Elliott Sclar, economics professor at Columbia University and the author of You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization is one of the nation’s leading experts on the consequences of turning public-sector programs over to private businesses and nonprofits. In an extensive interview with Amanda Witherell, he discusses the central theme of our our anniversary issue.
The Chronicle has discovered how expensive it is to live here. I have exactly one thing to say:
Years and years of refusing to promote affordable housing — refusing to enact effective rent control, allowing evictions to go on without effective limits, building housing for the rich and not the rest of us — has come back to haunt San Francisco.
And on all of those battles, the Chronicle was on the wrong side.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence make the archbishop squirm
I stopped going to Mass the minute I got my drivers license. At first it was kind of a goof — my brother and I told my devout Catholic partents that we wanted to go to a different church in town, where we liiked the priests better, and on Sunday morning, when they set off for their parish, we set off for ours … only we’d stop on the way at a deli where the German owner had never respected the drinking-age laws, and we’d pick up a six of beer. Then we’d go sit in the park and drink for an hour, come home a bit dizzy and answer my mother’s interrogation:
“How was mass?”
“Good.”
“What was the sermon about?”
“Sin.”
What did the priest say about it?”
“He’s against it.”
We all tried not to laugh, and lunch would be served.
Soon we stopped pretending, and didn’t even bother to get out of bed. A Catholic-school education never quite worked; I think I was born with the Atheist Gene, not the God Gene.
But 16 years of exposure teaches you a few things, and when I read about the ridiculous furor over the archbishop of San Francisco apologizing for giving Communion to two members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, I had to laugh.
Who knew the scramble of the Republicans for the White House in 2008 would yield such icky comedy? From lovey-dovey phone calls in the middle of NRA advocacy speeches to bizarre backbends over evolution, I’m pretty much betting that instead of rapping Bush twins at this year’s Repub convention, there’ll be a full on circus — with elephants dressed as showgirls, and dancing macacas of course. Maybe their strategy is to put Jon Stewart out of business? Hey, it just might work!
Fred Thompson
This morning’s hilarity comes from a graphic in the NYT of (wide) candidate stances on global warming (pace, laureate Gore!) accompanying a sadly funny article on Republican candidate ungreenness. Fred Thompson, who believes there’s “no scientific consensus on global warming” spilt this gem on the Paul Harvey show in April:
“Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto. NASA says that the Martian South Pole’s ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.
Wow, never thought I’d write that sentence.
But Garcia picked up on a story today that I’ve been following, too, and he’s got the point basically right: A property owner whose case is coming up tomorrow before the Board of Appeals claims that Clear Channel tried to shake him down, demanding he accept a lousy contract — and when he didn’t, the company pulled a billboard off his building and made sure that he could never lease the space to anyone else.
The building owner, Cheon Hool Lee, isn’t exactly an impoverished victim; he’s a retired dentist who owns several commercial properties in the city and lives in Hillsborough. He’s a Korean immigrant who has done well in the United States, and one of the things he did was buy a piece of property on Market Street that had a billboard on top — a valuable billboard in a prime location. In legal papers, Lee and his son Tony assert that they’vbe been told similar billboards in similar places rent for $10,000 – $15,000 a month (and that’s about what I’ve seen from my experience watching the cost of political ads on billboards, too.)
Clear Channel had a lease on the billboard at 2283 Market and was paying the Lee family $697 a month.
Lee wanted more, and when the lease expired, he tried to raise Clear Channel’s rent. According to the legal briefs, Tony Lee contacted other competing billboard companies and other industry professionals who told him that comparable properties rented for “in excess of 10 to 30 times” what Clear Channel was paying.
“I spent hundreds of hours in the last few months trying to be reasonable with them,” Tony Lee told me.
And here, according to the legal filings, is what Clear Channel said: Take our deal — or you get nothing at all.
That’s because city law says that no new billboards can be constructed in San Francisco — and if an existing billboard comes down, it can’t be replaced. So Clear Channel one Sunday evening showed up with a crew and took the billboard structure on Lee’s building down. Now he gets no rent at all — and can’t replace it.
Although Lee technically owned the structure and the building it sat on, and could have rented it to a Clear Channel competitor, it’s gone now — and unless the Board of Appeals supports the Lee’s plea, it will be gone for good.
The message: Mess with mighty Clear Channel, refuse to accept our bad contract, and we’ll screw you.
There are, of course, complicated legal issues here: Who exactly has the “right” to a billboard, the building owner or the company that leases the space and resells it? Did Clear Channel have the right to put a crew on top of Lee’s building without his permission and take down a structure? Does the city’s ban on new billboards apply even when a billboard was improperly taken down?
I’m no fan of billboards, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to try to sort that all out. I’ve called Clear Channel’s lawyer, who said he can’t comment and sent me to the company’s government affairs office, where I’ve left a message and haven’t heard back. I’ll keep trying to get the company’s response and will update this post when and if I get it.
But I will say that at this point, it sure looks like one of the biggest media companies in the nation is doing something pretty damn sleazy.
This is really brilliant.
The San Francisco Examiner called Prop. H “a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum.”
We should also be wary of self-serving Republican billionaires like Don Fisher, who is sponsoring Prop. H, and Phil Anschutz, who owns the Examiner and has used its editorial page to attack progressives values like smart planning and reasonable regulation of greedy capitalists who would harm the public interest.
Why would I say such things about the Examiner, whose editorial also noted that “If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad congestion dramatically worse.”? Well, because it wrote this honest assessment of the measure back on Aug. 2, and even though Prop. H hasn’t changed since then, the Examiner yesterday used its front page endorsements to urge a “yes” vote on Prop. H. There was no explanation or arguments, just a simple position change on the most heinous and far-reaching ballot measure in years.
Guardian photo by Charles Russo
Chicken John Rinaldi’s quest to become the first San Francisco mayoral candidate to qualify for a grant of taxpayer money is still lumbering along like the zombies that attacked him last week, more than a month after the Aug. 28 deadline for raising $25,000 from at least 250 city residents. The Ethics Commission last night voted unanimously to allow Rinaldi one more submission of proof that those who gave to him through PayPal are city residents, overruling Ethics director John St. Croix that Rinaldi doesn’t qualify. At issue are whether to count contributions from city residents whose current addresses doesn’t match their drivers license addresses, a fairly common circumstance for the artists and techies who make up Rinaldi’s base. If the campaign can satisfy Ethics, it gets $50,000, and so its quest inches forward like the undead.
Today’s New York Times features a photograph of soldiers phoning home from Iraq.
My son this summer before he deployed to Iraq
I feel cheered and churned when I get those calls.
My emotions don’t resemble “300”‘s Queen Gorgo , who tells her her husband, the Spartan king, “Come home with your shield or on it.”
Lena Headley plays the wife of Spartan King Leonides in “300”.
I am not Volumnia, the mother figure in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who tells her daughter-in-law, “had I a dozen sons, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.”
But as a mom whose son chose to serve in the US military, I understand that my son is following his passion.
My son studying a medal he was awarded
I respect the courage and discipline that he and his fellow soldiers are showing in going into a war zone.
I recognize the need for troops in some situations, given that we are not living in a perfect world.
The 143rd Field Artillery’s farewell ceremony at Camp Roberts, California, earlier this summer
So, for me, it’s not about ending the war in Iraq just so my son come can home.
I know he’s likely going to be there for 12, 15, perhaps 18 months.
What bothers me is that there are no guarantees that the troops won’t be sent right back for a second or third tour No guarantees that they’ll get a break that’s at least as long as the time they’ve just served.
No guarantees of adequate care for veterans or adequate, functioning equipment for active soldiers.
And then there’s the fact that the US had no business invading Iraq in the first place.
Every day, I think about my son and what he is experiencing and what his presence in Iraq means for the Iraqi people, the US and the rest of the world.
Every day, I wonder if today, maybe, he’s going to be able to call home.
Every day, I hope that this nation will have the courage to talk about bringing our troops home.
And most of all I hope that one day I’ll be able to drink tea with my son in the garden, again.
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Tim Redmond recently reviewed former labor secretary Robert Reich’s new book Supercapitalism — below, he talks to Reich about economics, industry, and the pervasive creep of new capitalism’s moral degradations.
CItizens for Halloween report that at the Police Commission hearing, Martha Cohen, who is coordinating Halloween for the Mayor’s Office, indicated that the City might be willing to reconsider its decision to forbid portable toilets this year.
If you would like toilets placed in the Castro on Halloween, C4H urges you to contact the Mayor’s office:
Call 415.554. 6141 or email martha.cohen@sfgov.org.
Because a girl, boy, sheman or faux queen never can have too many places to go? Right?
Wokette’s got this lovely nutty rumor that Sean Penn would give Matt Gonzalez $5 million to run against Gavin Newsom — as a Democrat. SFist picked up, wondering if it’s a joke.
Coupla problems with the item. First of all, Wonkette refers to Gonzalez as a “deputy mayor under Willie Brown,” which would be news to both of them. Second, folks, the deadline for filing as a candidate for mayor passed quite some weeks ago. The only way someone could file now is as a write-in — theoretically possible, but since abstentee voting has already begun, and by the time a campaign got up and running, a sizable percentage of the votes would already be cast, the whole thing seems rather implausible.
I think Wonkette heard some very old gossip and thought it was new.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s calvacade zoomed past me today as I left Alameda island. They were coming from the Alameda ferry terminal, where Arnie and SF Mayor Gavin Newsom and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums had just held a press conference to mark the formation of a new agency.
It’s called the San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority, or WETA,and it’s aimed at bolstering ferry service as a fallback if a disaster takes out area bridges and highways. Like an earthquake or a Maze meltdown, we guess.
WETA was created by a bill that the Governor signed on Friday, October 12, and will get $250 million in infrastructure bonds passed last November to begin building more ferries and ferry terminals.
I suppose that means that there won’t be money for more free rides if and when emergencies happens. Remember the Maze meltdown earlier this year? At the time, I naively thought they’d make the ferries free for as long as it took to replace the freeway connector that had melted to toffee after a truck driver lost control of his rig and crashed.
But, no-oooo.
Still from Daisy Mohr and Negin Kianfar’s 2006 documentary “The Birthday,” about sex changes in Iran
One of the weirder outcomes of combining fundamentalist religion with national governance is that you have the leader of your country say things like “There are no gays in Iran. We do not have this phenomenon,” at an American university, only to be practically laughed offstage and spend the next week backtracking on the statement.
Another is that your country finds itself in the somewhat awkward position of punishing homosexuality with death, yet publicly funding gender reassignment surgery. According to this recent report in the Guardian UK, Iran is second only to Thailand in the amount of sex change surgeries performed there. Yep, folks – sharia law commands that gays be killed for having sex with each other only once, and that lesbians be executed if they have sex four times (talk about double standards!). But it’ll foot your trans bill.
Yet another strange thing to emerge from this situation is that your country is so fucked up that the leader of the major transsexual organization can say, as Maryam Khatoon Molkara recently did, “Transsexuality is a real disaster. It’s a one-way street. But if somebody wants to study, have a future and live like others they should go through this surgery.” Eek. (She herself convinced Khomeini to make transsexuality legal — no small potatoes!)
Iran’s fundamental answer to gay love is change one of the partners into a woman. Shazam!
Big business loves complaining about California’s famously “tough” regulations. But if they exist mostly on paper and there’s no one around to enforce them, than what the hell is big business whining about?
The state legislature gets the best of both worlds as a result. The majority Dems can show the unions how they’re protecting workers by passing new rules on occupational safety, but their big-business donors are appeased when year after year California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (known widely as Cal/OSHA) is systematically de-funded and top administrative posts remain vacant.
And now it’s worse than it has been in more than a decade, writes Garrett Brown in the rag Industrial Safety & Hygiene News. (Is this really what we spend our weekends reading?) Brown is a long-time investigator for Cal/OSHA. He notes that inspections have dropped statewide by 35 percent since 1992, and actual citations have declined by 44 percent.
In fact, California has one inspector for every 84,000 workers compared with the average among nearly two-dozen other states of one for every 50,000, according to Brown. (Those Commies in Canada have one for every 10,000.) Huge percentages of violations simply go unabated, and while employers are appealing citations they’ve received – which they commonly do and which are severely backlogged statewide – no one can force them to fix the identified hazards in the meantime.
That’s kind of like allowing someone to continue breaking people’s knees with a baseball bat until they’re proven guilty of the first assault.
Last night’s mayoral debate wasn’t terribly exciting, at least until the zombies attacked attendees as they left. A photo essay by Charles Russo:
Progressive favorite Quentin Mecke with Mayor Gavin Newsom
The first and only gathering of Newsom and his challengers.
Chicken John Rinaldi cracking up the mayor.
And outside, the zombies waited for brains.
Zombies attack and feast on Chicken
Zombie Chicken joins the mob.
So the folks at SFist have decided that we’re all commies over here because we think it’s okay to tax the rich and provide services for the homeless.
I thought we were all too intelligent in these circles to resort to stupid quips about the “proletariat,” and I’ve posted a response on SFist. But since I’ve had to have this fight since I was an economics major at Wesleyan way back in the dark ages, I have to make a point here:
The Soviet Union as we knew it in the post-War era was not built by Karl Marx. There were some guys named Lenin and Stalin who built a political system in the name of his economic theories. Neither of them had much use for democracy or freedom. One of them was a savage butcher.
That said, you have to admit that Marx was, and remains, one of the most important economists of the modern era. You can’t understand capitalism just by reading Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. The critique of capital that Marx put forward was brilliant; I never fully understood the role of labor in productivity and the way labor-price theory actually works until I studied Marx. So yeah, he should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to talk intelligently about economics.
I would add Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism to Steve’s reading list, too; I did an interview with him last week which will be posted on sfbg.com shortly.
The theory of money — how it’s created, what it is, how it effects the economy — is that stuff of dozens of textbooks and a thousand doctoral theses. But the bottom line is, money today is not a direct measure of labor productivity; it’s a far more artifical construct, as Steve points out. Money is created by the federal reserve and by private banks. At times, the government in effect prints more money at the mint to inject it into the economy. In practice, money — the dollar — is an internationally traded commodity, and the money supply in the United States is desperately hard to even track,much less manage or control.
Yes, taxes come from labor. But these days, a sane system would tax investment income and speculative income much higher than what we typically think of as labor. And a lot of the economy today is built on investment income and speculation that has nothing to do with productive labor.
Yeah, it’s all more complicated than that, but folks: If you can’t understand that money doesn’t directly equal labor, and that you can use Marx’s economic analysis without being a commie .. geez. I thought people in San Francisco were smarter than that.
Photo of Don Fisher by Luke Thomas, www.fogcityjournal.com, used with permission
Gap founder Don Fisher and other proponents of Prop. H, which seeks to invalidate city parking and land use policies developed over the last few decades, have sent out a misleading mailer attacking Prop. A, the Muni reform measure that would negate approval of Prop. H, among other things. The attack, which arrived in mailboxes on the same day many voters also received their absentee ballots, breaks a deal they had cut with Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin to not campaign on the issue in exchange for Peskin’s promise to support a less-heinous parking measure on the February ballot. “I always negotiate in good faith, and if that is true, this is very disturbing,” Peskin told the Guardian when informed of the mailer. “If A loses and H wins, it’s the worst day of my political life. That would set planning in this city back 30 years.”
Photo from www.cecilbfeeder.com
Beware, citizens, we’ve received word of an impending zombie attack in San Francisco. Our sources in the zombie world say they are likely to be gathered around 7:30 p.m. outside the main library, just as the crowd is leaving today’s mayoral debate, apparently drawn to that spot by the large quantities of fresh brains inside. Please take all necessary precautions, including not placing a piece of duct tape on your clothing if you don’t want to be attacked and forced to join the rampaging zombie mob. That is all.
In some ways, I feel totally cheated by this. I had no idea Tom’s of Maine sold the farm to Colgate. I’ve been brushing my teeth with their toothpaste for years, I’ve been to their headquarters in Kennebunkport (which is a bonanza of free/cheap products), and I frickin’ love their gingermint flavor. Love it.
Tom and Kate say they still have their values, and it’s all about broadening their market (Wal-Mart) and bringing those values to more consumers, and they still donate ten percent of their profit, but you gotta wonder what those values are really all about. Especially since they chose not to disclose on their packaging that they’re now owned by a global giant. Tom said, “I don’t see why our customer would be interested in seeing a Colgate reference. Branding is really about values, and the Tom’s of Maine values are intact. We are living those values, and that is what we need to reinforce among our consumers by investing in the Tom’s of Maine logo, not confusing them with another logo.”
Kate said, “It clarifies that we are still in Maine. It’s important, a sense of place.”
What? Maybe your summer house on Monhegan Island is still in Maine, and your factory is still in Maine, but this feels like finding out the man you love kills people for a living. World domination of the toothpaste market — what kind of value is that?
Did anyone else see “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox” last week at the Red Vic? That company is still family-owned, they give away 70 percent of their net, profit share with their workers, and Ralph Bronner was still whipping out his wallet and passing out $100 bills on camera and presses hugs and bottles of soap on anyone he runs into. Guess I’m back to brushing with the peppermint Bronner’s.
The chickens were back last night, come home to roost in front of Dede Wilsey’s (the swell’s chicken-in-chief) house, where she helped Mayor Gavin Newsom by hosting a fundraiser to stop Question Time from becoming enforceable law through Prop. E. Fun stuff, but the real fun comes tomorrow night when Newsom tries to shake his chicken image by finally debating the dozen candidates who are running against him, including Chicken John. The League of Women Voters event starts at 6 p.m. in Koret Auditorium at the main library, but seeing as this is the only debate Newsom has agreed to (insert clucking sounds here), attendees are advised to arrive early because it’s expected to be a capacity crowd.
Photos by Patrick Roddie, webbery.com
This morning on Forum Michael Krasny hosted Jennifer Friedenbach from the Coalition on Homelessness and CW Nevius, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing the homeless sweeps in SoMa and the vitriol stirred up by the Chron’s coverage of life on the streets by pointing at the shit, the needles, the trash, the insanity.
Near the end of the piece, Nevius says that using the cops to ticket homeless people who do these things is one solution and a way to hold them accountable. He said he doesn’t know how to solve the overall issue of homelessness. In the background, you can hear Friedenbach simply say, “Housing.”
Which is the whole frustrating disconnect on this issue. “Homeless” does not automatically translate into “criminal,” or “insane,” or “druggie,” or “lover of shitting on the street.” Nobody wants to see people sleeping in the streets, using drugs, defecating, or publicly displaying their individual psychotic problems. So give them a place to live. Don’t buy cops, buy housing. Let people do what they need to do behind closed doors.
One caller mentioned new housing developments at 5th and Mission and how none of the buyers of the million dollar condos are going to want to see the streets outside their doors in such a condition. Again, another major disconnect — developers want attractive neighborhoods, but when it comes to building affordable housing that might make those neighborhoods more attractive by housing the homeless, they run away screaming that it can’t be done.
Randy Shaw checks in today with another housing action plan for the city. I’m getting a real sense of urgency on this, all over town, a feeling that San Francisco needs some sort of comprehensive housing legislation. I still like a prop. M for housing, but Randy’s idea that the city needs to buy up as much land and as many buildings as possible also should be part of the mix.
The only problem with the city buying land and buildings is figuring out what happens next. Either the city mainstains the buildings, becomes the landlord and rents them out, or the city turns it over to a nonprofit to do that job — or, if we want affordable ownership housing for middle-class people, which is part of Randy’s platform, the buildings need to be sold as part of a land trust to make sure they stay affordable forever. Otherwise it’s only affordable housing until the owner decides to cash in and sell at some astronomical price.
Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor’s Office looks on as School Board member Eric Mar hands him the school board’s unanimous resolution asking for a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s site until health testing can be done. Crowfoot promised to “pass the message along” to Mayor Gavin Newsom…
Sup. Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi joined educators, spiritual leaders, and families and residents from BayviewHunters Point outside City Hall today to commend the San Francisco School Board for unanimously passing a resolution that asks the City to halt Lennar’s BVHP construction at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard, at least until testing proves that it is safe.
A dressed down Daly (there was no Board of Supes meeting today) joined the anti-dust rally outside City Hall
