Ammiano — with zero help from Newsom — pushed through the Healthy San Francisco law.

The mayor also claims that the city’s bond rating is up and that San Francisco is relatively fiscally sound because of the Rainy Day Fund. Again — that was Ammiano’s bill, and Newsom did absolutely nothing to help pass it.

“He want to be the governor of appropriations, because he appropriates everyone else’s ideas,” Ammiano told me.

Truthfully, Newsom has very little in the way of actual accomplishments (except for same-sex marraige, which is a major accomplishment he can take a lot of credit for, but isn’t pushing and doesn’t even mention in his campaign video.)

What a fucking fraud.

Rev. Billy runs for mayor of NYC

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By Steven T. Jones

Billy Talen was an activist and performance artist living in San Francisco in the early ‘90s when he became Reverend Billy, the charismatic founder and pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping. “We were always looking for ways to highlight the politics of our time,” Talen said. “One of the ideas we had was to appropriate the right-wing icon.”

Talen, his alter ego, and his flock have evolved over the years: moving to New York City in 1996 to preach the evils of rampant consumerism from the streets of Times Square, transformed by 9/11 into something like a real church, attending Burning Man in 2003 and developing an important relationship with that community, performing around the world, making the excellent film “What Would Jesus Buy?”, and this year renaming themselves the Church of Life After Shopping to better capture the redemptive nature of their calling.

But last month, Rev. Billy took an even larger leap of faith, announcing his Green Party candidacy for mayor of New York City. He will run against Mayor Michael Bloomberg the man, but also Michael Bloomberg the Wall Street made billionaire, as potent a symbol of the capitalism ethos and excesses as any in the country.

The Guardian caught up with Talen yesterday at his campaign office in SoHo (a neighborhood where he also lived until being driven to Brooklyn by rapidly rising rents) for a long conversation about a campaign that seems to highlight the most pressing issues of these turbulent times. We’ll post excerpts from that interview, and regularly check in with the unfolding campaign, periodically between now and November.

In other words…to be continued.

Behind the Democratic Party lunch picket

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Chris Daly amid the picketers. Photo: Luke Thomas, Fog City Journal
By Rebecca Bowe

Imagine it’s a sweltering day, and you’re on a crowded sidewalk in a dark suit surrounded by about 200 tough, angry men who are booing you in unison, clamoring for your resignation, and yelling inches away from your face as you pass by. Do you try to dodge the swarm and duck into the building you’re headed to? Not if you’re Supervisor Chris Daly.

This afternoon, when Daly showed up downtown for the San Francisco Democratic Party Unity Luncheon at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, a crowd of building-trades union members greeted him with shouts and jeers. With cameramen shadowing his every move, Daly paraded up and down the line, seeming almost as if he enjoyed soaking in all the negative attention, getting into heated exchanges with some of the protesters and shaking hands with others. At one point, when the tradesmen started chanting, “What do we want? Jobs! When do we want them? Now!” Daly simply joined in with the chorus, punching his fist into the air for emphasis. Once people caught on, they stopped chanting and booed him all over again.

According to San Francisco Building and Construction Trade Council head Michael Theriault, the protest was over proposed changes to the city’s planning code that would strengthen historic preservation standards, which he said he feared would “freeze the entire city as a historic preservation district” and put a drain on already-scarce construction jobs. Much anger was directed toward the Historic Preservation Commission, a city body created by Prop J — a ballot measure authored by San Francisco Democratic Party chair and former Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, placed on the ballot by an 11-0 vote of the supervisors, and approved by nearly 60 percent of the voters last November.

But the underlying issue was the Board of Supervisors’ 6-5 vote on April 14 that rejected Larry Mazzola Jr. as board director of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District. Mazzola, who helps run the plumbers’ union, was the San Francisco Labor Council’s choice for the seat, but his appointment was blocked by the board’s six progressive members, who were more inclined to go with Dave Snyder — a transportation expert who was deemed more qualified. “The majority of the Board of Supervisors has taken up a war against labor, and they disrespect labor. It’s all about us losing our jobs and our health coverage,” Mazzola told the Guardian just before he turned and started chanting, “Daly, resign!” about three inches away from Daly’s face.
But in an interview for a Guardian story that will hit stands tomorrow, Daly said, “at the same time the plumbers were attacking me, I was sponsoring paid sick days. It’s the six members of the board that are the most pro-labor who voted against Larry Mazzola.”

The “tax day” defense

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This surveillance photograph of the suspected bank robber is posted at the SFPD’s website.

The San Francisco Police Department has issued a description of a bank robbery suspect who threatened to blow up the Bank of America at 50 California Street, on April 15, aka tax day, if his demands weren’t met.

Carrying a black lap top case, the suspect, who is described as “a white male, 6’, 190 lbs., last seen wearing a
baseball cap with “SF” on it, a khaki buttoned shirt, and blue jeans,” allegedly “entered the
Bank of America on California Street, at approximately 12:50 P.M, and asked an employee to speak with the manager because he wanted to make a large withdrawal,” according to a SFPD press release.

The manager took him to a room, where the suspect allegedly “explained that he worked for an organization that is concerned about government bailouts of corporations.”

The suspect, who apparently was smiling throughout, then demanded cash, stating, that unless the manager complied, he would “detonate a bomb that he was carrying with him.”

The cash, the suspect explained, “would go to people who deserve it,” according to the SFPD.

The manager withdrew a large amount of cash from a vault and gave it to the suspect, who fled the bank on foot.

For more information–or if you have information for the police, call the SFPD’s Public Affairs Office at 415.553.1651.

Don’t blame it on Onek

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Text by Sarah Phelan

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David Onek is a San Francisco Police Commissioner and founding executive director of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice.

When the Board voted to support due process for all youth, a few weeks ago, the ever irascible h. brown went off on one of his infamous rants, this time targeting the SFPD in general and San Francisco Police Commissioner David Onek, in particular.

“Isn’t there a police commissioner named David Onek who created a half million dollar program to milk this cow, then resigned from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice so that his firm could grab a third of it?” brown ranted. “Write about Onek. Too hot a potato?”

I don’t normally reply to Brown’s comments, but this time they got my attention because I recently unearthed communications in a public records request related to an investigation into the city’s criminal justice department that show that Brown’s claims—namely that Onek created a MOCJ grant program and benefited financially from it—are not only false, but also resemble unsourced claims in a August 2008 Chronicle article.

As such, these claims deserve to be addressed, even if some pieces of this particular MOCJ puzzle are still missing.

So, I went back, reviewed the MOCJ records again, and tried to piece together what really happened—for the sake of brown, Onek and anyone else involved in this saga, which appears to have been driven by anti-immigrant hate mongers, has harmed countless immigrant families, and lead to the Board’s support of due process for all.

POA agrees to $17 million cut over two fiscal years

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Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced that the city’s labor contract with the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association (SFPOA) has been amended and will net the City nearly $17 million in savings over the next two fiscal years.

“These officers, whose own jobs are not in jeopardy, are reaching out to save the jobs of other city employees,” Newsom said in a press release. “We appreciate their public spirit and leadership.”

“It was the right thing to do,” said SFPOA President Gary Delagnes.

The amendment reduces police contract expenses by 5 percent over fiscal years 2009-10 and 2010-11, by deferring 2 percent in wage increases, reducing night shift differential payments, and suspending a sick leave cash-out program.

The agreement will be extended one year beyond its original term, to June 30, 2012, with a final-year wage increase based on a survey of local police agency pay rates, the statement said.

Cab drivers rally against privatization

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By Tim Redmond

One of the tricky ways Mayor Gavin Newsom is going to try to pretend to balance the city budget is by selling off taxi medallions, the permits needed to operate a cab in the city. And the drivers, with the help of Sup. Eric Mar, are organizing to fight back.

Mar, the Asian Law Caucus, the United Taxi Workers and others will hold a demonstration tomorrow, Tuesday May 21, on the steps of City Hall to denounce the plan. This is going to be an epic battle — the mayor sees the permits as a source of tens of millions of dollars, and drivers and their advocates say a public resource is being put on the auction block — and that ordinary drivers will get screwed.

I’m glad to see that Mar is taking this on — cab-industry politics is complicated and often rough, and the anti-privatization folks in the cab industry need an ally at City Hall.

San Franciscans say ‘hell no’ to new offshore oil leases

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By Rebecca Bowe

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Photo by Christopher Chin / COARE

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar was welcomed to San Francisco last Thursday by a host of activists dressed as marine creatures, including a few diehards in head-to-toe polar bear costumes who were probably becoming endangered species themselves by standing out in the sun. At a public hearing called to solicit comments about a federal plan for new offshore-oil development, environmentalists and elected officials demanded that the new interior secretary reject new leases for oil drilling off the California coast.

Sen. Barbara Boxer called new offshore oil drilling “an environmental and economic disaster for California” and called for investment in green alternatives instead. Her statements were echoed by a host of congressional representatives, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, and speakers from organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and others.

The five-year leasing program was a parting gift from the Bush administration. Salazar put it on hold so that he could hear from stakeholders in coastal regions. He’s also shifted the focus from oil and gas exploration to possibilities for developing offshore renewable energy including wind, wave, and tidal power. But he noted that oil and gas development would remain on the table.

Look for the full story in the Guardian on Wednesday. In the meantime, the proposed plan can be found here. The Department of the Interior will accept public comments until September 21.

BART (finally) opens a meeting

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By Tim Redmond

In the wake of a storm of criticism, here and elsewhere, the BART Board’s police oversight committee has finally started holding open, publicly noticed meetings.

At the first meeting, this morning in Oakland, “they tried to take credit for the public notice, but I reminded them that the only reason they issued a notice is that we’d already emailed it out,” Quintin Mecke, communications director for Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, told me.

So now it’s on the record: Every monday morning, 10 a.m., at BART’s headquarters at 300 Lakeside, Oakland. Feel free to show up and ask why it’s taken 17 years for the board to even begin talking about police oversight.

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