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Politics Blog

Ain’t no love in Oakland, bitch

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Image from imdb.com’s archive for “American Pimp”.

Text by Sarah Phelan

Folks in Oakland—and those in the parallel universe that makes films about Oakland—are getting their knickers in a twist about a HBO drama that wants to focus on a 40something Oakland-based pimp’s attempts to get out of the world’s oldest profession.

In the right corner, we have Mayor Ron Dellums, who is worried about the impact of the show, called ‘Gentlemen of Leisure” and based on a 1999 documentary called “American Pimp”, on Oakland’s image as a “model city.”

In the left corner, we have folks who are worried about the impact of canceling the show, set to begin 2009, on Oakland’s already flailing economy.

And stuck in the middle, so it seems, are the folks at Oakland’s Film Office.

Reached by phone, Ami Sims, (oops, as one reader just pointed out, her name is Ami Zins, not Sims) Film Coordinator for Oakland’s Film office, told the Guardian that she had heard nothing, in terms of the show actually being nixed.

“The company doesn’t even have a script, so there’s really nothing to talk about,” Zins told me.
Pressed for details of how the City could stop HBO from filming and whether it has taken steps to do so, Zins said, “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

So, what in heck is going on in Oakland, a city made infamous by Too Short’s “No love from Oakland” which begins “Ain’t no love in Oakland, bitch/ Niggas always talkin bout ‘I love you’/But ain’t no love, bitch”?

Shortly before Christmas, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the HBO proposal had come under fire from Mayor Ron Dellums and other city officials before filming had even started.

‘It’s the mayor’s view that this project goes against our vision of Oakland as a ‘model city’ and does a disservice to residents and visitors alike,” Dellum’s chief of staff David Chai told the Merc. “The people of Oakland have come too far to have our city’s name trampled upon in the name of entertainment.”

Now, it’s true that folks nationwide hold a negative stereotype of Oakland, and that the City has spent a lot of time, money and effort to clean up its crime-plagued streets.

But that doesn’t take away from the reality the Oakland continues to be crime ridden and that pimps are no strangers to many of its less than pristine streets.

In 2008, Oakland witnessed 124 homicides. That’s three fewer than in 2007. But 25 more than in San Francisco, which saw 99 homicides (its highest since 1995) in 2008. And it’s a stunning 121 more than the city of Alameda, which saw three homicides in 2008 and is only separated from Oak town by a short underground tunnel.

It’s also true that Oakland is in a very dire financial predicament, one that Mayor Dellums predicts will only get worse over the next couple of years. The City’s $42 million deficit in 2008 could balloon to $113 million by 2012.

So, could ‘Gentlemen of Leisure” be Oakland’s financial salvation?

City officials argue that the $150-a-day cost of a film permit is chump change, given that the project would only reinforce the city’s criminal reputation.

But as a film industry source, who prefers to remain anonymous, points out, Oakland would also benefit from the jobs that the show would create, not to mention the trickle down effect of people spending their paychecks locally.

“These are jobs we could have had, that actors who live in the East Bay could have had” our source said, noting that the Emmy-award winning show Dexter “doesn’t mean that everybody who lives in Florida is a serial killer.”

More crap from PG&E

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By Tim Redmond

Our local private utility continues to make enemies. Ling Ma reports in the East Bay Express that merchants are complaining about the length of time it takes to get natural gas service hooked up; we hear the same about electricity service. You rent a space and prepare to open a business, then it takes six months to get lights and gas service, and all that time you’re paying rent and maybe paying employees — and PG&E doesn’t care. Ma reports that there are no state laws mandating service intervals for utility connections for businesses.

Meanwhile, the Sacramento Bee notes that PG&E won’t release key documents related to a deadly gas explosion in Rancho Cordova.

I know the Legislature’s going to be busy with the budget this spring, but somebody ought to introduce a bill mandating that private utilities provide service to new customers within some reasonable period of time — and that records relating to utility safety practices are public. This is one that can unite progressives and small business owners and public safety agencies..

The Chron announces (then edits out) its own demise

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By Tim Redmond

Very odd item in the World Views blog on sfgate today. Sfist captured the key section:

As this long, memorable and costly – in so many ways, to so many people – year winds down, so, too, is this regular, daily feature of S.F. Gate, the website and related, online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, coming to a close after a run of several years. Numerous other, familiar features of this website will also be disappearing, and a notable number of employees from the S.F.Gate/San Francisco Chronicle editorial team will be leaving the print/electronic newspaper as its editorial-production staff is dramatically downsized.

That’s a strange way for a newspaper to announce major cuts. But wait — the item has been changed! Read World Views now, and all it says is

As this long, memorable and costly – in so many ways, to so many people – year winds down, so, too, is this regular, daily feature of S.F. Gate, the website and related, online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, coming to a close after a run of several years.

The rest of that paragraph has vanished.

I emailed Ward Bushee, the Chronicle editor, to ask him about this, and if he gets back to me I’ll let you know. (I also called Bushee’s line at the Chron, where the voicemail says “you have reached the office of Phil Bronstein, editor.” They need to update the recording.)

UPDATE: Bushee got back to me this afternoon. His comments shed some interesting light on the whole situation:

You are right – this is not a source of reliable and accurate information on SFgate and the Chron. If any of his statements are correct it would be news to me and Michele Slack, VP of SFgate. The column was full of erroneous information and was pulled down by Sfgate editors. It apparently had slipped through without editing. The columnist was a freelancer who was getting poor traffic and was dropped, which is a common practice for ineffective content in all news sites. Michele and her staff are scrupulous about editing before content is posted. But this one slipped through unfortunately. I was out of town when I saw your note and had to catch up with this through Michele. Thanks for checking this out and asking me about it.

So perhaps there are no mass alyoffs on the way at the Chron. I give Bushee credit for getting back to me; his predecessor, Mr. Bronstein, was hard to reach and rarely answered my emails.

The Chron’s skewed notions of water and rights

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by Amanda Witherell

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“Is there a right to water?” The San Francisco Chronicle’s editors asked today. The editorial outlined how water isn’t currently considered a human right by the UN, an issue the Guardian also recently covered. The Chron still found a way to criticize the notion that we all deserve a clean, safe glass of it.

“Enshrining water as a right sounds innocent. But it carries multiple implications. On one level, such a right would put nations on notice to upgrade water systems to make sure all their citizens have access. It’s an inarguable ideal for a human necessity.”

They go on: “But it also carries a political undercurrent. Such a right would be a powerful signal to international water companies such Veolia, Suez and RWE (all based in Europe) that their attentions are unwelcome in developing countries. These poor nations are prime targets as their leaders wrestle with the costs and engineering needs to improve outdated pipes, dams and spigots. In this setting, water shifts from a [sic] everyday need to an economic issue.”

Doubtless water is an economic issue – it costs money to install pipes, pumps, filtration systems, and monitoring equipment. It costs money to keep the system running properly. It costs money to ensure the cleanliness of water sources. How much should it cost? Should that cost include a profit margin?

Corporations and private companies would contend that governments just don’t have enough money to do the massive infrastructure improvements that are called for worldwide – in the US alone water infrastructure needs amount to a $1 trillion investment.

Politically courageous act of the year

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By Steven T. Jones

As the year winds down, I’d like to note what I consider to be the most politically courageous act of 2008: Attorney General Jerry Brown’s decision to reverse his position and urge the California Supreme Court to overturn Prop. 8.
This was a deeply principled decision that went against Brown’s political self-interest considering the fact that he’s planning to run governor in a state where a majority has approved Prop. 8. And that political danger was exacerbated by Brown’s post-election statement saying he would defend Prop. 8, as attorneys general are generally required to do, opening him up to the dreaded flip-flopper label.
But his new position is consistent with important constitutional principles (as I outlined in the Guardian almost a month before Brown adopted his new stance) and well-worth taking a gamble to do what’s right, the kind of act that is all too rare in modern American politics.
We’ve seen lots of different Jerry Browns through the years, from Governor Moonbeam to the We The People presidential populist to the tough-on-criminals, easy-on-developers Oakland mayor. Perhaps this act heralds Jerry Brown as the kind of governor California desperately needs right now: someone willing to tell the people “no,” that we can’t have everything we want, that some sacrifice and selflessness and tolerance are needed, that this nation was founded on principles more important than majority rule.

Whose house lost the most value?

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Text by Sarah Phelan

Produced by First American CoreLogic, using the real estate industry’s home price index, this map is not a pretty sight, despite the pretty colors.

It shows that California remains the clear leader nationwide, in terms of highest home price depreciation.

Prices in California have declined 28.3 percent annually.

Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Rhode Island, Wyoming and Hawaii are the next top losers, in order of percentage loss.

Only three states show price increases: West Virginia, South Dakota and Texas.

These states account for only 13 percent of the US population.

Within California, the biggest losers are Salinas, Merced, Stockton, Riverside, San Bernadino, Ontario, Vallejo, Fairfield, Oakland, Fremont and Hayward, Modesto and Bakersfield (losses of around -29 and -28 percent.)

So, while it’s true that San Francisco home prices have not taken such a huge beating, so far– an average -16.28 percent loss, since last year–it’s worth remembering that much of the city’s workforce lives in the East Bay and the Central Valley.

In other words, the bigger regional hurt is probably a more accurate way of predicting and estimating the wider negative economic impacts that are still headed our way, like a tsunami, gathering offshore.

Republicans are stupid

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By Steven T. Jones

Forgive the blunt headline, but it seems to me an inescapable conclusion based on the ridiculousness going on right now in Sacramento. Since writing about Republican legislators’ illogically doctrinaire opposition to taxes in this week’s paper, I’ve now watched the Democrats come up with a dishonest yet effective way around the blockade.

Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed with the legally dubious tax gambit, noting that desperate times require desperate measures. But then he vetoed the bill, criticizing Democrats for not making deep enough spending cuts in social services that people need most during hard times. This is the guy who keeps saying we face “fiscal Armageddon” if we don’t act immediately (and his best shot doesn’t take effect for another month and a half). And then, he has the balls to summon back the legislators, who had already stretched in barely legal ways to work around the Republican temper tantrum.

Let me say it again: Republicans are stupid, and California is about to start paying a heavy price for that stupidity.

HuffPo: The future of journalism, or its death?

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By Steven T. Jones

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Huffington Post, and not just because of media-savvy founder Arianna Huffington’s convenient conversion from neocon darling to progressive populist. No, for me, as a struggling newspaper journalist of 17 years (and with the debt to prove it), I’m bothered by a business model that relies on free content. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe writers — even that subspecies known as bloggers — should be paid for their work. More media, great; more exploitation of media professionals, not so great.
But of even greater concern is that HuffPo has apparently been outright stealing content from other outlets that do pay their writers, as a post and discussion over at the Chicago Reader’s blog details. I’ve heard these stories for quite awhile and I know some of the victims, so it doesn’t seem like this is an isolated instance.
At a time when my profession has been decimated by corporate layoffs and challenged by evolving expectations of readers, HuffPo often get held up as a model for the future. In fact, they reportedly have their sights set on the San Francisco media market, flush with venture capital cash. Unless they can figure out a way to pay reporters for working a beat, HuffPo could be a huge contributor to journalism’s demise rather than its savior.

Republicans attack education

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By Tim Redmond

The GOP proposal to cut $10 billion out of K-12 education is unconscionable and the Democrats who control the Legislature will never go for it. And the state’s getting sued over low school funding already. But the proposal just shows how bankrupt the GOP ideas are as California struggles with a horrible budget crisis.

First of all, California’s schools are so big, and have so many contracts, that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could simply whack 20 percent of all spending in one year. Even if you wanted to cut spending that much, it would take a couple of years to phase those cuts in (unless you’re interested in wholesale dismantling of public education).

But here’s the nut: Even after destroying the schools, the GOP would still come up radically short in closing the state’s budget gap. The Republican plan covers $22 billion. The deficit is about $40 billion. What about the rest of the money? No answer except “no new taxes.”

Not the the Democrats or the governor are doing a whole lot better, but at least they’re part of the reality-based community. This is going to take a radical combination of cuts and tax increases. Period.

Or perhaps we should simply cut off all state payments to the Legislative districts that have sent no-tax Republicans to Sacramento. No schools, no road repairs, no housing money … nothing for the people who don’t want to pay for it.

The layoff list

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By Sarah Phelan

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s 409 mid-year layoffs mostly target front line staff, who make under $70,000 a year. And that almost 70 percent of these lay-offs (285 positions) are in the Department of Health.

You can read the list here.

(Reader beware! The list is, in itself, fairly impenetrable. So it helps to go online to the City’s compensation manual. Here, you can enter the “class” of job, plus job “class title” to decipher each annual salary. For instance, a 923 Manager 11 makes between $91,000 and $116,000 a year, and we could only find a couple laid off. By contrast, a 1428 unit clerk makes between $45,000 and $55,000 a year–and 49 such clerks got pink slips last week.)

What’s worrisome about the Mayor’s lay-off decisions—aside from the obvious human pain and cost of losing one’s job in the middle of a nationwide recession—is that those left on the job are going to come under increasing physical, mental and employment pressure, as unemployment lines lengthen next year.

That at least was one of the primary concerns that San Francisco General Hospital worker Mike Dingle shared with me last week, outside the first public hearing into the Mayor’s proposed cuts–a hearing only made possible thanks to Board President Aaron Peskin, who folded the Mayor’s $118 million proposal (which up until then had been negotiated exclusively behind closed doors) and his own package of cuts into brand new legislation, so that all the proposed cuts can now be publicly reviewed

Dingle handles bodies, “both the living and dead” as he put it, as part of SFGH’s patient lift team. And from his position in the front line trenches, Dingle is predicting that one of the impacts of Newsom’s layoffs—scheduled to kick in on February 12, 2009– will be increased injuries all around.

Save Muntader al-Zaidi!

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By Tim Redmond

Okay, let’s get this straight right away: I don’t believe anyone should throw a shoe at the president. In fact, I told my son this morning (perhaps a bit too loudly) that just because a reporter threw a shoe at George W. Bush doesn’t mean he can throw things at his sister.

But seriously: After all that Bush has done in Iraq — after all the Iraqis killed and maimed, after the devastation that country has seen — it’s hard to blame the guy.

But already, the Iraqi security forces have beaten him pretty badly — they “kicked him and beat him until he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party. You can hear him howling on the YouTube video; it’s almost painful to listen. And he faces seven years in prison. I’m sure the prisons in Iraq are just lovely, too.

What a way for Bush to end his presidency — watching a guy who threw shoes at him get beaten and dragged away to a long, harsh prison term that may well involve abuse and torture.

I’m sure the Bush administration even now is trying to finalize the list of corrupt politicians and white-collar crooks who will walk away with presidential pardons on the last day of his term. I think we should all call on Bush to ask the prime minister of Iraq to pardon Muntader al-Zaidi.

Sharing the Budget Pain

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By Sarah Phelan

It wasn’t pretty at Board President Aarom Peskin’s mid-year budget cuts hearing.

(For starters, there wasn’t enough room for all the people who showed up at today’s meeting. Apparently, months ago, long before “Financial Armageddon” was a nationwide buzz word, the California Coastal Commission booked the Board’s Chambers for today. Unfortunately, as a result, only a small percentage of folks managed to squeeze physically into today’s budget hearing, while a huge crowd was left lingering discontentedly outside. This led to chants of “Let us in! Let us in!” until some burly not-to-be-messed-with Sheriff’s Deputies shepherded them to a nearby “spill over” room.)

The meeting itself felt surreal, set yards away from the huge Tree of Hope on CIty Hall’s second floor.
(At various moments throughout the proceedings, as red faced Department heads tried to explain the rationale behind the Mayor’s proposed $118 million package of solutions, or defend themselves against cuts in Peskin’s competing proposal, we could hear angelic voices trilling, as choirs sang carols under the City’s rotunda. )

But for all the social unrest and financial gloom and doom, there were a few positive moments.
Peskin managed to pull off a beautifully finessed legislative move. (By combining the Mayor’s proposal with his own, he was able to introduce a piece of legislation that allows everyone impacted to voice comments publicly.)

This was not true under Newsom’s original proposal, which he introduced during a surprise Dec. 9 Board visit.

“But now there’s a de facto collaboration,” Peskin told me, during a brief recess, after which the hearing was relocated to the Board’s chambers for the remainder of today’s hearing.

Republicans make one last stand to drown government

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By Steven T. Jones

Democrats in the California Legislature say they’re ready to take the gloves off and start aggressively attacking the longstanding “no new taxes” pledge that their Republican colleagues signed with American for Tax Reform, which threatens to shut down the deficit-plagued state government.
“Every Republican has signed a pledge to someone who wants to drown government in a bathtub, Grover Norquist. So nothing will happen until we rip up those pledges,” Sen. Mark Leno told me, noting the devastating combination of that pledge and the two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget in California, which only two other states have. That margin is just three Republicans in each the Assembly and Senate. “Six human beings are bringing us to our knees.”
“No matter how nice the Republican next to me is, or how gay friendly, they’re doctrinaire and they have everyone by the cojones,” Assembly member Tom Ammiano told me.
Senate Republican leader Dave Cogdill yesterday put out a statement saying, “Raising taxes doesn’t solve the underlying problem of California’s budget, which is the state spends more than it takes in.” I’m awaiting return calls from both Cogdill’s office and the ATR, but Cogdill’s statement is simply untrue on its face. Raising taxes does indeed address the problem of the state spending more than it takes in.

Prop 8: Stonewall 2.0?

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By Marke B.

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Photo by Max Whittaker of Sacramento protestors

Did you call in gay to work today? I’m one of those fortunate few whose job it is to actually be as gay as possible — I fought long and hard for it, sweetz, lemme tell ya — so here I am in my fuzzy pink gorilla slippers and hot oil treatment blogging away for you. I’m fixing myself up to look pretty for tonite’s rally:

SF DAY WITHOUT A GAY RALLY & MARCH
Weds/10, 6pm, 24th and Mission, SF
www.daywithoutagay.org
protest8sf.wordpress.com

Protesting is hottt.

ALSO: Great piece in the New York Times today on how a new generation of queer activists was awakened by Prop 8. They’re calling it Stonewall 2.0, which is kind of like “duh,” but it’s great to read about and be inspired by the youth and their crazy internetz.

This quote, in particular, brought a tear to my eye:

“We’re a gay couple in West Hollywood, neither of us involved in activism, but we just wanted to help,” said Sean Hetherington, 30, a stand-up comic who was the first openly gay contestant ever to do battle, however briefly, in the Gladiator Arena. “And we were amazed at what happened.”

From arena to gay-rena, hunky sister-man.

But maybe more on-target would be this:

Cut half the general fund?

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by Tim Redmond

I’m not kidding. That’s what the numbers right now suggest. San Francisco over the next year could face a budget deficit of $576 million — almost half of the entire discretionary money that the city has to spend.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, frankly, is entirely missing in action on this one. He’s been hiding out, doing his budget discussions in secret, playing Where’s Waldo (even showing up that the board meeting without a budget plan) and leaving City Hall and thousands of city workers, nonprofits and activists wondering what the hell is going on. The lack of leadership is mind boggling.

In the vacuum, the Coalition to Save Public Health has proposed a series of alternative cuts, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, writing in tomorrow’s Bay Guardian, suggests that the board consider them. The proposals include eliminating unnecessary jobs that pay more than $100,000 a year, cutting back the mayor’s seven-person PR staff, cutting the money the city gives to the Opera and Symphony and re-opening the police and fire contracts. These are all good ideas — and they might, in the best of all circumstances, add up to ten or 20 percent of the deficit.

The reality is that the mayor is going to be making some brutal cuts now — and it will be much worse in a few months, when the supervisors have to deal with the next fiscal year’s budget. You can’t cut half a billion dollars out of San Francisco city government without eliminating a lot of essential programs. Public health? Decimated. Parks and Rec? A wreck. Muni? Service will get way worse, fares may go up, and the city’s commitment to public transit will be at risk. What’s the city do for you? Get ready to give it up.

And you think the job market is bad now and the recession starting to hit the city hard? Imagine when a few thousand city employees join the unemployment lines.

So what are we supposed to do? Let me make a suggestion.

The worst thing a government agency can do in a recession is cut spending. The feds can borrow money and keep spending, but the city can’t. So we simply need to face the fact that this is an emergency, a crisis, the worst situation since the 1930s – and we need to look for new revenue.

We can’t mess around with half steps, either. We need big money, right now – and the best, most fair and progressive way to get that is with an income tax.

Now, the city can’t just impose an income tax on residents, the way New York City and Philadelphia do. The California Constitution pre-empts that. But the city CAN levy a tax on all income earned within the city. So the commuters pay, too (although residents who live here and work somewhere else don’t; it’s an imperfect world). Oakland passed a tax on income earned in the city in the 1970s, and the issue went all the way to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in Weekes v. City of Oakland that the tax was perfectly legal (the City Council dropped the tax anyway). Here’s an opinion on it.

The nice thing about income taxes is that they hit the rich harder than the poor. In fact, San Francisco could exempt, say, the first $100.000 of income, then use a progressive scale to make sure that only well-off people paid anything, and the richest paid the most. Even in a recession, there are rich people in this town, people who have done very well under the Bush tax cuts – and shifting money from the rich to the poor during a recession is excellent economics.

And an income tax could actually bring in enough cash to make a real difference.

Of course, the rich people who pay it can deduct the local tax from their state and federal returns – so a lot of the money actually comes to SF from Washington and Sacramento.

Passing something like this would be a huge political challenge – it would have to go on the ballot, and nobody wants new taxes, and the Chamber of Commerce types would howl and raise huge sums to defeat it. It could only work if the entire City Hall establishment, starting with the mayor, was willing to go out and campaign, hard, for the measure. Make it temporary – the tax would expire in two years. Make it progressive – nobody who is hurting financially would pay a heavy burden. And tell the voters: We tax the rich, or we close libraries, and eliminate Muni lines, and take cops off the streets, and close fire stations, and let sick people die because they can’t see doctors – and watch the local economy fall even deeper into recession as city spending plummets.

Because that’s what we’re talking about here. These are the choices.

There’s a good chance the state will have a special election in the spring – a tax measure could go on the ballot then. Or the city could hold its own special election. And if the city income tax doesn’t fly, I’m open to something – anything – else. But is has to be big, and we have to move on it now.

Any takers?

Newsom’s shocking Board appearance

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WTF?! Mayor Gavin Newsom shocks everyone by making a surprise “Bad News” visit to the Board.

Photos by Luke Thomas
Text by Sarah Phelan

For years, voters have been asking Mayor Gavin Newsom appear before the Board of Supervisors for monthly policy discussions. And for years, MGN has refused, claiming that such invites were “political theater.”

So, eyeballs understandably popped and jaws dropped when Newsom showed up at today’s Board meeting.
What could have possibly got the Mayor to come and talk to the Board?

A $576 million budget deficit, as it turns out. That’s almost half the City’s $1.2 billion in discretionary funds.

“That arguably makes it the most daunting crisis since the Great Depression,” Newsom observed.

But while the Mayor claimed he had come to the Board to “share the challenge”, he did not share copies of his proposed solution, until hours later at a press conference he did not attend. In other words, no one could ask the Mayor hard questions about his proposed plan in real time. And that was a tad frustrating.

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The media try to make sense of the Mayor’s proposal as Dr. Mitch Katz talks about what it means for the City’s Public Health Department.

Instead, Newsom did what he seems to do best: he stood there, hair and nails immaculate, spouting numbers, percentages, and statistics about his package which he dubbed, ” $118 million in proposed mid-year solutions.”

Somehow,he didn’t get to the part about the 399 pink slips that will be sent to City workers on Friday, or the 313 vacant positions that will also be eliminated.

Those details were left to Controller Ben Rosenfield and Budget Director Nani Coloretti to share with the press, as we stood in the International Room, surrounded by glass cases filled with signed memorabilia from the likes of “Their Royal Highnesses” Prince Charles and his wife Camilla.

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The Mayor’s “dream team” address media questions in the International Room,

It also fell lto the Mayor’s financial team to spell out that this mid-year proposal only addresses $100 million of the problem, meaning 2009-2010 will likely look four times worse.

Meanwhile, some supervisors were left wondering of there will there be any meaningful collaboration between Newsom and the Board, or whether it will take the form of the usual feral faction versus manicured tribe?
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Sup. Chris Daly wonders aloud about “real collaboration.”

“We have the capacity, the ingenuity and the spirit to solve this,” Newsom told the Board, looking painfully alone as he stood in their chambers this afternoon.”It’s going to take all of us working together. It’s in that spirit that I am here..The mid-year solution–difficult and painful as it is–its he easy part. The difficult part comes in the next four months.”
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His appearance was a good first step, but will he follow it up with regular monthly visits, so that the Board can engage him in policy discussions, as per their voters’ requests?

It looks as if the Board isn’t banking on it: Peskin and his fellow supervisors have put together their own package of solutions–an ordinance deappropriating $8.5 million in alternative cuts from the General Fund.

As one aide told me, “It’s important for the Board to set the stage now for the budget discussions in the Spring.”

But it would be great if there was a silver lining to the global crisis-in which the SF Board and Mayor started acting as equal partners in their efforts to save what they can from the economic wreckage.
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Blue Angel kills thousands in SF crash

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By Tim Redmond

That’s the headline we’d be reading if one of the Navy stunt pilots had the same misfortune as the FA/18 pilot just did in San Diego.

We don’t know yet if it was pilot error or an equipment failure, but we know this: Same airplane. Coulda happened here. The only difference is that the Marines probably need to fly training missions in and out of that base (although they could conceivably move to a less-populated area). The Blue Angels don’t need to fly over San Francisco.

Something to think about for next year’s Fleet Week program. If the supervisors decided not to invite the Navy precision flying team, they wouldn’t come.

Newsom swears in Campos

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By Steven T. Jones

A day after appointing David Campos to fill the Board of Supervisors seat vacated by new Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (which Campos won in last month’s election), Mayor Gavin Newsom marveled at the huge and enthusiastic crowd that showed up at City Hall for Campos’s swearing in ceremony.

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“Thanks for coming here on remarkably short notice,” Newsom said. “I’m impressed with his ability to raise a crowd, which is a cautious warning as well.”

Indeed, after an election in which progressives such as Campos consolidated their legislative power, Newsom does have something to fear if he continues with his autocratic attacks on progressive priorities, as we could see more of tomorrow when he is scheduled to announce a package of mid-year budget cuts.

But for today, they were just one big city family, a tone strongly set by Campos, who pledged to work well with Newsom, fellow supervisors, and those who supported other candidates in his race. And he singled out Ammiano for special praise, telling him, “I’m going to do my best to make you proud.”

Throwing money at Muni

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By Tim Redmond

I’m not surprised that C.W. Nevius, who lives in the East Bay suburbs and drives into work at the Chron every day, doesn’t like the idea of congestion pricing.

But his column doesn’t entirely add up. I mean, I though he likedmodern capitalism, which is an economic philosophy based on incentives. You give people an incentive to drive downtown — like free or cheap parking — and you never charge them for the external costs of their actions, and they are, by and large, more likely to drive. You take away that incentive — by, say, charging a fee that reflects in some modest way the additional costs to the city, the environment and society as a whole of their behavior — and driving downtown may diminish. That’s pretty basic stuff.

But he’re the big mistake:

It makes you wonder about the numbers the proponents keep throwing out. Between $35 million and $60 million will be generated each year, they say. Add that to the funds the advocates hope to get from the federal government, and they insist it will all come together. The money will dramatically improve mass transit, fewer people will want to drive in the city, and more of them will happily get aboard the bus, or BART, or Caltrain.

Let’s see, just throw more money at public transit and everything will improve. Have we heard that before? You bet we have and the problems persist.

I recognize that throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve everything. It’s not always the smartest thing for government to do, and often it doesn’t work at all.

But public transportation, like public education, is an area where throwing money around really does make a difference. Spend more on Muni and Muni gets better. Cut Muni’s budget and service gets worse. There are other factors (the competance of management etc.) but on a linear regression line, the correlation between money and quality or service is going to be pretty direct.

The reason mass transit isn’t up to Nevius’ standards is mostly because we don’t fund it adequately. Making the (mostly wealthy) people who drive — and pollute the air and contribute to congestion and global warming — pay a small fee to offset just a part of those costs, and use that fee to improve transit, makes perfect sense.

Sheehan’s strange coporate media crusade

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By Steven T. Jones

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan got a respectable 44,804 votes (16.2 percent of the total) against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. But Sheehan honestly thought she could win the race and blamed her loss on the media, writing to supporters last month that she going to run again in 2010 with the help of a new radio show on Green 960 AM, “right after Corporate Democrat Gavin Newsom,” who has a Saturday morning show.

“The reason we are undertaking this show in that the corporate media (locally and nationally) wrote me off and put a blockade on coverage even before we began our campaign,” Sheehan wrote Nov. 14 in an e-mail entitled “The Revolution Will not be Reported!”

Now, I love to bash the corporate media as much as the next alt-weekly editor; we endorsed Sheehan; and I personally voted for her and thought her supporters gave Pelosi a good challenge. But Sheehan’s rhetoric has gotten ridiculous. For one thing, Sheehan simply wasn’t going to dethrone the Speaker of the House, no matter what the media said or how out-of-touch with San Francisco values Pelosi may be. For another, the station on which Sheehan is going to launch her revolution is owned by Clear Channel, the biggest corporate media villain on the dial. And honestly, if it weren’t for the corporate media promoting Sheehan’s Camp Casey a couple years ago, would we have any idea who she is?

I wrote Cindy back to ask about the contradiction and got no response. But today, I got another mass e-mail from her asking for money to fund her new show (which she said begins Jan. 4 and for which she says she needs $1200 per week). For a donation of $500 or more, Sheehan will even do a 30-second PSA plugging “any event you are doing” or organization you wish. So much for integrity.

Rather than selflessly pushing for progressive revolution, it often seems that Sheehan just loves the spotlight.

Comrade Newsom slices and dices

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By Steven T. Jones

After watching Mayor Gavin Newsom’s virtual State of the City speeches (delivered on You Tube rather than the traditional venue of City Hall) – and reading the criticism of them today in both the Chronicle and the Examiner, even from Newsom’s two BFF columnists – I’m torn between two metaphors.

In the first few minutes, Newsom seemed like a salesman in a late night infomercial, telling me how I could get a complete set of Ginsu knives for just $19.99. “But wait, there’s more,” Newsom seems to say, if I order now then he’ll throw in a comprehensive climate change plan, absolutely free, the first city in the country to make an offer like this. Operators are standing by.

But then it just went on and on and on (there are almost eight hours of this stuff being rolled out this week) until Newsom seemed to morph into Fidel Castro or some other Soviet Bloc dictator, just droning on endlessly about the glories of the State (or in this case, The City) with the self-assuredness and lack of self-censorship that flow from feeling omnipotent and beloved by subservient subjects.

And to add to the surreal nature of this strange exercise in over-inflated egoism, Newsom flacks Nathan Ballard and Eric Jaye (apparently the brainchildren – so to speak – behind this fiasco) are trying to cast this cyber-lecture as facilitating a dialogue with the community (even though they turned off the comments section on the You Tube posting).

We’ve long argued that Newsom is overdue for some real dialogue, particularly with progressives and the city’s legislative branch, which was why the city charter called for an annual State of the City address in the first place. So if Newsom now prefers the online world to the real one, please use our comments section to place your orders or offer dear leader some healthy feedback.

Great day for biking

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by Amanda Witherell

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More please. Image courtesy of San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

In spite of the dreary un-bicycle friendly weather today, things are looking up for cyclists in the “safety” and “free shit” categories.

First off, this afternoon City attorney Dennis Herrera filed a request with San Francisco Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch to amend the injunction against the city’s Bike Plan. The city is banned from making any bicycle-related infrastructure improvements until an Environmental Review of the plan is completed, a draft of which was released last Friday.

But, the injunction was recently waived for the deadly intersection of Fell and Masonic Streets, which allowed the city to alter the traffic flow and install a bike signal. It’s great. We love it. (Though I still see cars blowing right through it occasionally, so don’t take it for granted, fellow pedalers.)

Similar to the Fell and Masonic waiver, Herrera is asking the court to review more than 100 pages of supporting evidence detailing an alarming increase in the number of collisions between bicycles and automobiles at locations throughout San Francisco. You can read the full pleading here.

“We are confident that our motion today makes a compelling case for how we can best address and alleviate hazards to cyclists and pedestrians while respecting the limits of the court’s injunction,” Herrera said in a press release. “With more and more commuters making use of bicycles as their preferred means of transportation, we have an obligation to do what we can to make bicycling as safe as possible on San Francisco streets.”

Top of Herrera’s hit list is Market and Octavia where, according to the press release, at least fifteen bicyclists have been struck by cars since the 101 highway entrance opened on Sept. 9, 2005. Cars routinely make illegal right turns and clip cyclists who have right of way to cross. The city is asking to change the traffic lanes so cars and bikes queue up in front of each other, rather than side by side.

Five other sketchy places to ride are also listed for safety improvements. They, and their collision totals as of 2003, are as follows:

Chevron not guilty

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by Amanda Witherell

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The jury didn’t think so.
Image courtesy of Justice in Nigeria Now

A federal court jury in San Francisco has found Chevron not guilty in a case alleging the corporation was complicit in the shootings, killings, and torture of protesters on a Chevron oil platform off the Niger Delta in 1998.

Plaintiffs in the case, who include Larry Bowoto, injured when Nigerian police opened fire on the unarmed protesters, have announced they will appeal the decision to the 9th Circuit, the most liberal appeals courts in the country.

“The fact that Bowoto v. Chevron made it this far in the process is a victory in and of itself, because it means that we have demonstrated that there is a clear pathway in the US court system for holding corporations accountable to the rule of law,” said Laura Livoti, founder of the group Justice in Nigeria Now, in a press release after the verdict. “This is the first time a case against a company for aiding and abetting human rights violations overseas has even gone before a jury.”

The case was filed under the Alien Tort Statute, an 18th century law that allows foreign victims of human rights crimes inflicted by US-based corporations to sue them in US courts, and a ‘guilty’ verdict would have been a first – similar cases settled out of court in the past.

So, this is a victory for Chevron, which has been spending a lot of cash on its image lately and was dealt a losing hand from voters on Election Day with the passage of Measure T, a business tax reform measure that will cost the billion-dollar corporation $26 million. The money will go to Richmond city coffers and Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin has said funds will be allocated for projects through an open public process, according to a story in today’s Chronicle.

SF slowly pedals forward

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By Steven T. Jones

City officials finally released the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the San Francisco Bicycle Plan, and while I’m still working my way through this 1,353-page tome, the pre-ordained conclusion seems painfully obvious: bicycling is good for the environment, and facilitating more bicycling is even better for the environment.

Why exactly did we need to spend two and a half years and over $1 million on this again? Oh yeah, because anti-bike zealot and occasional also-ran supervisorial candidate Rob Anderson sued the city for not adequately studying bicycling before proposing to complete the bicycle network and almost double the city’s current 45 miles in lanes, leading the courts to impose an injunction against any new bike projects until we can get this EIR certified.

“So far, it’s just a black hole for money, time, frustration… and cyclists are paying the price,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.

But the good news is that by next year at this time, the city’s burgeoning population of regular cyclists — which an SFBC-commissioned study placed at about 16 percent of the city’s population and growing rapidly — could start seeing new lanes, bike racks, and safety markings known as “sharrows,” assuming that Anderson and his ilk don’t stall this process further after the public hearings for the DEIR begin in January.

Meanwhile, activists and city officials have been quietly working on reforming how the city analyzes traffic impacts (known as LOS reform, which I wrote about here and which we’ll have another story on in our next issue), which could spare bicycle and pedestrians projects from this expensive, ridiculous EIR process. And I’ve heard from people inside both the Mayor’s Office and Board of Supervisors that they’re excited about moving it forward, so perhaps our creation of a more sustainable transportation system could soon move into high gear.

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