Photo from Rocky Mountain News
This is the kind of thing I feared when I criticized Matt Gonzalez for joining Ralph Nader’s latest run for president. I cringed when listening to Nader tell the Rocky Mountain News that Obama “talks white” and doesn’t express enough concern for life in “the ghettos,” using anachronistic and extremely paternalistic language to essentially hector Obama for not being black enough.
Progressives have a hard enough time convincing communities of color that we’re on their side without arrogant old white guys talking down to them and the nation’s first black presidential candidate. Nader says he sees no difference between Obama and the other Democrats he’s challenged and says Obama’s campaign is an appeal to “white guilt.”
The best part of the interview is when Nader levels this criticism at Obama: “He censors himself.” Guess what, Ralph? In civil society, we all censor ourselves from time to time, something that is particularly important for a presidential candidate. It’s advice this campaign would do well to adopt before Nader’s antiquated, quasi-racist rhetoric takes that desperate campaign down even further into infamy.
SFBG Blogs
Nader questions Obama’s blackness
Local Artist of the Week: Praba Pilar
LOCAL ARTIST Praba Pilar
TITLE Performance still from The Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno
THE STORY Reverend Praba Pilar of the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno travels the world offering fantastical prophesies, outrageous sermons, incantations, neorituals, and a freshly minted techno-communion with emerging technology. Inverting phobic cries for a precautionary principle, the church proclaims a liturgy that drives these technologies: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience — forward into the neoteric millennium.
BIO A Bay Area/Colombian multidisciplinary artist, Praba Pilar explores the intersections of art, science, technology, and community through site installations, performances, street theater, and Web sites. Her wildly diverse work has been presented at museums, galleries, universities, and on streets around the world while winning multiple honors, including the Creative Capital award and the Creative Work Fund award.
SHOW “Bay Area Now 5,” opening July 19 (performance: Aug. 10, 2 p.m.). Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $3–$6, (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. “We Remember the Sun,” through Sept. 13 (performance Sept. 11, 7 p.m.). Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. Free, (415) 749-4563, www.sfai.edu
WEB SITE www.prabapilar.com
Gas takes you through the wild wood to its magic mountain
GAS
Nah und Fern
(Kompakt)
By Erik Morse
The landmark release of Gas’ four-CD Nah und Fern (Kompakt) might well narrate a secret märchen that begins in the lowlands of the Black Forest, climaxes upon a Harz mountainside and ends in the enchanted mixing board of a Cologne studio.
One of many noms de guerre of Kompakt founder Wolfgang Voigt, Gas represented the extremes of the techno/ambient hybrid pioneered in small continental studios throughout the ’90s and released on hip electronic labels like Mego, Raster-Noton, and Mille Plateaux – Gas’ original record company. The new box set encompasses Gas’ four releases – 1996’s self-titled debut, 1997’s Zauberberg, 1999’s Königsforst and 2000’s Pop – whose sylvan intricacies appreciate from album to album in a spiritual tour of German romanticism and its putative antipode, techne.
But Voigt endeavors to merge these inconsistent paradigms head-on, finding the majority of musical sources for Gas in his collection of classical German genres, including Wagnerian opera, Webernian serialism, and alpine oompah bands, then mutating them through obsessive looping, stretching, and the ever-present bass drum. What is produced is an incredible acoustic environment overflowing with epic grandeur and religious hymnal. “Gas is Hansel and Gretel on acid,” Voigt has said. “…A seemingly endless march through the under woods – and into the discotheque – of an imaginary, nebulous forest.”
A surveillance video set to Gas music.
Ammiano: Brain-free driving
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Hands and brain-free cell phone driving. So What else is new.
(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on July 01,2008)
US Air Guitar Championships soundcheck thrashes past
By Ariel Soto
With their beer mugs in hand, a crowd gathered around a small stage at Bar None in the Marina for US Air Guitar Championships soundcheck on June 24th, before the show later at the Independent. Hot Lixx Hulahan, the 2006 National Air Guitar Champion who hails from San Francisco, started the evenings show by “playing” a myriad eclectic guitar tunes that spanned several musical genres.
Hey, hey, Hot Lixx
Each artist who performed was unique not only in their way of strumming the strings, but also in their personal fashion sense and ability to interact with the crowd. At the beginning of the show Hot Lixx said that what the judges look for at the actual competition is showmanship, skills when actually playing the guitar, and most importantly that they embody a powerful sense of “air” in their every move.
Video: San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival 2008
Guardian videographers Rhyen Coombs and Eric Zassenhaus reported from the Bicycle Music Fest on June 21.
Bowing to Humboldt-bred Jenny Scheinman
Fiddling around: Jenny Scheinman. Photo by Wendy Andringa.
By Todd Lavoie
Jenny Scheinman can do it all. The Humboldt County-bred Brooklynite has already worn plenty of hats – violinist, composer, bandleader, session musician, collaborator – but with her recently released eponymous disc on Koch Records, she’s donned perhaps her most impressive chapeau of them all: vocalist. While hardly a newbie to recording – having recorded a handful of avant-garde jazz albums over the years, including a couple for the venerable Tzadik label – Scheinman’s vocal debut swings with honestly blindsiding levels of “whoa, where did this come from?!”
The biggest surprise? Jenny Scheinman isn’t jazz at all, but rather a rustic collection of old-timey country, rambling blues, and rockabilly swagger. Yes, there is an improvisational spirit to these recordings – thus revealing her deep-rooted jazz connections – but overall the focus is on gorgeously twanged-out vocals and faithful evocations of the old south. It’s a mighty auspicious first step to the mic, bursting with the confidence of someone who has been singing all her life, of someone who lives and breathes every word that leaves her lips. As far as first introductions go, it’s just as quietly revelatory as Gillian Welch’s Revival (Almo Sounds/Acony).
I should also mention here that Scheinman actually has just released two albums at once – the other, Crossing the Field (also Koch) is a purely instrumental affair, which I haven’t heard yet. I’m sure it’s wonderful, but for now I’ll stick to discussing the self-titled record. And since it’s getting touted in some circles as her “vocals album,” I might as well get right to it and heap gushing praise upon her comfortingly familiar but still uniquely expressive voice.
Lennar’s bombing range in Orlando
Explosive news from Orlando: unexploded bombs found on Lennar housing site
How did Lennar build homes on a former military base without the live ordnance first being cleared? That’s the subject of a CNN report about a neighborhood in Orlando that was built on the former Pinecastle Jeep Range.
And as questions swirl about who knew what and when, a bigger question is coming into focus: who will the homeowners be able to hold accountable, now that their homes have been built? Is it the Army Corps of Engineers, the developer?
The report notes that “multiple lawsuits have been filed, accusing builders of gross negligence and seeking unspecified monetary damage.”
NIMBY nightmare: top ten things you don’t want to find in your backyard.
So, is this “real estate fraud” as one commentator on the CNN online edition claims?
And is it true that the government would have to step in and help the banks if all these property owners refused to pay their mortgages, claiming that the contract to buy the property was fraudulent, due to non-disclosure?
Either way, here is an interesting comment that should give prospective home owners pause:
” The twisted thing about real estate is you owe the bank not the developer. The bank pays the developer, and the home-owner is left with 30 years of house payments on a piece of property not safe to live on and lower in value than they paid for it. “
Seven Hells of SF: The road to hell is paved with potholes
By Kat Renz
Rounding the peaks. All photos by Frank Chan. View more here.
“When gas is five bucks a gallon, I’m joining you!” An excellent sentiment shouted by a supportive driver on the afternoon of Saturday, June 21, from her idling car. And it was something I’d been thinking all day, that the three dozen other velophiles with whom I was riding the city’s most vertical inclines, officially dubbed “The Seven Hells of SF Bike Tour” were the badasses who’d easily contend with the realities – at least the personal transportation ones — of the fast approaching shitstorm called peak oil. Yet would the driver have expressed the same enthusiasm had she witnessed our collective past five hours – including the four blocks of Divisadero we had triumphantly climbed to the finish line at Sacramento five minutes before?
You’ll recall from high school lit class that Dante’s version of hell had nine circles, and they were cold. This unique tour’s organizers’, Dan Reider and Frank Chan, rendition had seven hills, all scorchers, exacerbated by the fact we rode midday on the tail end of the very un-San Francisco summer heat wave.
“Maybe I’m the only idiot who’s done this three times.” Chan remarked once we were relaxing back at our starting point, the daisy-dotted grass at the east end of the Panhandle (Chan was also the only one with a gigantic camera dangling from his neck, and he still roasted most of us on the hills in order to document our agonizing glory). There’s a reason why the tour’s only offered about once every two years, as that seems to be the average recovery time. Regardless of our recently burning lungs and wobbly legs, at least three-fourths of our group of 42 finished, and all were stoked. One rider said it was the most fun (Fun?! Yep, fun.) he’d had in a long time, and another dared to suggest the tour should be offered more regularly.
The torturous route
In case you can’t wait another couple years and want to try the hell ride yourself, here’s a lowdown of the route’s most prominent peaks.
More Montreal Fringe Fest: Peg-Ass-Us, Zombie parties, faux kraut rock …
Nicole Gluckstern reports from the Montreal Fringe Festival. You can read part one here.
It’s Monday morning, three am. In the last week I’ve eaten my way through a pound of chocolate-covered espresso beans, a bottle of Excedrin, and countless bowls of $2 chow mein, and now find myself uttering the unlikeliest phrase of all: “I’ll almost be glad when the party is over.”
The plays, the pleasure, the poster. Photo by Barry Smith
Not that the party is ever truly over in Montreal in June. Montreal in June, like Madrid eleven months a year, is like an endurance marathon of frenetic activity. Sure — the Fringe Festival has come to an end, but tomorrow is Saint-Jean Baptiste — Quebec’s largest and proudest festival day of all, the one day a year that even the dépanneurs (beer stores) don’t stay open. Also happening as I type: the Suoni per il Popolo Music Festival, the First Peoples’ Festival, the Free Jazz Festival, a Baroque Music fest, and the Infringement. And it ain’t free–but I’ve still somehow managed to score myself a ticket to Leonard Cohen’s sold out concert on Wednesday. No, there’s no end to the party around here, but the Fringe, at least, c’est fini. Since last night was the official awards ceremony, I feel obliged to offer my own shortlist of totally subjective, unofficial awards, in no particular order, to celebrate my personal top ten favourite moments of the Montreal Fringe, 2008.
1) Best passionate dissertation in musicology: Led Zeppelin was a Cover Band, by Stéfan Cédilot. Not a play so much as an exploration of the musical path leading from old beloved blues tunes to 70’s rock-and-roll, Cédilot’s love for his subject is evident in every anecdote and every rarity spun. His air guitar skills could use some polishing, but his enthusiasm couldn’t be better.
2) Best off-venue set design and use of space: The Beekeepers. Built into a tiny corner of a tiny cafe, The Beekeepers set is claustrophobic, spare, and entirely apt. Boarded up doors, a solitary bee box, wood floors, and a single suspended picture frame to serve as a window somehow conjure up the vision of an old wreckage of a farmhouse, barricaded against the rioting starving on the outside. We, the captive audience, are not even granted the cover of darkness, and the effect is as if we are watching an uncomfortable fight between a couple struck with cabin fever while sitting in their living room.
Fucking Zombie Party! Photo by Barry Smith
3) Best reason to stay up until 4 a.m. on a Monday (and a Tuesday, and a Wednesday….): The 13’th Hour. This Montreal Fringe variety show, which starts at one am.m every night of the Fringe, is a cornucopia of spontaneous hilarity and a showcase of the best (and worst) performers on the circuit. Suavely hosted by members of local improv troupe, Uncalled For, the hour often lasts two, punctuated by spins of the “money wheel” which leads to prizes the whole room can enjoy. Plus they threw a Zombie-themed party this year which somehow managed to surpass even last year’s Mass Wedding party in terms of sheers debaucherous entertainment.
Pics: Some famous faces of Pride
Yes, rainbow people turned out in bliss-tipsy droves for Pride ’08, more than a million according to parade and festival organizers. Photographer Neil Motteram caught some shots of three of the Proud celebrities.
Supervisor Tom Ammiano
Margaret Cho (right) with Violet Blue (middle)
Margaret Cho, onstage
Cyndi Lauper looks thoughtful, frightened?
No need for earplugs at SFTV Unplugged
Stefan Grant and bassist Martin Morales rock the Devil at SFTV Unplugged.
By Kat Renz
A year ago, local guitarist Stefan Grant wasn’t sure how he’d continue playing live shows. The drummer of his alternative/metal band, Kinetic Chain, moved to Chicago, and the tribe was further split after he and the lead guitarist suffered a falling out.
And then, as so often happens in those bummer times, epiphany struck: what if they took a different direction from the guitar riff-driven, crashing drum sound they were so used to and went acoustic instead? “Let’s strip it down to what it is,” Grant said, adding that he wanted to create an opportunity to play and see live music that’s easy on the ears but still rock, as opposed to jazz or pop – a sweet space he considers relatively rare in the city. Thus was born SFTV Unplugged.
It’s not a novel approach – remember how killer those episodes of MTV Unplugged were back in the ’90s? “I think there are a lot of 30-plus people who liked Unplugged a lot,” Grant said, as we proceeded to rail off a list of our favorite performances. Alice in Chains. The Cure. That legendary Nirvana performance with Kurt Cobain sarcastically commenting on everything from harp-tuning to Leadbelly’s for-sale guitar amid a stage buried in star-gazer lilies.
MediaNews lays off toilet paper, pens
Denver-based MediaNews Group announced today that it plans to lay off all pens, note pads and toilet paper declaring that the cuts would enable the company to remain profitable while continuing to serve news to its readers.
The company, which owns several major daily newspapers in the Bay Area including the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, also disclosed that its reporters will no longer gather in buildings leased or owned by MediaNews as the company will be shedding all of its commercial office space in order to save yet more money. Instead, they’ll meet in freely accessible public parks where they will use scattered twigs to etch their stories into the dirt relying on cans and rope to call their sources. Bloggers will then summarize the etchings by peering over their shoulders, but attribution won’t be necessary, because, well, you can’t link readers to sodden earth.
MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton asked company employees during a press conference in a Denver city park to refrain from throwing beer cans at him so the company can recycle them for pocket change to pay down his vast army of creditors, which is currently threatening mutiny.
Singleton has also reportedly done away with “beats” at his newspapers and his few remaining reporters will from now on cover “whatever they can gather with crude tools available on the ground,” according to the only reporter capable of actually documenting the conference with a pen and note pad, a bored-looking Entertainment Tonight producer who was apparently passing time in the park before Val Kilmer made a rare, rumored appearance in an opulent Denver restaurant around the corner.
“These are strange times,” Singleton said at the conference. “It may appear on the surface that the American people care about the Zimbabwean elections considering the recent demand for coverage there. But my nose for news tells me its anti-union editorials on the front page of the Denver Post that they really want and need.”
Patriotism ain’t black or white
Obama rocked people’s socks off in Oakland, 2007. He’s been doing it ever since, and today he did it, again.
Photo by Khalil Abusaba
Ever since I saw Sen. Barack Obama speaking in Oakland on St. Patrick’s Day, 2007, I’ve been confident that he’ll be able to roll with the punches on the presidential campaign trail, no matter what gets thrown at him.
Today, Obama did it again, turning the predictable attacks on his patriotism into an opportunity to make a great and uplifting speech.
“Patriotism starts as a gut instinct, a loyalty and love for country that’s rooted in some of my earliest memories,” Obama said in a speech that’s being widely reported on the Internet.
Obama said that as he grew up, his patriotism matured to something that “Would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections: its ongoing racial strife; the perversion of our political system that were laid bare during the Watergate hearings; the wrenching poverty of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia.”
Obama said he learned that “What makes America great has never been its perfection, but the belief that it can be made better.”
Patriotism, he also said, must involve the willingness to sacrifice.
He then called attention to the service of John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate.
McCain’s campaign has been calling on Obama to condemn comments from retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who said this weekend that McCain’s service in Vietnam did not necessarily mean that he was qualified to serve as commander-in-chief.
Clark is a military adviser for Obama.
Obama did not directly address Clark’s comments, today, but after calling attention to McCain’s service, he said “no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters of both sides.”
Giants: Don’t give up on us yet
Aaron Rowland
Giants: Don’t give up on us yet
By A.J. Hayes
The San Francisco Giants may still be 10 games under .500 and play like a recreational softball team in their home yard, but after last weekend’s series win on the “road” in the 510, the club was whistling an optimistic ditty that sounded an awful lot like the old David Soul ‘70s hit, “Don’t Give up on Us Baby.”
Despite several tube socks full of calamities this season – several not involving Barry Zito – that left the Giants lugging a 36-46 season record at the schedule’s midway point, San Francisco somehow found themselves only five games out of first place in the National League West.
That fact, along with the Giants first two wins over the Oakland A’s since last May, had the clubhouse buzzing with excitement Sunday afternoon.
“We’ve had our struggles no doubt about that,” said Giants manager Bruce Bochy. “But nobody is out of the race for the division. We feel we’re still in this thing.”
San Francisco centerfielder Aaron Rowand, who had yet to scrub the lamp black from his face following Sunday’s 11-1 throttling of the white bucks gang, told me exclusively:
“This division is up for grabs, there’s no reason why we can’t jump in the mix and be a part of it. We’ve had some really good games and we had some really rough games. But were capable of being much better than we are now. Everyone in here truly believes that we have an opportunity to be in the mix when September comes around.”
There, two people officially affiliated with club orange and black went on the record with pennant race talk and weren’t whisked off by the guys in the CATS van.
Clean Energy Act excites supervisors
At today’s Rules Committee, Supervisors Bevan Dufty, Tom Ammiano, and Chris Daly, all expressed enthusiasm for San Francisco’s Clean Energy Act. Daly and Ammiano even broke into chants of “victory, victory” during discussion of approving the measure for November’s ballot.
“In 2002 I supported Prop D and I look forward to supporting this measure,” said Dufty during his comments on this new public power ballot initiative. “I think PG&E has not held the public trust in San Francisco well,” he added, citing the smear campaign PG&E launched against Mark Leno during his bid for State Senate.
The measure, known as the “San Francisco Clean Energy Act,” would amend the city charter to require that, within 120 days of passing the legislation, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission must “produce a comprehensive plan for providing clean, secure, cost effective electricity for city departments and residents and businesses.” This may include construction city-owned transmission lines, as well as procuring the resources to advance the Community Choice Aggregation plan of 51 percent renewables by 2017.
It actually goes one step farther and says if CCA falls through, the city must still get 51 percent of their energy from renewable and clean sources, 75 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2040. A green jobs workforce development must also be part of the plan, and if it’s determined that public ownership of the grid and resources is the way to go, any employees fired by PG&E, the private company that provides our power now, will be hired by the PUC.
Sup. Ross MIrkarimi, who introduced the measure, rattled off figures from Alameda, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and Sacramento, all of whom have publicly-owned utilities and all of whom charge the average household rates far below PG&E.
His figures, for a 500 kilowatt hour household:
Friday Special: Feds cough up $2.8 million over anthrax
Anthrax: the bacteria that wormed its way into the consciousness of an entire nation, thanks to who?
I like to cruise the news on Fridays in search of breaking stories that someone hopes will be buried by the weekend and forgotten by Monday.
I bet the feds are hoping that Steven Hatfill will be one such case.
That’s because they have just agreed to pay the former bioweapons researcher $2.825 million and a $150,000 annuity.
Hatfill, who lost his job, but was never charged, sued the Justice Department in 2003 for violating his privacy , after he was designated a “person of interest” following the deadly anthrax attacks in October 2001.
Five people were killed, 17 became seriously ill–and an entire nation was traumatized, on top of the already traumatizing 9/11 attacks.
Two post office workers died in Washington. An employee of American Media died in Florida; an elderly woman died in Oxford, Connecticut, as did a hospital worker in New York.
At least 24 FBI agents undertook 900 interviews, but no one was ever charged.
It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but at the news organization where I was working at the time, we were instructed to open the mail wearing gloves and mask, after anthrax-laced letters were sent to the offices of U.S. Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Veahy of Vermont and a TV news network.
I also remember local law enforcement turning out in full force, after white powder was found on the street outside my office. It turned out to be flour, scattered in a beer run, in which someone had gone jogging, marking the path from bar to bar with flour.
Asked if the perpetrators could be prosecuted, a local fireman told me , “Well, you could stretch it out to littering.”
Wish that we could prosecute whoever was responsible for littering an entire nation’s psyche with fear of anthrax.
But with the feds declaring the case “stone cold,” feel free to share your “anthrax memories” here, lest we forget how thoroughly terrorized we all were–and lest we ignore, at our own peril, how some will seek to reactivate those fears as the November election approaches.
Burning Man film revives key conflict
A new film about Burning Man – Dust & Illusions, which has its first public screening tomorrow night at CELLspace in a benefit for the fire arts collective Flaming Lotus Girls – revives questions about whether the rapidly growing event has missed an opportunity to transform itself from the best party on the planet into an important and enduring sociopolitical movement.
San Francisco filmmaker Olivier Bonin has been shooting footage for the film (which is still in rough form and awaiting final editing and a soundtrack) for more than four years. Much of his time has been spent with the Flaming Lotus Girls, who we were each embedded with when I did a nine-month immersion journalism project with the group in 2005.
Bonin has collected some amazing archival footage from the event’s early years and he scored insightful interviews with significant originators such as John Law and Jerry James, offering viewers a sense of what a collaborative effort the creation of the modern event was. Founder Larry Harvey comes off as sort of the last man standing and the often uncomfortable interview footage with Harvey certainly doesn’t help dispel the accusations that there’s a leadership vacuum at the heart of an event that has come to consume so much financial, emotional, and creative capital in San Francisco.
Tom Morello makes some noise for Cindy Sheehan this weekend
The Nightwatchman in the film Berkeley.
This just in for Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello‘s people:
“Tom Morello’s solo project and alter ego, the Nightwatchman, will play a San Francisco benefit for anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, best known for her extended demonstration at a camp outside President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch. Sheehan’s son, Casey was killed during his service in the Iraq War on April 4, 2004.
“Says Morello, ‘I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate until now. It is an honor to perform at Cindy Sheehan’s fundraising event because I strongly believe she is the kind of uncompromising righteous voice for justice that this country so desperately needs. Her unwavering commitment to peace and human rights as well as her intelligence and fortitude are inspiring and stand in dramatic contrast to the lame parade of mealy-mouthed sell-outs and red state war-mongers we are normally forced to choose between.’
“Morello will headline the fundraising show for Sheehan at San Francisco’s Fat City on Saturday, June 28, alongside Malcontent, an acoustic performance by Travis Bilenski, and a reading by Eric Victorino.
Raging with RATM: “Bulls on Parade.”
The Chamber attacks public power
The SF Chamber of Commerce is getting itself all into a frothy lather over the prospect of a public-power campaign, and the email that the Chamber sent out today is full of insanely inaccurate iinformation.
Here’s the email and a few notes on its most bizarre claims:
This Friday, June 27 at 10:00am at City Hall, Room 263 the Rules Committee will consider a measure that would put the City in control of our power system. The cost of this measure will be billions of dollars, paid for with higher utility bills, especially for business.
The cost to buy the PG&E electric system in San Francisco in 2010 is presently expected to beat least $4.02 billion. This is only a preliminary estimate, the final figure could be substantially higher. When you include the interest payments on the bonds and the associated severance and financing costs, the ultimate cost for a takeover will be more than twice that amount.
WHAT? Where do you suppose that $4.02 billion came from? It clearly didn’t come from any realistic study. PG&E’s dilapidated, poorly maintained distribution system is probably worth less than $500 million — and even if the city had to pay twice that much, it would be more than worthwhile when you look at how much revenue would come in.
San Franciscans Will Pay to Replace the Lost Tax Revenue
Taking over PG&E means removing PG&E from the tax rolls. That will cost taxpayers over $25 million annually in lost franchise fees, payroll taxes, property taxes, and direct contributions from PG&E. Those taxes and payments will need to be replaced – or services will need to be cut. The City is now facing one of the most severe budget shortfalls ever. The power system takeover will make this budget gap at least $25 million worse. Again, there is no current plan to replace this lost revenue. The PG&E takeover means either service cuts and layoffs – or another massive tax increase.
HUH? The $25 million the city would lose would be more than replaced by the money — several hundred million at least — that the city would gain in extra revenue from running a municipal utility.
We’ll All Pay the Price of Putting City Hall in Charge of our Power System
Right now, PG&E is regulated by the State of California. But a city-run power system would be exempt from most state regulations, giving the Board of Supervisors the power to make some customers pay more so others can pay less, siphon away funds needed for the retrofit of the Hetch Hetchy water system and delay investments in the safety and reliability of our energy grid.
WELL, actually the supervisors could mandate renewable energy — which PG&E isn’t doing.
So the battle is already underway, and already, PG&E’s mouthpieces are putting out wildly misleading data.
Should be a great hearing tomorrow.
Ammiano: Starbucks found on Mars
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Starbucks found on Mars due to a collision with the soy Milky Way.
(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on June 26,2008)
LIT: Beautiful photography exposes crude reality
photo by Lou Dematteis
Crude Reflections opens with pastoral scenes of a rainforest lagoon and the looming roots of a giant ceiba tree. Indigenous Ecuadorians are dancing in an open-air hall and traveling by canoe down tributaries of the Amazon River. A placid stretch of water seems threatened by nothing more than a puffy white thunderhead.
Turn the page. The viewer is blasted by roiling flames: the liquid surface of a waste oil pit on fire, the foreground charred to coal, the forest horizon blurred by a shaky haze of heat.
Turn another page and the river has given way to a viscous stream of oil seeping out of a “remediated” pit. A family is walking down a road, sprayed with waste oil to keep down the dust. They are barefoot. They are the Aguindas from Rumipamba, lead plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against Chevron,
Photographers Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak have put together an unparalleled pictorial account of life in the northern Amazon region of Ecuador, where certain elements of life are cruel and crude. For over 30 years, the land, water, and people have been tossed asunder in favor of a more marketable natural resource: oil.
From 1964 to 1992, Texaco drilled for oil in the Oriente region, but chose not to employ best practices for the industry, instead dumping the waste and byproducts into 627 open, unlined pits, polluting a region three times the size of Manhattan.
Color shots by Dematteis and black and white images from Szymczak are interspersed with profiles, written in English and Spanish, of families and children who have fallen ill from decades of drilling.
“After bathing, our skin was covered with crude,” says Maria Garofalo, whose husband and daughter both suffer from different forms of cancer. “I went to the oil companies, and they said this wouldn’t affect me; that the reason I had cancer was because I didn’t have good personal hygiene.”
photo by Lou Dematteis
Lennar asks feds for help–Republican senator blocks bill
Are we worried, yet? With San Francisco having climbed deeper into bed with Lennar thanks to Prop. G’s passage, the bad news coming from Wall Street and beyond can’t exactly be music to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ears.
As Lennar reported bigger-than-expected quarterly losses today, Lennar’s Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller expressed hope that the federal government would soon belly up and help bail out the beleagured housing industry.
Miller cited increased foreclosures, higher unemployment rates and diminished consumer confidence as reasons why the Florida-based mega developer experienced a 61 percent loss in revenues this quarter.
“With the U.S. housing inventory growing in excess of absorption and limited credit available, the prospect of further deterioration in the homebuilding industry will likely become reality absent Federal government action,” said Miller, who is apparently hedging his political bets by making the maximum campaign contribution to both presidential candidates.
“To that end, we are hopeful that the Federal government will acknowledge the need for further reform and will institute programs designed to stabilize and facilitate the recovery of the housing market.”
But a government plan to address the nationwide foreclosure crisis hit a roadblock in the Senate yesterday in the shape of a Republican from Nevada, Sen. John Ensign.
Sen. John Ensign (Nevada) wants $7 billion for renewable energy tax credits before he’ll support foreclosure bill.
This isn’t the first time that Ensign has played the role of lone obstructionist.
In September 2007, the Senate discovered that Ensign was using the “secret hold” to obstruct a bill that requires senators to file fund-raising reports electronically, rather than bury the identity of their benefactors in paper filings.
And for a short period in March 2006, Ensign blocked the nomination of Vice Admiral Thad Allen (who replaced FEMA director Mike Brown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) to become the next Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.
But now Ensign, who reportedly has been tasked with assembling a staff to win back the U.S. Senate for Republicans in November 2008, is blocking a foreclosure rescue plan that has broad bipartisan support until he gets a vote on his amendment to provide almost $7 billion in renewable energy tax credits.
As a result, passage of the housing bill to create a multi-billion fund to aid thousands of homeowners refinance costly mortgages into more affordable government-backed loans, will likely be delayed until after July 4.
“In an election year, very few things are actually going to make it into law,” Ensign told reporters, “So if you actually want to get something done, you need to be on that train that is basically going to be leaving the station.”
While Lennar spent $5 million to defeat a grassroots coalition that wanted 50 percent affordable housing in the Bayview, the City applied for $25 million in grants to bail out Lennar’s Shipyard development.
Here in San Francisco, Lennar Corp. has assured elected officials that there is no relationship between LandSource, a land and development company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, June 8, and Lennar’s Bayview Hunter’s Point project.
In a June 9 letter to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Lennar Corporation’s Chief Investment Officer Emile Haddad wrote, “We anticipate that there may be some effort to link LandSource to other Lennar ventures, including Hunters Point Shipyard. Let me be clear: There is no relationship between the two entities. Hunters Point has its own capital structure and financial partners.”
Haddad does not however explicitly mention that LandSource, which owns properties in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas and New Jersey, does have a relationship with Lennar Mare Island, which also filed bankruptcy June 8, leaving city officials in the already bankrupt Vallejo doubly stressed.
And nowhere does Haddad guarantee San Francisco a smooth, obstacle-free redevelopment of Bayview Hunters Point, which apparently is already facing a potentially fatal $25 million funding gap, according to City officials.
“Lennar is committed to continuing to work closely with our community partners and the City and County of San Francisco to overcome any obstacles and to work toward a successful venture,” Haddad writes. “You have my personal reassurance that we will keep you fully informed of any and all significant developments that may impact the project.”
“Likewise, we will continue to utilize the development’s partnership experience and qualifications to leverage all state and federal funding sources to enhance the project and ensure its timely completion.”
As for Lennar’s CEO Stuart Miller, he told investors that “notwithstanding the bleak operating environment, Lennar made significant progress during our second quarter.”
This progress included reducing unsold completed inventory. “We now have on average less than one completed unsold home per community.”
Lennar also reduced selling, general and administrative expenses by 60 percent.
“Given our success with asset reduction, we have shifted our primary focus to the execution of an efficient homebuilding model through the repositioning of our product to meet today’s consumer demand and by aggressively reducing our construction costs.”
Sounds like a potential Triple Uh–oh.
‘we are very pleased to end our second quarter with approx $880 million in cash and no outstanding borrowings under our credit facility. We have reduced our maximum joint venture recourse debt by approximately $1 billion from its peak level in 2006, which reflects a decrease of over 50 percent.”
“We recognize that the remainder of 2008 will likely see further deterioration in overall market conditions; however, we are confident that we will remain well positioned with a strong balance sheet and properly scaled operations to navigate the current market downturn as a leaner and more efficient homebuilder.”
Meanwhile, following a posting of a video showing some community members less than positive take on Lennar, someone replied with a video about Lennar’s homebuilding operations in Texas.
Seems like some folks in the Bayview aren’t the only ones, er, frustrated with Lennar.
Clean Energy — tomorrow!
The Board of Supervisors Rules Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow (Friday) to discuss the new clean-energy charter amendment. It’s a long-overdue measure that would give San Francisco control of its own energy future and set aggressive mandates for sifting to renewable resources for electricity.
The measure is sponsored by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin, and includes the following:
1. A mandate that 51% of the city’s electricity is generated from renewable resources by 2017, 75% by 2030, and 100% by 2040. This would be one of the few laws in the country that requires a city to move toward a 100 percent renewable portfolio. It also requires the Public Utilities Commission to issue a report every two years explaining how the city is meeting those goals. This would be a model for cities around the nation (and around the world), and would put San Francisco in the forefront of the movement to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change. Since state and federal governments are moving far too slowly on the most important environmental issue of our lives, cities are going to have to take the lead, and San Francisco – one of the most progressive communities in the nation — should be showing everyone else how to do to that.
2. A mandate that the city move toward acquiring its distribution system for the sale of electricity. Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which now supplies the residential and business customers in San Francisco, is spending a huge amount of money on a greenwashing campaign to convince residents that it’s moving away from fossil fuels. That’s a big lie: PG&E’s current power profile is 44 percent fossil fuels, 24 percent nuclear, 20 percent large hydro, and only 12 percent renewable – and the utility admits that it will not even make the state’s mandate of 20 percent renewable by 2010. . The only way this city is going to have a truly environmentally sound energy program is if we run it ourselves.
Of course, a publicly run utility has other big advantages. Public-power agencies all over the country have lower electric rates and many bring in huge amounts of revenue, which the city desperately needs. And public-power is good for the economy
3. Mandate green jobs and job training for San Franciscans. There’s a lot of money in renewable energy, and thousands and thousands of good jobs. The measure mandates that the PUC as part of creating a public power agency create job-training programs to help San Franciscans build careers in green energy.
The hearing is at 10 am. Be there and support this crucial legislation.