BART

Parents in San Francisco: we want justice for Trayvon Martin

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“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” President Obama reflected today. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, said Obama, “I can only imagine what these parents are going through.”

Martin, a black 17-year-old walking back to a family friend’s home in a gated community in Sanford, Florida was killed Feb. 26. His killer shot him after pursuing him in his car, and then on foot. 911 tapes and a confession from the killer, George Zimmerman, confirm his guilt. But no jury has had the chance to decide the case, as police have refused to so much as arrest him.

This remains true, even after Sanford police chief Bill Lee Jr stepped down temporarily in response to a nationwide outcry.

Police say that, at the scene, Zimmerman told them he was acting in self-defense. 

“Mr. Zimmerman provided a statement claiming he acted in self defense which at the time was supported by physical evidence and testimony. By Florida Statute, law enforcement was PROHIBITED from making an arrest based on the facts and circumstances they had at the time,” (emphasis theirs) said the chief in a statement yesterday. 

The killing, which has been called a case of “walking while black,” has ignited a call for justice throughout the country.

This call was made March 21 in San Francisco, when hundreds gathered downtown after a protest organized just two days earlier.

At  6 p.m. in Justin Herman Plaza, 500 held candles and listened as parents of black sons murdered in the Bay Area spoke.

Cephus “Uncle Bobby” Johnson, whose nephew, Oscar Grant, was killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in 2009, expressed his support to Martin’s family.

“He was only 17. His life was taken away from him. This murder of Trayvon is very personal to me,” said Johnson. “It’s another baby gone.”

He added that, if Zimmerman is not arrested by Sunday, he plans to fly to Florida. 

“My wife and I will be on a plane to support the community.”

“It’s our kids who are going through this thing. If we don’t stand up for them, who will,” said Denika Chatman. Her son, Kenneth Harding Jr, was killed by police in July 2011. He was 19 years old.

The parents of James Rivera, Jr, who was 16 when he was killed by police in July 2010 in Stockton, also spoke to the crowd. 

“The pain still feels like it was yesterday,” said Rivera’s mother, Dionne Smith-Downs. “It’s been almost two years and we’ve received nothing. They didn’t even tell us why they shot our son.”

Many speakers asserted that, had the races been switched in the Martin case, law enforcement would likely have immediately arrested the perpetrator and he would likely be charged by now. Both first degree murder and felony murder are punishable by death in Florida.

In the United States, persons convicted of killing whites are four times more likely to be sentenced to death than persons convicted of killing African Americans. 

Hundreds then marched up Market Street. Many held signs reading “In loving memory, Trayvon Martin: 1995-2012.” Many wore hoodies, the garment that apparently made Martin appear “suspicious” to Zimmerman. 

Chants included “we are all Trayvon Martin,” “protect and serve, that’s a lie, they don’t care when black kids die,” and ‘Zimmerman: guilty. The system: guilty.”

The group then marched to UN Plaza, gaining supporters, including handfuls of passers-by and shoppers on every block. By Sixth Street the group was 700-strong.

Mourners then created a memorial for Martin at the foot of a pillar in UN plaza inscribed with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thousands in New York City also marched to the UN March 21, and the national call coincides with the UN’s International Day to End Racial Discrimination.

At the memorial, silence fell over the crowd when organizers called for participants to speak the name of anyone killed by the racism. In a chilling ceremony, many spoke, naming Sean Bell, Emmett Till, Nat Turner, Ramarley Graham, Fred Hampton, Troy Davis, Tookie Williams, and dozens of other black men killed in the United States spanning slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights era and today.

Speakers demanded the immediate arrest of Zimmerman. But many maintained that arresting the killer in this case may not prevent “the next Trayvon Martin.”

“When Oscar was killed we said, we must work, because we cannot have another Oscar Grant. Now, we have another Oscar Grant. And there will be another one,” said Johnson.

Several mothers, many of whom did not give their names, spoke of the fear they feel for their children when they walk the streets, not knowing whether they will be the next victim of a racist crime.

“They don’t care when people kill our babies. We have to fight and stand up for our own people and for our children,” said one mother. 

Interviewing Anonymous

Andrew Lam
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Interviewing Anonymous

yael@sfbg.com, steve@sfbg.com

There have always been journalists and activists devoted to safeguarding the free flow of information, but the age of the Internet has brought a new set of opportunities and challenges — and a new generation of loosely affiliated online enforcers collectively known as Anonymous.

This network of so-called “hacktivists” from around the world organize operations ranging from physical protests to cyber attacks on corporate websites, involving anything from small groups carrying out someone’s idea to large groups using downloaded software to launch sophisticated attacks on high-profile villains or in defense of embattled heroes.

“We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” is a common tagline members of the group use in announcing its campaigns, often through YouTube videos and accompanied by imagery of a suit with a question mark for a head or someone wearing the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by the film V for Vendetta, with its theme of the masses rising up against injustice, driven by the power of basic ideas about justice (see “Remember, remember the 5th of November,” 11/1/11).

The idea of the online community rising up in collective action under the banner of Anonymous first appeared around 2003, but it really caught on and went viral in the last few years, first when Anonymous organized global protests outside Church of Scientology offices in 2008 and again at the end of 2010 when Anonymous defended Wikileaks’ release of secret diplomatic cables, shutting down the websites of Visa, Amazon, PayPal, and other companies that cooperated with the U.S. government in trying to freeze Wikileaks’ assets.

Here in San Francisco, Anonymous helped organize and coordinate the waves of protests directed at BART in August 2011 after the agency shut down cell phone service to try to disrupt a protest of the latest fatal shooting by a BART police officer. It was through those protests that some of the earliest organizers of Occupy San Francisco say they met and began working together, and Anonymous has shown strong support for the Occupy movement.

So, for this year’s FOI Issue, we decided to chat up an Anonymous member who is active in the group’s discussions on its Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, which are hard to find and prone to being shut down whenever someone fears security has been breached. The following are excerpts from that interview:

SFBG Is there a philosophy behind the work Anonymous does?

ANON You should really ask the hive mind. We are all Anon, not just a single person. But I will answer you. There are a few things that bind all of Anon together: Justice, freedom, personal joy. We just want to live our lives normally and happily, and we believe there is a power stopping us from doing so, so we decided to band together and do something about it.

SFBG We’ve written a lot about Occupy and it’s the same thing: Everyone can only represent themselves.

ANON Occupy is the next step, I believe. But that’s just me. Occupy is the forum where people gather transferred into the real world. It’s just one manifestation of the hive mind in reality. There may be another one in the future.

SFBG How is organizing with Anonymous different from organizing in the real world?

ANON Safer I suppose. Convenience. We are only at the mercy of what’s out there in cyberspace. We aren’t going to be beat down by a cop who has gotten drunk on power. In the real world, it’s dangerous to gather in numbers. It’s come to a point where even a little dissent under the First Amendment can turn you into an “enemy” of a country you love so much.

Anon, we are people. We come together. We feel like doing something, we do it. We separate; it’s not always the same people. There is very, very, very little organization.

SFBG How does Anonymous tend to organize? Are raids the most common form of political protest?

ANON Raids can be and cannot be, depends on your mood. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. I have personal views on raids as a protest. But all I can say to that effect is, it is simply one means of a protest. There is no damage. Just an online sit-in.

SFBG Can you describe how that process works, in which some ideas turn into action and some just remain ideas?

ANON People just agree on it, or talk about which is a good idea and which is a bad one. You see it every day on the IRC channel, for example. The bad ones we disagree on. We all input into one another’s conversation. Even if our idea is wrong and we see truth in another, there is no judgment for being wrong.

SFBG What about people who aren’t great with computers or would have no idea how to find this chatroom. Would they be helpful? Would you want them to get involved?

ANON There are Anons everywhere. They talk to people and show them how to get here. I’ve showed people and others in this room have showed people. And this is just one congregation. There are many. Yes we want more people involved. We want the average Joe to be involved. You don’t need computer skills to be a part of anonymous. Just ideas, or questions. Just wanting to search for the truth of the world.

SFBG Does Anonymous have ideas and faith everyone in the group believes in?

ANON No. There are some ideas, but no faith. Faith, I believe, is really personal. But ideas, yes, we have many. And everyone ideas are important, whether they are brilliant or stupid, because they are another person. I guess respect and appreciation for other people for who they are is something we all agree on.

SFBG Websites targetted for recent raids have included those of the Vatican, AIPAC. How would you describe the pattern or category that most targets fit into?

ANON I guess I could say, corrupt. And there is proof of corruption. We don’t ever move without proof. But other than that, I am not at liberty to say.

SFBG It’s not based on corporate greed or crimes?

ANON I am really not at liberty to say. Anons come from all walks. We attack what we think is wrong, as a collective. It doesn’t always have to be corporate greed. It has to be crime. Personally I don’t care how greedy a company is. But when they do something wrong, I react. I’m sure there are some like minds in Anon, but I can’t speak for everyone.

A good example is back when PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa refused to release funds to Wikileaks. The money belonged to Wikileaks and the middle men would not release it. The money was donated, and they refused to release it…We saw it as wrong. It also hurt the free flow of information, of revealing what’s going on behind closed government doors. Who are they to decide those things should be kept secret? The people want to know and they should know. I suppose this brings us to another of Anon’s ideas that we mostly believe in, transparency.

SFBG Is there anything that should be kept secret?

ANON When it comes to governments, no. When it comes to personal life, yes.

SFBG What about personal lives of government officials?

ANON Of course that should be kept private. But when it involves the rest of the country, we are at an impasse. If they want certain details kept private, fine by me. But if they want to make back door deals, that is wrong. People should know what the government is doing. The only place where secrecy can be defended that I see at this moment is military defense, but even that can be easily corrupted. So we want to know.

SFBG What about Bradley Manning’s alleged leaks? Those were about the military.

ANON Personally, I think there is a danger. But as a whole, we want to know. Because secrets left in the hands of a few can become corrupt. We should all understand one another.

It sounds like an ideal, but universal brotherhood, why is it so far off a thought? Why can’t we all just understand one another instead of going out and fighting? A lot of wars in the past have had many secrets, many back door dealings, many deaths that could have been avoided. If people just knew everything that happens all the time, if people just knew the truth, wouldn’t we care more?

SFBG Care more about what?

ANON About others. We are human, we laugh, we love, we share joy, we stand by and help people. This type of society is separating us, the Internet unites us. It’s what being a human being is about. We are a whole as a species, not an individual,

SFBG A sense of community is an important part of it?

ANON I don’t know, but I suppose it does hit our need for belonging. It’s just one place we belong. A community is the side effect I think of just coming together and sharing ideas. Not a bad side effect, but a side effect nonetheless

SFBG How does the concept of diversity factor into this? It could be all old white men in Anon and no one would know, but that could still affect what ideas come out.

ANON Well, because personally I am not old or white — as to my gender, I’ll keep that anonymous — and I am a part of it. I share ideas. I couldn’t care less. It’s the ideas that unite me to other Anons. Some ideas do separate me from some, but there is middle ground everywhere. And true news and an open mind, I believe, can help people find middle ground.

Families leaving SF: It’s housing costs, stupid

Zelda Bronstein
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Families leaving SF: It’s housing costs, stupid

City officials continue to wring their hands over why families are leaving the city, and I’m sure there are a number of factors, but I can tell you that from the people I know — families who live in the city or want to live in the city — it’s all about the cost of housing.C

Critics of the SFUSD like to say that families are leaving for better schools, but those families haven’t been paying attention to the tremendous strides the district has made in recent years. Yes, middle schools are still a challenge in some areas, and yes, not all the public schools are great, but overall, most families that make the effort to find a quality school for their kids can do it.

The folks I know who work in the city hate the idea of living in the burbs. Nobody wants to commute across that bridge or through the BART tunnels every day; more important, nobody wants to be on the other side of the Bay from their house and their kids when the Big Earthquake hits. The problem is the money.

You want to keep families in San Francisco? Building housing for multimillionaires isn’t going to do it. If it were up to me, I’d float about a $5 billion revenue bond, buy up all the housing on the private market, put it all in a land trust and resell it — with the provision that the buyers had every right of ownership except the right to sell for a profit. That’s not likely to happen — but the city has to get serious about both building new affordable housing and (even more important) preserving what’s already there.

Yes, a lot of families want to buy a house, but a lot of families would be happy with a decent, affordable place to rent. Particularly if they knew that they wouldn’t be evicted so a richer person can buy or rent the place. What most families want is stability — they want to know where they’re going to live not just this year but when their kids are older. So many renters in this town live in such fear of eviction that it’s a huge incentive to move somewhere else.

You can talk about parks and playgrounds and youth programs, but San Francisco’s never going to be as family-friendly as we’d all like unless we can do something about housing costs and rental stability.

 

The struggle for housing money at City Hall

Zelda Bronstein
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The struggle for housing money at City Hall

It’s barely March, and the next election isn’t until June and that’s just primaries and the Democratic County Central Committee, but we just started getting political mail anyway. It’s a piece from the Board of Realtors, denouncing plans for an increase in the real-estate transfer tax “to provide subsidized housing to people who want to live in San Francisco but don’t have the means to do so.” Mayor Ed Lee, the flier says, is backing this “outrageous” plan.

What, exactly, is going on here?

Well, for starters, the mayor is distinctly NOT pushing for an increase in the transfer tax, not right now, anyway. What he is doing is meeting with housing advocates and legislators and trying to come up with a stable source of funding for affordable housing — yes, for families and low-income people, many of them longtime residents who are being forced out by Ellis Act evictions, others of them people who work in the city and would rather live here than commute from Pinole, which everyone with any sense agrees is a good idea.

The problem: For years, San Francisco used Redevelopment Agency tax-increment money for affordable housing. Now that money’s gone, since the governor abolished redevelopment agencies. Actually, the money’s not gone, technically — the increased tax revenue from redevelopment project areas still exists. It’s just that the state is now taking a bunch of it, and other taxing entities like BART and the school district get some of it, and now it’s impossible to send bonds and borrow money against it. So what was once tens of millions for affordable housing is now a few million.

“We might have $20 million a year in the general fund,” said housing activist Peter Cohen. “But that’s compared to the $40 million or $50 million we had in the past, and it still leaves housing short.”

Lee has promised repeatedly to fix that problem, to find a way to make sure that there’s enough money that the nonprofits who build housing can plan and develop for the long term. Right now, it’s being called a Housing Trust Fund, but nobody knows exactly how it will actually work.

Remember: The city’s own General Plan states that 60 percent of all new housing should be available at below market rate. All of the regional growth projections say that San Francisco needs to build more housing — for its own workforce, not just for the rich. (And the local workforce, for all the tech jobs the mayor keeps hyping, is still mostly public-sector workers and service employees, most of whom can’t possibly afford the soaring rents and housing prices in this city.)

A lot of the existing affordable housing money comes from the city’s inclusionary housing law, which mandates that market-rate developers set aside a percentage of their new units (usually 20 percent) for lower-income people. Most developers eschew allowing poor people into their condo enclaves, so they pay a fee into a city fund instead.
But if we’re aiming for 60 percent, and we’re getting (at most) 20 percent, we’re a long ways off. Oh, and the developers are starting to argue that the 20 percent rule is too onerous and they can’t build enough condos for the rich if they have to throw scraps to the poor and middle-class, too.

And some supervisors are squawking about building more housing for the middle class, and right now in a zero-sum game, that means less for low-income people.
This all adds up to a mess for the mayor, and it’s no wonder some advocates are talking about raising the transfer tax — which, after all, is paid by the seller of a residential or commercial building, and while there are absolutely some houses underwater in San Francisco (and there should probably be an exemption in the tax for that situation), overall home prices are rising again, and many, probably most home sales these days involve substantial profit. It’s not a perfect tax, but it’s a tax on a class that is (generally) better off to support a class that is typically not so well off.

Here’s the problem: If the mayor supports a transfer tax, and that’s part of the final package, the realtors and the commericial building owners will no doubt put huge amounts of money into defeating it. That would mean Lee would have to raise a bucket of money and campaign really hard to pass it. But Lee’s demonstrated that he’s not the fighting type; he wants something that nobody serious will oppose. Which is why my sources at City Hall say that he wants the transfer tax off the table.

That could mean that the Housing Trust Fund will be a basic set-aside, a budgetary mandate that a certain amount of money go into a reliable fund for housing. That’s one of the city’s most pressing needs (really, if this becomes a city of just the rich, even those of us who own houses or have rent-controlled apartments won’t want to live here any more. Mayor Larry Ellison? Eeew.) So I’m okay with that. I’m not a big fan of set-asides, but this is the whole future of San Francisco we’re talking about.

So the realtors can take a chill pill — the mayor doesn’t want to get in a fight with you. Sigh.

The case against 8 Washington

Andrew Lam
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The case against 8 Washington

tredmond@sfbg.com

In city planning terms, it’s a fairly modest project: 134 condos, no buildings more than 12 stories tall, on a 27,000-square-foot site. It’s projected to meet the highest environmental building standards and offers new open space and pedestrian walkways. It’s near Muni, BART, and ferry lines. And the city will collect millions of dollars in new taxes from it.

But the 8 Washington project, which will come before the Planning Commission March 8, has become a flashpoint in city politics, one of the defining battles of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration — and a symbol of how the city’s housing policy has failed to keep pace with the needs of the local workforce.

Put simply, it will create the most expensive condos in city history, housing for the richest of the 1 percent on the edge of the waterfront — and will further push San Francisco toward becoming a city that caters almost entirely to the very wealthy.

So in a city where the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest of us has become a central issue and where the lack of affordable housing is one of the top civic concerns, 8 Washington is an important test. By any rational standard, this sort of development is the last thing San Francisco needs.

But some of the best-connected lobbyists in the city are pushing it. One of the mayor’s closest allies, Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak, is a leading advocate — and the final outcome will say a lot about city politics in the Lee administration.

There are all sorts of half-truths and misleading statements by supporters of 8 Washington. Here are the five main reasons the project shouldn’t be approved.

1. It fills no housing need. San Francisco has no shortage of housing for the very rich; the dramatic need, outlined in both regional planning documents and the city’s own General Plan, is for low- and moderate-income housing for the people who actually work in this city (see “Dollars or sense?” 9/28/10). While San Francisco is getting richer by the day, the core workforce — public employees, workers in the hotel and restaurant industry, service workers, construction and trade workers, and a majority of the people in the lower levels of the finance and tech sector — are being priced out of the city. That means more people working here and living far out of town, often commuting by car, in what everyone agrees is an unsustainable situation. Meanwhile, more and more high-paid workers from Silicon Valley are living in San Francisco — again, commuting to distant jobs, either by car or by corporate bus.

The city’s General Plan states that some 60 percent of all new housing built in the city should be below market rate. San Francisco desperately needs housing for its workforce. This type of project simply puts the city deeper in the hole and further from its housing goals.

2. It’s a reward for bad actors. The main developer of this project is Simon Snellgrove, but one of his partners is, by necessity, Golden Gateway, which owns a significant part of the land — and which has been flouting at least the spirit if not the letter of city and state law and costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars.

As project opponent Brad Paul has noted in written testimony, when Timothy Foo, the current owner, bought the complex from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago, he used a loophole in state law that allowed him to avoid a formal transfer of ownership. That means the property wasn’t re-assessed, costing the city about $1.5 million a year. According to the Assessor’s Office, the deal wasn’t illegal (and these tricks to avoid reassessment are relatively common) but still: He’s costing the city millions by using a loophole not available to most people.

Golden Gateway, which was built in a redevelopment area as middle-class housing, is now renting out apartments as short-term tourist or corporate rentals. There are dozens of examples right now on Craigslist. City law bars the owners of rental housing from converting it to hotel rooms, but a loophole in that law makes what Foo’s outfit is doing technically legal. But he’s clearly violating the spirit of the city ordinance that seeks to protect rental housing from hotel conversions.

One of the main aesthetic complaints about the area — something Snellgrove’s lobbyists have tried to use to support the project — is the ugly fence that now surrounds the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club. But who do you suppose put that fence there?

Do we as a city want to be giving special zoning benefits to companies that try to circumvent tax and housing laws?

3. It’s an environmental disaster. Snellgrove and his architects, Skidmore Owning and Merrill, are seeking LEED platinum certification for the project, saying that its energy-efficiency, water use, and green building materials will make it one of the most sustainable structures in San Francisco. It is, the project website notes, close to all types of public transit.

But LEED doesn’t take into account what the building is used for (see “Is LEED really green,” 7/5/11) — and in this case, the use makes a huge amount of difference.

People who buy multi-million-dollar condos don’t tend to take Muni or BART when they go places. That’s not conjecture, it’s a proven fact. A 2008 study by the American Public Transportation Association notes, bluntly, that wealthier people are more likely to drive cars. When you move into the stratospheric regions of the ultra-rich, that’s even more true. A 2011 report on the Charting Transport website notes: “The very rich tend to shun public transport.”

The current zoning in the area allows for one parking space for every four residential units. Snellgrove is asking for one space per unit — in other words, he figures every single buyer will have a car.

Many of the people who buy these condos won’t be working or even living most of the time in San Francisco. These are condos for world travelers, second and third homes for people who want to spend a few weeks a year in San Francisco. “They aren’t going to be living here all year,” Christina Olague, a former Planning Commission member who is now the District 5 supervisor, told us last July.

If five of the 165 residents of 8 Washington fly in a private or corporate jet from, say, New York to their SF pad once a month, the project will cause the use of jet fuel equivalent to what a normal family would use driving a car for 330 years, Paul noted.

“How many solar panels are needed compensate for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel a year?” he asked.

Then there’s the construction issue. If the developer’s projections are correct, as many as 20,000 dump truck runs will be trundling along the Embarcadero for several months, one every two minutes — and it could be happening right as the traffic nightmare called the America’s Cup is hitting the waterfront.

It also goes against some 40 years of waterfront planning policy, all of which as focused on downzoning and creating open space. This would be the first upzoning of San Francisco waterfront property in decades.

4. It will wipe out what is mostly a middle-class recreation facility. The Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club will be closed for three years, then (possibly) reopened later as a smaller facility. The club — with two outdoor pools and six tennis courts — sounds like something for the elite, and it’s managed by the upscale Bay Club, but a lot of the users are longtime Golden Gateway residents and seniors. “I would say 30 or 35 percent of the users are seniors,” Lee Radner, chair of Friends of Golden Gateway, told me. Most, he said, are middle-class people, and the expense isn’t that high. “My wife and I pay $3 a day to use the pool,” he said. “I swim every day, and it would cost more than that to use the public pools in the city.” He added: “There are some wealthier people, of course, but many of us are retired and on fixed incomes.”

We’re talking about 90,000 total square feet of outdoor recreation space — which dwarfs the 20,000 square feet of open space the developer promised to provide.

5. The city doesn’t get much out of the deal. In exchange for upzoning the waterfront, creating a big all of buildings and screwing up the city’s housing balance, what does the San Francisco general fund get? Not a lot. The estimates for new tax revenue run about $1.5 million a year of the next 60 years — and when you translate that to what economist call “net present value,” the cash equivalent today of that revenue stream, it’s about $30 million. The Port of San Francisco is talking about creating a special infrastructure financing district — sort of the equivalent of a redevelopment area — to pull that money out in advance, which may not even be legal (since part of the land is a former redevelopment area, the state law that allows these special finance districts may not apply). But even so, a Jan. 14 Port memo suggests that the agency has plans to spend all that money on its own infrastructure — setting up a potential battle between the supervisors and the Port Commission over where the money, if it actually can be collected up front, will go.

Like any developer, Snellgrove will pay into the city’s affordable housing fund — in this case, about $9 million to pay for the equivalent of 27 units. No affordable units will be on site, of course; that would detract from the uber-wealthy ambience of the place. And it’s not clear when those units would be built. “Nobody builds 27-unit buildings any more,” Paul, a former deputy mayor for housing, said. “We’ll have to wait until there’s enough money for a bigger project, somewhere, sometime down the road. That’s what we’re getting here.”

Either way, it’s not a huge benefit for allowing this disaster of a project — and it’s a terrible statement for San Francisco to make. At a time when the mayor has cleared the Occupy protesters — who are talking about how little the rich pay in taxes — off the waterfront, the city is preparing to move in the exceptionally rich, who aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share in tax revenue to local government.

(Nobody knows for sure whether the costs of servicing high-end residential exceed the revenue the city gets from property taxes. In 1971, the Guardian put together the first-ever cost-benefit study for highrise office development, which showed that commercial buildings cost the city more than they paid; that’s been confirmed and demonstrated over the years to the point where it’s hardly even an argument any more. The supervisors ought to ask the city economist or the budget analyst to do the same sort of analysis for luxury condos.)

There’s another element here: Mayor Lee made a point during his campaign to say over and over again that he was an independent thinker, that powerful and influential allies like Rose Pak would not be calling the shots at City Hall. This will be his first major test: Pak and lobbyist Marcia Smolens are working hard to promote 8 Washington. And we’re already getting some disturbing signals out of the mayor’s office.

Lee told us that he has “no thoughts” about the project and hasn’t been paying any attention to it. That’s an odd stance, considering that his own Port Commission is pushing it and staffers in his office are working with the developer. This is a big priority for Pak, and the notion that she has never mentioned it to the mayor defies reason. Board President David Chiu, who talks to the mayor regularly, opposes the project, which is in Chiu’s district.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who pays attention to local politics could be missing what will be one of the landmark votes this spring on the Planning Commission — which will take up the project March 8 — and the Board of Supervisors.

The mayor, may, indeed, be ignoring everything that supporters and opponents of 8 Washington have said and may be waiting until the Planning Commission vote to take a position. But if he’s just ducking questions because he’s planning to support it, he’s making a big mistake.

This is a chance for San Francisco to go beyond the platitudes about building housing, go beyond the hype about “green” buildings, see through the fraud about community benefits and consider what this really is: A special favor for a developer who wants to cater to the top 1 percent of the 1 percent and move San Francisco even closer to being a city of, by, and for the elite. The only reasonable vote on 8 Washington is No.

Editorial: The case against the 8 Washington tower

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Editorial note: In 1971, at the height of the Alvin Duskin anti-highrise battle, the Guardian did a special first ever cost benefit study for high rise office development.

We found that highrises cost the city  more in services than they produce in revenue.  This meant that the commercial high rise boom could be fought on economic grounds, not just aesthietic and environmental grrounds, and the Chamber of Commerce/Big development gang could never adequately refute our findings.  In fact, they are now taken for  granted. So, as the 8 Washington battle is poised to open the floodgates even further for a forest of market rate residential  buildings, it’s time for the city to do its own study to determine the economics of high end  residential buildings.  Does the cost of servicing luxury residential buildings exceed the taxes they pay? We and many others in the neighborhoods are certain that market rate housing doesn’t pay for itself. But the facts are needed and so we urge the supervisors to direct the budget analyst or the city economist to do a similar analysis  for luxury condos.  Below is Executive Editor Tim Redmond’s powerful argument against 8 Washington.

By Tim Redmond

tredmond@sfbg.com

In city planning terms, it’s a fairly modest project: 134 condos, no buildings more than 12 stories tall, on a 27,000-square-foot site. It’s projected to meet the highest environmental building standards and offers new open space and pedestrian walkways. It’s near Muni, BART, and ferry lines. And the city will collect millions of dollars in new taxes from it.

But the 8 Washington project, which will come before the Planning Commission March 8, has become a flashpoint in city politics, one of the defining battles of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration — and a symbol of how the city’s housing policy has failed to keep pace with the needs of the local workforce.

Put simply, it will create the most expensive condos in city history, housing for the richest of the 1 percent on the edge of the waterfront — and will further push San Francisco toward becoming a city that caters almost entirely to the very wealthy.

So in a city where the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest of us has become a central issue and where the lack of affordable housing is one of the top civic concerns, 8 Washington is an important test. By any rational standard, this sort of development is the last thing San Francisco needs.

But some of the best-connected lobbyists in the city are pushing it. One of the mayor’s closest allies, Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak, is a leading advocate — and the final outcome will say a lot about city politics in the Lee administration.

There are all sorts of half-truths and misleading statements by supporters of 8 Washington. Here are the five main reasons the project shouldn’t be approved.

1. It fills no housing need. San Francisco has no shortage of housing for the very rich; the dramatic need, outlined in both regional planning documents and the city’s own General Plan, is for low- and moderate-income housing for the people who actually work in this city (see “Dollars or sense?” 9/28/10). While San Francisco is getting richer by the day, the core workforce — public employees, workers in the hotel and restaurant industry, service workers, construction and trade workers, and a majority of the people in the lower levels of the finance and tech sector — are being priced out of the city. That means more people working here and living far out of town, often commuting by car, in what everyone agrees is an unsustainable situation. Meanwhile, more and more high-paid workers from Silicon Valley are living in San Francisco — again, commuting to distant jobs, either by car or by corporate bus.

The city’s General Plan states that some 60 percent of all new housing built in the city should be below market rate. San Francisco desperately needs housing for its workforce. This type of project simply puts the city deeper in the hole and further from its housing goals.

2. It’s a reward for bad actors. The main developer of this project is Simon Snellgrove, but one of his partners is, by necessity, Golden Gateway, which owns a significant part of the land — and which has been flouting at least the spirit if not the letter of city and state law and costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars.

As project opponent Brad Paul has noted in written testimony, when Timothy Foo, the current owner, bought the complex from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago, he used a loophole in state law that allowed him to avoid a formal transfer of ownership. That means the property wasn’t re-assessed, costing the city about $1.5 million a year. According to the Assessor’s Office, the deal wasn’t illegal (and these tricks to avoid reassessment are relatively common) but still: He’s costing the city millions by using a loophole not available to most people.

Golden Gateway, which was built in a redevelopment area as middle-class housing, is now renting out apartments as short-term tourist or corporate rentals. There are dozens of examples right now on Craigslist. City law bars the owners of rental housing from converting it to hotel rooms, but a loophole in that law makes what Foo’s outfit is doing technically legal. But he’s clearly violating the spirit of the city ordinance that seeks to protect rental housing from hotel conversions.

One of the main aesthetic complaints about the area — something Snellgrove’s lobbyists have tried to use to support the project — is the ugly fence that now surrounds the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club. But who do you suppose put that fence there?

Do we as a city want to be giving special zoning benefits to companies that try to circumvent tax and housing laws?

3. It’s an environmental disaster. Snellgrove and his architects, Skidmore Owning and Merrill, are seeking LEED platinum certification for the project, saying that its energy-efficiency, water use, and green building materials will make it one of the most sustainable structures in San Francisco. It is, the project website notes, close to all types of public transit.

But LEED doesn’t take into account what the building is used for (see “Is LEED really green,” 7/5/11) — and in this case, the use makes a huge amount of difference.

People who buy multi-million-dollar condos don’t tend to take Muni or BART when they go places. That’s not conjecture, it’s a proven fact. A 2008 study by the American Public Transportation Association notes, bluntly, that wealthier people are more likely to drive cars. When you move into the stratospheric regions of the ultra-rich, that’s even more true. A 2011 report on the Charting Transport website notes: “The very rich tend to shun public transport.”

The current zoning in the area allows for one parking space for every four residential units. Snellgrove is asking for one space per unit — in other words, he figures every single buyer will have a car.

Many of the people who buy these condos won’t be working or even living most of the time in San Francisco. These are condos for world travelers, second and third homes for people who want to spend a few weeks a year in San Francisco. “They aren’t going to be living here all year,” Christina Olague, a former Planning Commission member who is now the District 5 supervisor, told us last July.

If five of the 165 residents of 8 Washington fly in a private or corporate jet from, say, New York to their SF pad once a month, the project will cause the use of jet fuel equivalent to what a normal family would use driving a car for 330 years, Paul noted.

“How many solar panels are needed compensate for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel a year?” he asked.

Then there’s the construction issue. If the developer’s projections are correct, as many as 20,000 dump truck runs will be trundling along the Embarcadero for several months, one every two minutes — and it could be happening right as the traffic nightmare called the America’s Cup is hitting the waterfront.

It also goes against some 40 years of waterfront planning policy, all of which as focused on downzoning and creating open space. This would be the first upzoning of San Francisco waterfront property in decades.

4. It will wipe out what is mostly a middle-class recreation facility. The Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club will be closed for three years, then (possibly) reopened later as a smaller facility. The club — with two outdoor pools and six tennis courts — sounds like something for the elite, and it’s managed by the upscale Bay Club, but a lot of the users are longtime Golden Gateway residents and seniors. “I would say 30 or 35 percent of the users are seniors,” Lee Radner, chair of Friends of Golden Gateway, told me. Most, he said, are middle-class people, and the expense isn’t that high. “My wife and I pay $3 a day to use the pool,” he said. “I swim every day, and it would cost more than that to use the public pools in the city.” He added: “There are some wealthier people, of course, but many of us are retired and on fixed incomes.”

We’re talking about 90,000 total square feet of outdoor recreation space — which dwarfs the 20,000 square feet of open space the developer promised to provide.

5. The city doesn’t get much out of the deal. In exchange for upzoning the waterfront, creating a big all of buildings and screwing up the city’s housing balance, what does the San Francisco general fund get? Not a lot. The estimates for new tax revenue run about $1.5 million a year of the next 60 years — and when you translate that to what economist call “net present value,” the cash equivalent today of that revenue stream, it’s about $30 million. The Port of San Francisco is talking about creating a special infrastructure financing district — sort of the equivalent of a redevelopment area — to pull that money out in advance, which may not even be legal (since part of the land is a former redevelopment area, the state law that allows these special finance districts may not apply). But even so, a Jan. 14 Port memo suggests that the agency has plans to spend all that money on its own infrastructure — setting up a potential battle between the supervisors and the Port Commission over where the money, if it actually can be collected up front, will go.

Like any developer, Snellgrove will pay into the city’s affordable housing fund — in this case, about $9 million to pay for the equivalent of 27 units. No affordable units will be on site, of course; that would detract from the uber-wealthy ambience of the place. And it’s not clear when those units would be built. “Nobody builds 27-unit buildings any more,” Paul, a former deputy mayor for housing, said. “We’ll have to wait until there’s enough money for a bigger project, somewhere, sometime down the road. That’s what we’re getting here.”

Either way, it’s not a huge benefit for allowing this disaster of a project — and it’s a terrible statement for San Francisco to make. At a time when the mayor has cleared the Occupy protesters — who are talking about how little the rich pay in taxes — off the waterfront, the city is preparing to move in the exceptionally rich, who aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share in tax revenue to local government.

(Nobody knows for sure whether the costs of servicing high-end residential exceed the revenue the city gets from property taxes. In 1971, the Guardian put together the first-ever cost-benefit study for highrise office development, which showed that commercial buildings cost the city more than they paid; that’s been confirmed and demonstrated over the years to the point where it’s hardly even an argument any more. The supervisors ought to ask the city economist or the budget analyst to do the same sort of analysis for luxury condos.)

There’s another element here: Mayor Lee made a point during his campaign to say over and over again that he was an independent thinker, that powerful and influential allies like Rose Pak would not be calling the shots at City Hall. This will be his first major test: Pak and lobbyist Marcia Smolens are working hard to promote 8 Washington. And we’re already getting some disturbing signals out of the mayor’s office.

Lee told us that he has “no thoughts” about the project and hasn’t been paying any attention to it. That’s an odd stance, considering that his own Port Commission is pushing it and staffers in his office are working with the developer. This is a big priority for Pak, and the notion that she has never mentioned it to the mayor defies reason. Board President David Chiu, who talks to the mayor regularly, opposes the project, which is in Chiu’s district.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who pays attention to local politics could be missing what will be one of the landmark votes this spring on the Planning Commission — which will take up the project March 8 — and the Board of Supervisors.

The mayor, may, indeed, be ignoring everything that supporters and opponents of 8 Washington have said and may be waiting until the Planning Commission vote to take a position. But if he’s just ducking questions because he’s planning to support it, he’s making a big mistake.

This is a chance for San Francisco to go beyond the platitudes about building housing, go beyond the hype about “green” buildings, see through the fraud about community benefits and consider what this really is: A special favor for a developer who wants to cater to the top 1 percent of the 1 percent and move San Francisco even closer to being a city of, by, and for the elite. The only reasonable vote on 8 Washington is No.

Noise Pop Roundup 3: Flaming Lips, Veronica Falls, Matthew Dear, Archers of Loaf

Tony Robles
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MVP for Noise Pop coverage this year goes to Ryan Prendiville. See below to find out why – Ed.

TUESDAY: The Flaming Lips at Bimbo’s

Time, for the Flaming Lips, is important. Because as a band — one that has been through all sorts of well documented shit — the Flaming Lips know the value of time (particularly borrowed) and have made it their work to not just create music but get into the complete manufacture of moments. Which is a tricky business, because moments are bastards.

Take all the pictures you want of the blinding lights, the beautiful costumed kids, the confetti cannons or all the other individual weapons that the Flaming Lips use to wage musical psychedelic war on time, and the moment still might not fit in a shutter, no matter how you slice a second. Full review here.

WEDNESDAY: Grimes, Born Gold, oOoOO, and Yalls at Rickshaw Stop

Cecil Frena described the lineup at Rickshaw Stop last night simply as “weird music.” He should know. Performing with his synth-fueled electronic dance trio, Born Gold (formerly Gobble Gobble,) Frena stood in front of a camera-slash-iPad pulpit, singing and conducting a third of the group’s sound via a motion-captured, clearly homemade, Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation era-esque military jacket. Full review here.

THURSDAY: Surf Club and FIDLAR at Cafe Du Nord, New Diplomat and Big Black Delta at Rickshaw Stop

“This song is called ‘Stoked and Broke,’” the band’s most talkative, spastic member introduced the first song, explaining, “because we’re stoked and broke.” What followed was a frenetic set of punk fueled, stripped down rock. With a rollicking tightness that reminded me of Thee Oh Sees, FIDLAR shot along, keeping the energy up by alternating singers. Full review here.

I left Cafe Du Nord after FIDLAR, hoping to catch at least some of Big Black Delta at the Rickshaw Stop. When I arrived another band was just starting. A local five piece, New Diplomat reminds me of the kind of groups that dominated the alternative rock airwaves in the late ’90s after grunge and pop-punk stopped being exciting. Since it was about the same time period when I stopped listening to the radio, and New Diplomat’s spiky haired singer had that emo/screamo edge that I have a hard time tolerating, it makes sense that the band put me off.

But then when Jonathan Bates, a.k.a. Big Black Delta started to perform, and I felt almost nothing, a more alarming possibility came to mind: maybe I’m burnt out. On record, I’ve liked what I’ve heard of Big Black Delta’s droned, vocally distorted hard electronic tracks. And performance-wise, Bates kept things appropriately dark, moody, and atmospheric, bumping up the sound with two drummers, each banging away on their side of the stage for some heavy hitting percussion. That whole stereo kit thing is usually the easy way to pull me in, but in this case all I could do was recognize it with cheap approval. Between New Diplomat and Big Black Delta the crowd thinned out a bit, and I leave early too, hoping to reset my baseline by the next day.

FRIDAY: Brilliant Colors, Bleached, and Veronica Falls at Rickshaw Stop, Matthew Dear at Public Works

My plan for the night was to see Veronica Falls at Brick and Mortar, and then hopefully run across the street to catch Matthew Dear at Public Works. But when I showed up at Brick and Mortar, the man at the door told me I had the wrong venue, their Noise Pop show was the night before. I apologized and, checking my schedule, saw that I was indeed an idiot. So much for that plan, at least I wore a coat.

The show was underway at Rickshaw. I didn’t know any of the bands opening for Veronica Falls. The androgynous singer onstage had a bowl cut and was wearing a collared button up that was the most over-sized fashion piece since Stop Making Sense. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was a nice voice – a little deep and dreamy – that mixed in with some catchy guitar riffs. The band was playing melodic pop, and having fun by all appearances. I found out later they are SF’s Brilliant Colors.

The next band, Bleached, had a sound that reminded of the Dum Dum Girls with a lo-fi punk edge. Two of the girls are blondes and the other two aren’t even girls. Bleached was more energetic on stage than Brilliant Colors, but I found their songs didn’t really hook me in. (It also didn’t help that there was a camera crew onstage with them.) The group harmonized a lot and decently, but too often spent a lot of time singing vowels (oohs, ahhs, and ohhs), which started to wear on me. They played a Ramones cover. I think it’s “When I Was Young.”

Still, it was good lineup leading into Veronica Falls, a UK band that has a retro pop sound as well. VF’s sound live was as clean and distinctive as it is on record, with nice guitar work over a signature drum sound that has an ever-present jangle that’s accomplished by little more than taping a tambourine to the floor tom. The band’s vocal style has some nice contrast, between Roxanne Clifford’s usual lead with backing from James Hoare and Patrick Doyle, but really I think it’s its structure and a Belle and Sebastian-like sense of lyrical imagery on songs like “Stephen” or “Bad Feeling” that sets the group apart.

So much so that on “Crimson and Clover”-referencing song, “Come on Over” VF can bust out some oohs and ohhs without it seeming like a shortcut. It was a good set, with a lot of new material as well, for the band that canceled its earlier SF debut due to visa issues. If anything, Veronica Falls was overly apologetic, drummer Patrick politely stated before the encore, “I know I keep saying it, and I feel like a bit of a dick saying it, but thanks.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6BFAwzwLU

It was before midnight when Veronica Falls finished, so I hurried to Public Works, where they were still setting the stage. While waiting for Matthew Dear to come on, however, I had the misfortune of standing in front of someone explaining to everyone within earshot how terrible the venue was, how it was a warehouse that they just put equipment in but never fixed up, how if she just got a warehouse for a weekend she could fix it up nicer, how there was a bare two-by-four nailed to the beam above the stage for no apparent reason, how they charged club prices but it was “not really a club.” (Sort of the reason I actually like it, that last part).

When Matthew Dear started performing, with a live band – his second night with the lineup – it all sounded more loud and abrasive than I had expected. I think my attitude, and my tired ears had been switched to bitch mode by the girl behind me. The show was sweaty and chaotic, it being a weekend late night at Noise Pop, but I called it a night while it was still going on.

SATURDAY: Noise Pop Culture Club at Public Works, Built Like Alaska, Hospitality, The Big Sleep, and Archers of Loaf at Great American Music Hall

This would be my last day of Noise Pop, I was convinced. As much as I would’ve liked to, I started the day knowing that I would not make it to Sunday’s Dodos show. Between my day job, covering Noise Pop, and pet-sitting three cats (who operate in a binary of meowing or vomiting) back in the East Bay, I may have taken on too much last week. That said, somehow, Saturday at noon I found myself back at Public Works, for the Noise Pop Culture Club, a six-hour-long block of workshops, screenings, interviews, performances, and something called the Seagate Remix Lounge that I didn’t really understand.

When I got to PW they were screening selections of Petites Planètes, another musical documentary series by the guy behind the Take-Away Shows on YouTube. The videos were cool, but the director, Vincent Moon, wasn’t there for the Q&A. Something about being a “nomad.” Dude bailed. Disappointing. Since I was sitting 20 feet from a bartender with nothing to do, I decided to get a drink, but the shaky feeling in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t had the right ratio of solid food to alcohol in my diet last week. Some spicy noodles from the food truck outside created a buffer on which I began to add of few layers of bourbon, while watching the restored, color version of Méliès A Trip to the Moon, with soundtrack by AIR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nx8hVGzSO4

The main plan was to see Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters play the drums. Modeliste was there as part of a Q&A with the makers of Re:Generation Music Project, a documentary-slash-Hyundai promotion in which he appeared. The clips made the recently released film (which apparently no one in the audience had seen) seem interesting, if only for scenes with whipper snapper EDM artists like Skrillex and Pretty Lights attempting to work with established musicians in other genres, awkwardly. At the end Modeliste played the drums for a bit, and the snare was so loud that each time he smacked it everyone in the audience blinked. A walk outside in the sun and a Bloody Mary later, I returned for a how-to session on using Ableton, and realized I am un-Able ton stay awake.

Clearly, when I made it to the Great American Music Hall, I was in bad shape. Nearly asleep on my feet, with quite a bit of time to go, and not thinking clearly, I made a bad strategic move that combines Red Bull and vodka, two things I don’t like anymore together than apart. When the first band, Built Like Alaska went onstage, I was in a fairly vile mood, my head hanging limp over the balcony while I wrote down petty things about the drummer that I didn’t like: his hat (a fedora indoors) his shirt (vintage Mickey Mouse) his facial hair (Tom Selleck meets Mario Brothers). All this, when his consistently irregular drumming was actually my favorite part of the band who I really had no problem with. Clearly, I was hating hard that night.

Until the next band, Hospitality played. I’d never heard Hospitality before – it was the band’s first time playing in San Francisco – but the sound pulled me in almost immediately, led by the charming, identifiable lilt in guitarist and lead singer Amber Papini’s voice. The songs were light and bouncy, and Papini performed with a slight disaffected edge, always looking up and off to something above the crowd, making strange faces and rolling her eyes at no one in particular. When I got home later, I went online almost immediately to listen to its album and find the song “Friends of Friends.”

Likewise, I tried to find music from the final opener, the Big Sleep, but that’s more of a band to see in concert form, as the trio’s main attraction is a Jack White-like guitarist, who has a lively style of playing and a way of alternating his sound between growling and loud to Jesus Christ, where did I put my ear plugs, I can feel my cochlear hair cells dying.

Now I’m not the biggest Archers of Loaf fan – the band’s actually only been on my radar since a number of high profile reissues last year – but other people at the Great American were clearly eager to see the reformed act live. When a few random notes came out of bassist Matt Gentling’s instrument during the band’s set-up a woman above stage in the balcony yelped, jumping to her feet and clapping her hands together excitedly.

Launching into “Harnessed in Slums,” the band played with an easy energy that gave no suggestion of their hiatus or age, and people in the crowd were shouting “I want waste! We want waste!” along with the chorus. Gentling in particular was electric. He leapt around stage and struck every hard rock guitar god stance imaginable but did it with a physicality that actually pulled them off. (Dude is ripped, FYI.)

At one point early on, struggling with some technical issues, Gentling looked at singer-guitarist Eric Bachmann and joked, “It’s just like the old days, everything is breaking.” Not quite getting the kink out of his bass, Gentling asked the crowd if it’d be ok if the band just kept playing through the difficulty, and Archers of Loaf continued on, powering through a long set. The place wasn’t full, but the crowd made up for it, and was still shaking the floorboards fifteen or so songs later when Archers play “Wrong” and shred a version of “Nostalgia”, making an encore completely obvious.

Ten minutes later – when I headed for BART to wait for a train alongside a couple of giggling guys laying on the platform surrounded by what must have been a dozen empty nitrous canisters – I was no longer tired and sent a text that read: “Okay. That was a good show. Worth it.”

Occupy 4 Prisoners hits San Quentin

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Occupy 4 Prisoners hits San Quentin

About 800 protesters marched to San Quentin’s East Gate in a day to protest what they called inhumane conditions in prison Feb. 20

Protesters called for an end to the practice of trying children as adults, three strikes laws, life sentences, life without the possibility of parole, and the death penalty.They did not call for the dismantling of the prison system or an end to the practice of incarceration, as Chip Johnson implies here.

In San Quentin– and in prisons across the country—inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes for decades. Kids as young as 13 are tried as adults and sometimes sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In three-strikes states, people are sentenced to decades in prison for non-violent crimes that sometimes amount to less than a couple hundred dollars in damages. And in death penalty states, state-sponsored execution means that lives, sometimes innocent, are thrown away.

Twenty-four US states do not have three strikes laws, many countries cap prison sentences at 15 years regardless of the severity of the crime, and only one European country- Belarus- continues to impose the death penalty. The United States incarcerates its citizens at a rate that far surpasses any other country in the world; second on the list in Rwanda.

Conditions and laws like these have spurred decades of prison reform and prison abolition activism, both from inmates and supporters on the outside. Feb. 20, this movement joined with Occupy Oakland to protest outside San Quentin prison and demand that these issues be addressed.

As protesters arrived, organizers blasted music, hoping to reach the ears of prisoners. Dozens of prison guards and representatives from the Marin County sheriff’s department were stationed in front of the prison gate, and well as on hills looking down on the protest group.

The loud music continued with a performance from the Brass Liberation Orchestra, and subsequently a drumming ritual.

“As First Nations people, we’re no strangers to occupation. We’re also no strangers to prison. The first prisons were the reservation and the slave plantation,” said George Galvis, Executive Director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice.

“We have post-colonial stress disorder in our communities,” added Galvis.

Author, film producer (Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story) and 2006 California gubernatorial candidate Barbara Becnel helped facilitate the event.

In her opening statements, Becnel praised the crowd, packed with Occupy activists, family members of incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, and others.

“We should really be proud of ourselves today. Because today, we are history makers. We have merged the prison rights movement with the Occupy movement,” said Becnel to an eruption of applause.

Throughout the program, speakers read solidarity statements addressed to Occupy Oakland from prisoners across the country, including Mumia Abu Jamal, Leanard Peltier, Kevin Cooper, and group statements from Pelican Bay human rights organizers, and those involved in state-wide prison strikes in Georgia.

A movement has coalesced around the claim that Cooper, a death row inmate at San Quentin since 1985, is innocent. Cooper was denied an appeal in 2009 in a ninth-circuit court case in which five judges dissented, declaring that, “the state of California may be about to execute an innocent man.” Their 103-page dissent statement includes descriptions of evidence tampering leading to Cooper’s conviction.

Cooper helped call for the Occupy 4 Prisoners day of action.

Speakers at the rally called for Cooper’s freedom, and for the end of death row entirely.

Becnel related a story about some prisoners, charged with life without the possibility of parole, that she had met while campaigning against the death sentence for Stan “Tookie” Williams.

The men, Becnel said, told her: “We only leave here in a casket also. We are also dead men walking.”

Speakers also decried the use of solitary confinement as a punishment in prisons.

Sarah Shourd, known for her imprisonment in Iran after accidentally crossing the border during a hike, spoke along with fellow imprisoned hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer.

Shourd, who was held in solitary confinement for 14 months, related her experiences.

“After just two months my mind began to slip. I would spend large portions of my day crouched down by a small slot in my door, listening for any sounds from the outside that might distract me from the sheer terror of my isolation.”

A statement from a Texas prisoner, read by an Occupy Wall Street organizer, also addressed solitary confinement.

“We tend to think of man as a collection of individuals, each complete in himself, who just happen to come together to satisfy certain needs. Actually, however, there is nothing distinctly human that can be exhibited by an individual in isolation,” said the philosophical letter.

The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike last year highlighted solitary confinement, and prisoners demanded an end to the practice, in which inmates are held in isolated rooms with no sunlight for 23 hours a day, often for years on end. Some inmates at Pelican Bay have been held in these conditions for over 30 years.

Organizers of the hunger strike called it off when the California Department of Corrections promised to investigate the issue, but started to strike again several months later when no changes had been made to any of the conditions that they were protesting.

Kelly Turner, 42, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for writing a bad check for $146.16 in 1997, was also placed in solitary confinement for one year. However, she focused her speech at the rally on California’s three strikes law, the legislation that turned what would have been a three-year sentence for forgery into a possible life sentence for Turner. Turner said she was lucky that good pro bono lawyers defended her, and would likely still be in prison had they not; she now owns her own business.

Turner, who advocates for Families to Amend California Three Strikes (FACTS), urged the crowd to vote for an initiative to amend the law that is slated to appear on the California ballot this November. 

In her speech, Turner described meeting women in the Central California Women’s Facility is Chowchilla that were also serving decades-long sentences after having been charged with a third strike.

“I am here today for the woman that was on my dorm that had 27 years to life for drinking a 99 cent lemon line soda out of a store. Or the woman who stole a jar of Vaseline, a bottle of vitamins, two pairs of boxers,” said Turner.

Tatiana, a young prisoners rights advocate who spent time in juvenile hall, read a statement from incarcerated youth Veronica Hernandez.

Hernandez, 20, has been imprisoned since age 16.

She was tried as an adult, an outcome that she attributes to a public defender who did not do his best to fight for her.

“There are no law libraries or legal services at juvenile hall, so a juvenile, for better or for worse, is entirely dependent on his or her court-appointed attorney, and must trust that he or she will lead them in the right direction. Unfortunately for me, that direction was to adult court. I now face a life sentence should I be convicted,” said Hernandez in her statement.

No speaker argued for the dismantling of the prison system, instead focusing on what they saw as unjust sentencing and inhumane treatment in prisons.

In a statement calling for Occupy 4 Prisoners, Kevin Cooper connected a call to end the death penalty with struggle for correct racial and economic justice and an end police brutality:

“America has a deep-seeded philosophy in which it only allows for the execution of its poorest people. These seeds have taken root and have grown in such a way that no person who this system sees as a ‘have-not’ is safe from the death machine. Whether they are within (San Quentin) or on a BART platform.”

Bauer also expressed the importance of tying prison rights to the Occupy movement, saying, “This Occupy movement needs to permeate the prisons. God forbid one day some people here will be on the other side of this fence. But when movements get strong, people start getting locked up. We should know this. This happens in every country. Prisons are places where movements are killed. But at the same time, when movements successfully permeate prisons, a space built to break people down, the movement is at its strongest. This is true all over the world.”

Occupy Oakland organizers have already been hit with bizarre and seemingly invalid charges, such as “lyching,” “bike,” “boat,” and umbrella. In one of the most extreme cases, Khali, an Occupy Oakland protester, may face life in prison after being arrested for a allegedly taking a blanket out of a garbage can. Advocates for Khali say that he was denied prescription medications in jail for ten days before allegedly assaulting a police officer; his third strike.

Well-known prison rights advocate and former Black Panther Elaine Brown ended the program. After remarking that “there aren’t enough songs in this movement,” she sang Oh, Freedom as the crowd peacefully exited the site, as several volunteers picked up any trash that was left behind.

“Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my comrades and be free,” sang Brown.

Live Shots: Decentralized Dance Party

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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All photos by Bowerbird Photography
 
When Sam Love and I finally arrived at Union Square on Fri/27 night, we were surprised by the mass of boomboxes perched on peoples’ shoulders, like a thousand John Cusacks in Say Anything, heading down Powell Street. Somehow, we found our friends (Ickles and Eckles) when the party descended at the Powell Street BART station. The music blared and tourists careened their heads over the banisters of the station to see what the heck was going on. It was a Decentralized Dance Party (DDP), where strangers get dressed up, gather with their old boomboxes, and wait for the organizers to hijack a radio frequency, where they send out the jams on long antennas, for some major noise and wild Friday night dancing.

The theme was “Strictly Business,” so at times it was hard to tell the downtown suits from the party people, which just added more crazy to the mix. Of course, it got pretty hot on the concrete dance floor and layers were quickly stripped. Eventually, we found ourselves walking down Market, a hoard of twinkle-toed goofballs, getting down to everything from Journey to LMFAO. Almost to the Ferry Building, we stopped in a business park at 1 Bush Plaza and were told — gleefully? — that we had amassed 400 noise violations. The cops gave us one more song. Little did they know, DDP would pick a nearly 15 minute-long song – extending the party just long enough to finish off those “water” bottles and find someone’s shoulder to dance on.

Gov. Brown backs high-speed rail and other big ideas

Sasha Cuttler
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4
Gov. Brown backs high-speed rail and other big ideas

California Gov. Jerry Brown this morning used a big portion of his annual State of the State speech to promote the construction of a high-speed rail system for California – a project that has been under attack by conservatives, as we reported in this week’s paper – chiding those who believe the state can’t do big things anymore.

“Contrary to those declinists, who sing of Texas and bemoan our woes, California is still the land of dreams,” Brown said, a theme that he developed and returned to throughout his speech, calling them “critics who fantasize that California is a failed state.”

Instead, Brown optimistically called for California to take on big projects, singling out high-speed rail, the conversion to sustainable energy sources, and a major water project that will address environmental issues in the Delta and the needs for drinking water and agricultural uses.

But it was the high-speed rail project, for which the Legislature must approve the issuance of bonds this year, that Brown used to make his strongest statement against retreating from big ideas, noting that California can’t simply build enough new freeway and airport expansions to handle a growing population.

“Those who believe that California is in decline will naturally shrink back from such a strenuous undertaking. I understand that feeling but I don’t share it, because I know this state and the spirit of the people who choose to live here,” he said.

And he exhorted Californians to remember the past as they plan for the future: “Critics of the high-speed rail project abound as they often do when something of this magnitude is proposed. During the 1930’s, The Central Valley Water Project was called a ‘fantastic dream’ that ‘will not work.’ The Master Plan for the Interstate Highway System in 1939 was derided as ‘New Deal jitterbug economics.’ In 1966, then Mayor Johnson of Berkeley called BART a ‘billion dollar potential fiasco.’ Similarly, the Panama Canal was for years thought to be impractical and Benjamin Disraeli himself said of the Suez Canal: ‘totally impossible to be carried out.’ The critics were wrong then and they’re wrong now.”

OccupyOakland rings in the new year with protests against police

Sasha Cuttler
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21
OccupyOakland rings in the new year with protests against police

Occupy Oakland kicked off the year with two marches protesting police and prisons. A march to the Oakland City Jail on New Year’s Eve was followed by a march against police brutality on New Year’s Day, ending with a rally against police violence. Speakers at the rally indicated that the Bay’s most radicalized Occupy group may focus on an anti-police repression theme in the new year.

About 300 people attended a nighttime demonstration in Oakland City Center on Dec. 31. Protesters left Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza at 9:45 and marched to the city jail. About 20 Occupy Oakland protesters remain in jail after several different incidents of arrest in the past weeks.

At the jail, protesters spoke about police repression, set off fireworks, and chanted “inside or outside, we’re all on the same side.” Many reported seeing solidarity fists sticking out from between bars on the jail’s windows.

The demonstration was part of a national call for New Year’s Eve jail solidarity protests, and similar “noise demonstrations,” in which protesters made noise outside jails to show solidarity with inmates. Similar protests took place in 25 cities around the world.

The march featured a giant banner stating “Fuck the police.”

Around 11:30 pm, protesters marched back for a dance party on the plaza. “At midnight, we did the countdown like everyone else,” said Patrick, who has been involved in OccupySF and Occupy Oakland.

A banner dropped in the plaza read, “Out with the old. Occupy 2012.”

At 1 pm on Jan. 1, Occupy Oakland participants gathered once again. They marched to Fruitvale Bart Station in an anti-police brutality march commemorating Oscar Grant. The unarmed young Oakland man was killed on Jan. 1, 2009 by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for the shooting and given a two-year prison sentence.

The march was followed by a rally and speak-out with about 500 in attendance. Several women with sons and grandsons who had been killed by police in San Francisco and Oakland shared their experiences. Adam Jordan, member of the Oscar Grant Committee for Justice, said that Occupy Oakland had helped unify the local community against police brutality.

Several speakers agreed that police violence against the poor and people of color and recent arrests at Occupy Oakland, as well as tear gas and other weapons used against Occupy Oakland protesters, are all connected. “It’s all systemic. It’s the same problem,” Jordan said. “The police that are attacking everyone in Occupy Oakland now have been attacking black people for centuries.”

Members of Oscar Grant’s family, including his mother, his young daughter, his fiancé, his uncle, and several cousins, were also present, and many spoke.

Gerald Smith, an organizer with Occupy Oakland and member of the Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality and Repression, read aloud a message from Angela Davis, who has proposed nationwide demonstrations to free political prisoners on Feb. 20. He also talked about several proposals to continue to protest against police violence in the East Bay, including picketing the Alameda County District Attorney’s office and emergency meetings the following day every time an Oakland resident is killed by a police officer.

In a reference to the leaderless, “horizontal” structure that has defined Occupy groups around the world, Smith said to the crowd, “How much will we do this? It’s up to you. I hope you know by now, you decide everything.”

Gifted: The Poor Bastard’s SF Almanac

Andrew Lam
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0

Hey, Slingshot Organizer gang. Yeah youse, the well-planned anarchists in the corner. Stephen Kovacic would like you folks to know you are no longer the only alt-dayplanner game in town. 

Kovacic — inspired, he says, by his experience working the front desk at the LGBT Community Center — has pulled off the impressive feat of assembling a one-stop guide to sustainable brokeness in this fair city of ours. Not only is The Poor Bastard’s SF Almanac a calendar, but it is also is packed with supervisoral district maps, last-BART-of-the-night times, guides to where to find fair trade coffee, free museum and zoo visits, eight (!) $1 oyster happy hours, and San Francisco pools. The result is delightfully scrappy, delightfully useful package of wisdom. In an email interview with the Guardian, Kovacic admitted to ordering far, far too many of the things from the print shop, so in addition to being able to cop the planners for $12 in local bookstores (we even spotted them at Scarlet Sage Herb Company), you can order them from his website at prices as low as five for $35.

The thing even comes with a mix CD of local artists, from the Dents to Rin Tin Tiger (listen to it for free here). So, maybe New Year’s Day gifts are the new, hot holiday present? Here’s what Kovacic had to say about his labor of love. 

 

SFBG: Tell us a little about yourself.

SK: My name is Stephen Kovacic, I’m a 28-year old male, I’ve lived in San Francisco for nine years. I went to SFSU and CCSF. I like chemistry, and turtles, and Rubix cubes, and the people in my life. I like making systems work better.

 

SFBG: What inspired you to put together this dayplanner?

SK: I was working for three years as the front desk info and referral person at the LGBT Community Center, compiling info for visitors or people off the street who needed referrals to services. I noticed immediately that there were a ton of services and fun things and things to know about the city, but no really good compendium of up-to-date information. Websites on the subject are woefully out of date.   

When budget issues dissolved that job I was gainfully unemployed for a while, living very cheap, going to free things, writing things that were useful into my Slingshot Organizer. I wrote in free zoo and museum days, and I drew guitar chords and such in the back pages. It seemed like a logical progression to make my own organizer and fill it with as many useful things as possible, like supervisor contact info, or last BART times, or when to register to vote, or your rights at work, or a list of anti-gay companies to boycott. Things that empower people to be who they want to get around to being. And to entice people to carry it around all the time, i put games and trivia and interesting days in SF history, free days, zodiacs, SF celebrity births, guitar chords, fun stuff. 

 

SFBG: What’s your favorite feature in its pages?

SK: The history probably. I spent a long time finding things that happened in this city 100 years ago, and there’s a ton of them. I put the most compressible, interesting stories in there. I encourage people to look them up because there’s a lot more to each story than i had room to put in. At the same time, the CD is the thing i’m least tired of seeing. It’s really good.

 

SFBG: Who were the artists that helped you out with it?

SK: The folks on the CD are all local San Franciscan bands. Mostly talented friends of mine that I’ve been collecting. People can listen to the whole CD for free at www.SFalmanac.org. Sometimes compilations are crappy, but this one turned out really good. Mostly because I took songs that were already my favorites and begged their SF writers to let me use them. Everybody was really supportive of the idea. There’s even some gems on there [that are] previously unreleased.

The [visual] art is about one-third mine, the rest is my friends’, people that supported the concept. If it’s going to happen next year I’ll need a whole bunch more contributing artists. The real star player is Justine Lucas, she did the cover and a whole bunch of other pages too. She’s been the most supportive and encouraging person there could be, it would never have happened without her support and advice and skill.

Occupy Berkeley’s overnight clashes with police

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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In an afternoon raid, the Berkeley Police Department cleared what was left of the Occupy Berkeley protest encampment. Here’s our account of protesters’ attempts to defend the camp last night and early this morning.

After being served an eviction notice the morning of December 21, protesters gathered at the Occupy Berkely camp, established several blocks away from the downtown Berkley BART station. About 100 protesters remained on site throughout the night, clashing a few times with police. But when the park officially opened at 6 a.m., an encampment of about 20 tents remained in Martin Luther King Junior Civic Center Park.

The Occupy Berkeley camp had been in place since October 10. In early December, it boasted more than 60 tents and several hundred protesters, but many packed up and left when the eviction notice was served. The notice stated, “this park is closed at 10:00 p.m. Starting December 21, 2011, this law will be enforced.”

It also noted that protesters were in violation of California Penal Code section 647 (e), which prohibits “public lodging.”

After the Occupy SF State camp was cleared December 20, Occupy Berkeley became the Bay Area Occupy movement’s last remaining tent city.

Around 11 p.m. Thursday, dozens of protesters milled around the camp. About 40 joined hands in a Winter Solstice ritual beside a large Christmas tree in the plaza, decorated by occupiers earlier that evening. Others had moved their tents and belongings to a nearby plaza outside of a Bank of America on Shattuck Avenue.

Two arrests were made around midnight. Some occupiers state that one of those arrested had been causing tension and fights in the camp, which has become notorious after several reports of crime. Yet when the arrests were made around midnight, thirty people followed and stood outside the police station, which is directly across the street from the camp.

Here’s a video from the scene posted by YouTube user akenower:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg-maHNl6gs&feature=youtu.be

“I can’t say I like the guy, but I’m in solidarity with my fellow occupiers,” said one longtime OccupySF camper who has been spending time at Occupy Berkeley since the OccupySF eviction December 7.

Said the young man, who preferred to remain anonymous, “I’d rather continue the process of working this out within the camp than see him go to the police.”

At 12:30 a.m., a Berkeley Public Works truck pulled up to the park’s southeast corner, and workers loaded one or two tents and other possessions into the truck bed. About 70 protesters ran over to respond, led by a dozen “citizen journalists” wielding cameras. When one man using a computer to film the police approached a police car, an officer abruptly opened his door and struck the computer, and the man fell to the ground.

The officer then exited the vehicle and brandished his baton. Protesters responded by chanting “go home!” and advancing towards the officer; he retreated several feet into the street before returning to his car and driving away.

About 30 minutes later, protesters began to gather outside the police station on Martin Luther King Junior Way. The BPW truck, packed with their confiscated tents and other items, had pulled up in front of the station.

The truck’s driver initially surged forward. But as more protesters massed, and someone called out “you’re part of the 99 percent too,” the driver slowed to a stop and parked. Protesters, who cried out, “come get your stuff back!” climbed on to the truck and began redistributing items.
Soon, a dozen officers exited the police station with batons and lined up, surrounding the truck. Protesters refused to leave the intersection, chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Holding their batons with both hands, several officers struck protesters, ordering them to get back. About ten “street medics” — protesters tasked with tending to injured occupiers — responded with assistance.

After police left the scene, the mood turned calm. Protesters exchanged stories and ideas for tactics, and donated coffee and food from supporters who stopped by trickled in.

The temperature was in the low 30s as the longest night of the year inched by. Unsure whether police would return, dozens of protesters stayed awake through the night.

Our Weekly Picks: December 21-27

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 21

Krafty Kuts

Before closing out the year with the Sea of Dreams NYE blowout, the party people at Sunset Promotions (along with Metrowize.com) are throwing a community appreciation show and bringing out the U.K.’s Krafty Kuts. He’s best known for his 2006 album Freak Show and a Fabriclive release in 2007, but is largely building a reputation as an international, multiple award-winning breakbeat DJ and turntablist through live performances. Krafty Kuts’ most recent mix — for his November Canadian tour — unrelentingly shifts between the likes of Beastie Boys, Wolfgang Gartner, Fast Crew, and Bart B More. Like the best of breakbeat, Krafty Kuts plays a high wire act, always keeping energy up without growing tiresome nor ADD addled. (Ryan Prendiville)

With DJ Zeph, Motion Potion

9 p.m., free with RSVP; $5 at door

www.krafty-xmas.eventbrite.com

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

www.mighty119.com

 

How The Grinch Stole Christmas: The Musical!

First published in 1957, Dr. Seuss” How The Grinch Stole Christmas was adapted into an animated film in 1966, featuring the unforgettable narration of Boris Karloff, and a bevy of now-classic songs such as “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” belted out by Thurl Ravenscroft. Fans of all ages can relive the beloved holiday special this month when How The Grinch Stole Christmas: The Musical! brings the classic tale to life on stage with colorful costumes and amazing sets that recreate the magical world of Whoville and the inspirational events that transpire there. (Sean McCourt)

Through Dec. 29, times vary, $25–$85

Golden Gate Theatre

1 Taylor, SF

(888) 746-1799

www.shnsf.com


THURSDAY 22

“Nutcracker”

There is something about the shortest days of the year that invites you to become hopeful about what lies ahead. Perhaps it is that we know that the sun will be back. So you don’t have to be a Christian or hooked on family traditions to celebrate what is an extraordinary, though yearly occurring season. “Nutcracker,” often for sentimental reasons, is part of that feeling. Graham Lustig’s 2000 version, now part of Oakland Ballet Company, has plenty of sentiments but little sentimentality. No whiff of Victorian attitudes inhabits this family’s turn of the 20th century modernity. The home is what was considered high-tech at the time: tile, steel, concrete, and huge expanses of glass that invite the sunny, snow-covered outside in. The very fact that the Oakland Ballet Company exists again, is a sign of hope. (Rita Felciano)

Through Dec. 24; 2 and 7 p.m., $15–$59.50

Paramount Theater

2025 Broadway, Oakl.

(800) 745.3000

www.ticketmaster.com

 

“RitLab: Hanukkah-Houdini”

The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s RitLab (Ritual Laboratory) series stretches the idea of what can be done with such a space as the CJM. Often museums host children’s interactive events, but RitLab is more like afterschool activity time for adults too — I once learned how to make my own spicy pickles at a RitLab event, m’kay? For this Hanukkah-Houdini version, there will be very-mature holiday crafting (magic card wallets, monkey-fist key chains, thaumatropes), a dreidel spin-off, and perhaps most importantly, a performance by Conspiracy of Beards — a local a capella Leonard Cohen cover group. It’ll be fun for kids of all ages, especially those who dig magic and Cohen. (Emily Savage)

6-8 p.m., free with admission (admission is $5 after 5 p.m.)

Contemporary Jewish Museum

736 Mission, SF

(415) 655-7800

www.thecjm.org

 

Dan the Automator

Popscene is bringing home someone special for its Xmas Gala. An innovative hip-hop and electronic producer, Dan “the Automator” Nakamura needs little introduction. Collaborating with Kool Keith, Del the Homosapien, Prince Paul, Damon Albarn, and Mike Patton on projects such as Dr. Octagon, Deltron, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Gorillaz, and Lovage (to name a few), Automator always looms large. He’s recently produced albums for English rockers Kasabian and locals Dredg, while contributing to Albarn’s Kinshasa One Two charity project along with the likes of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and Jneiro Jarel. (And yes, continuing to tease the long awaited follow-up, Deltron 3040.) (Prendiville)

With DJs Omar, Miles the DJ

10 p.m., $10–$12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com


FRIDAY 23

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

“The Coca-Cola Santa Clause is a hoax,” little Pietari tells his friend. He hands him a picture he’s torn from an old book — St. Nicholas with goatish antlers, dropping a child into a boiling cauldron. “The real Santa Clause, he tears naughty kids to pieces.” Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) — directed by Jalmari Helander and based on ancient Scandinavian mythology — might make the kids sooner want Freddy Kruger coming down the chimney on Christmas rather than Santa. When an archeology dig coincides with a bizarre series of events (slaughtered reindeer, missing children, stolen blow dryers), Pietari knows that the real Santa has been unearthed. Rare Exports is a dark tale that’s full of unsuspecting and outlandish surprises. You’ll never see Santa the same way again. (James H. Miller)

10:30 p.m., $9–$11

SF Film Society Cinema

1746 Post, SF

(415) 561-5000

www.sffs.org

 

Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 The Gold Rush

You loved The Artist, and now you’re obsessed with seeing every silent movie you can jam into your sockets. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival isn’t until next summer, but you can check out one of the genre’s very best this week at the Smith Rafael: Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 The Gold Rush, a delightful comedy even Buster Keaton 4-Lyfe Fan Club members can get behind. Unspooling in a snazzily restored 35mm print (with Chaplin’s own 1942 score as accompaniment, arranged by composer Timothy Brock), this film follows the Little Tramp as he tries his luck prospecting in the frozen Yukon. As the Smith Rafael notes point out, “it’s the one in which Chaplin eats his boot” and contains “The Dance of the Rolls,” an iconic bit of playing-with-one’s-food familiar to fans of 1993’s Benny & Joon — and the current Muppets movie. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Dec. 29, call for times, $6.75–$10.25

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael

(415) 454-1222

www.cafilm.org

 

Jazz Mafia

Jazz Mafia is a Bay Area institution. With its eclectic influences, cutting edge genre crossovers are this musical collective’s forte. Jazz Mafia has featured a ton of talented players, with founding member and trombonist-bassist Adam Theis contributing to no less than 10 acts since its inception. The Shotgun Wedding Quintet is a dynamic hip-hop and jazz hybrid fronted by exceptionally cool lyricist Dublin. Brass Mafia is a weird and wonderful New Orleans-y brass ensemble that covers songs from the likes of Skatalites and the Rolling Stones. And, well, there are simply too many incredible acts to list. It’s Jazz Mafia’s 11th anniversary, and I’m sure this San Francisco family has plenty of surprises in store. (Frances Capell)

With Adam Theis and the Jazz Mafia String Quartet, Joe Bagale, and more

9 p.m., $8–$12

Brick & Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 371-1631

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

“Kung Pao Kosher Comedy”

For those who don’t celebrate Christmas — or those who do, but could use a good laugh after spending the day with family — “The 19th Annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy” show is a sure-fire bet for entertainment while much of the rest of the city shuts down for the holiday. With a line-up featuring Elayne Boosler, Avi Lieberman, Jeff Applebaum, and Lisa Geduldig, what better way to spend the night than with a bit a bit of Jewish comedy — and what better location than in a Chinese restaurant! (McCourt)

Through Sun/25; 6 and 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat.; 5 and 8:30 p.m. Sun.; $42–$62.

New Asia Restaurant

772 Pacific, SF

(415) 522-3737

www.koshercomedy.com


SATURDAY 24

Tony! Toni! Toné!

There’s no expression of love more pure than early 1990s-era R&B. And in the golden age of sensual R&B, few could compete with Oakland’s Tony! Toni! Toné!. During the late ’80s and early ’90s, this trio cranked out the jams, climbed the Billboard charts, and provided the soundtrack for countless moments of passion and romance. Did you slow dance with your high school sweetheart to “(Lay Your Head On My) Pillow?” Did you bump and grind to “Whatever You Want?” The holidays are a time for nostalgia; a time for showing our loved ones how much we care. Why not spend Christmas Eve with Tony! Toni! Toné!? (Frances Capell)

8 p.m., $26

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com/oakland


SUNDAY 25

“Death Guild: X-Mess Night”

Undeniably, the holiday season is an adorable one — children point in store windows and glow; Dads are donned in gay apparel; It’s A Wonderful Life airs without end on basic cable; bells a-ringing, figgy pudding, fa la la la la and what have you. However, for some of us around this time of year, it feels like we’re being smothered by a hand knit stocking. Thankfully Death Guild’s “X-Mess Night” is here for anyone who prefers leather corsets instead of holiday turtle necks, The Sisters of Mercy over Bing Crosby, and of course, gin and tonics, not milk and cookies. DJs Decay, Melting Girl, Daniel Skellington, Sage, and Lexor spin gothic, industrial, synth pop and more. (Miller)

9 p.m., $5

DNA Lounge

375 Eleventh, SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

 

“It’s a Jewish Christmas”

Christmas day falls on the fifth night of Hanukkah. It’s also the Make-Out Room’s “It’s a Jewish Christmas,” which means Jews and Gentiles both face a dilemma. In the case of us Jews, it comes down to either enduring Grandpa Eshkol, or shooting over to the Mission for a Woody Allen film festival, Chinese food, and a salacious game of strip dreidel. With all that being offered, I doubt old Eshkol would blame you for schlepping out without him. Hosted by none other than Broke-Ass Stuart, the travel writer behind the recent IFC documentary, Young, Broke & Beautiful, “It’s a Jewish Christmas” also features the sounds of DJs J Dub and M.O.T. Mazz. Ah Freilichen Chanukah! (Miller)

5 p.m., $10

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

(415) 647-2888

www.makeoutroom.com


TUESDAY 27

Pal Joey

Set amongst the swingin’ nightclubs of San Francisco, 1957’s Pal Joey stars Frank Sinatra as a womanizing singer who dreams of one day owning his own club — and plans to seduce a wealthy widow (portrayed by Rita Hayworth) to secure the funding. Things begin to go awry, however, when he meets Kim Novak’s character, and starts to fall for her instead. Featuring the iconic tune “The Lady Is A Tramp,” the film earned Ol’ Blue Eyes a Golden Globe for Best Actor (in a Musical), and remains a shining example of why he was the king of the crooners. (McCourt)

Double feature with Bye Bye Birdie, which screens at 2:40 and 7 p.m.

4:45 and 9:05 p.m., $7.50–$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF.

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Policing the police

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Policing the police

Bay Area cities have been at the forefront of local challenges to the police state, making stands on issues including racial profiling, deportations of undocumented immigrants, the use of force against peaceful protests, and police intelligence-gathering and surveillance of law-abiding citizens. But the city of Berkeley is creating comprehensive policies to address all of these issues in a proposed Peace and Justice Ordinance that is now being developed.

The effort comes against the backdrop of clashes between police and Occupy movement protesters, including the violent Oct. 25 police raid on OccupyOakland, with Berkeley Police and other jurisdictions on the scene.

Among other things, Berkeley is redefining when it will join other communities in what’s called “mutual aid” agreements — deals that require nearby agencies to help each other out when one public-safety department is overwhelmed.

It’s not terribly controversial when it applies to firefighting — but some people in San Francisco and Berkeley weren’t happy to see their officers joining the Oakland cops in the crackdown in peaceful protesters.

Berkeley officials also want to limit the ability of local cops to work with the FBI and federal immigration agents.

The effort began quietly last summer with behind-the-scene organizing spearheaded by the Washington D.C.-based Bill of Rights Defense Committee, which reached out to a wide variety of groups, include the NAACP, the ACLU, Asian Law Caucus, National Lawyers Guild, the Coalition for a Safe Berkeley, and the city’s Peace and Justice Commission.

“It was a series of one-on-one conversations with the leaders of these groups and then getting them into a room together,” said Bill of Rights Defense Committee Executive Director Shahid Buttar.

That effort got a major push forward last month when Councilmembers Jesse Arreguin and Kriss Worthington led an effort to suspend mutual aid agreements the Berkeley Police Department has with the University of California police and two other police agencies — as well as two city policy documents — over concerns about the use of force against peaceful protesters and domestic surveillance activities.

The council approved the proposal unanimously. Ironically, on the day after the vote, the university launched a violent and controversial crackdown on the OccupyCal encampment — without the help of Berkeley Police.

“It sends the message that we’re not going to try to suppress people’s rights to demonstrate and express themselves,” Arreguin told the Guardian.

The timing of the violent police raid on OccupyOakland — which made international headlines — helped elevate the issue. “What happened in Oakland made people very concerned,” Arreguin said.

Peace and Justice Commission member George Lippman agreed: “People were so shocked by what happened in Oakland that they didn’t resist. …To me, it comes down to what are our values.”

Arreguin used public records laws to obtain the mutual aid agreements between the various cities and then, with help from activists, identified provisions that conflict with Berkeley laws and values. Worthington said that work was crucial to winning over other members of the council: “If it was a generic objection to the whole thing, we would not have won the vote.”

The agreements that the council suspended were with the UC police, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (an arm of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a domestic surveillance pact that has ramped up activities since 9/11), the Urban Area Security Initiative (a creation of the Department of Homeland Security), the city’s Criminal Intelligence Policy, and its Jail Policy (which directs local officers to honor federal immigration holds).

“There is a real potential for problems when we give police the blank check to respond to mutual aid agreements,” he said. “We’re trying to ensure they respect this community’s values.”

 

“WE DON’T DO ICE’S JOB.”

Arreguin and other members of his coalition have been working on modifying provisions of these documents, and they are expected to return to the council for a vote next month. But that’s just the first step in Berkeley’s efforts to create comprehensive peace and justice policies, covering civil liberties, crowd control policies, use of force, and cooperation with other policing agencies.

“The ordinance we’re discussing would cover a lot of these areas,” Arreguin said. “What we’re trying to achieve here is more accountability.”

For example, the police are the ones who decide what is an “emergency situation” that would trigger a mutual aid response. But should a peaceful protest that blocks traffic or goes on an unpermitted march be considered an emergency? “It may not be appropriate for us to respond to every request, particularly when it comes to political activities,” Arreguin said. “Just because people are breaking laws, that shouldn’t be a pretext to respond to mutual aid.”

In a similar vein, the coalition is developing policies to support Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city for immigrants of all kinds and looking for ways to resist the federal Secure Communities program, a national database of fingerprints and arrest information that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to place detention holds on those suspected of being undocumented immigrants.

The boards of supervisors in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and other jurisdictions have tried unsuccessfully to opt out of the program, something that requires state approval. But the activists say Santa Clara has become a model by following up with an ordinance that says the county won’t honor the federal requests until they have a signed written agreement to cover all the county’s costs associated with honoring the holds.

“We don’t do ICE’s job,” Sup. George Shirakawa told supporters after the Oct. 17 vote, according to published reports. Arreguin called the effort “a smart approach and we want to see if we can do it in Berkeley.”

Other Bay Area cities have also begun to examine issues related to a police state that has expanded since the 9/11 attacks, including Richmond and Piedmont. In San Francisco, the latest process of challenging the role of local police officers in domestic surveillance — issues the city has periodically wrestled with for decades — began earlier this year (“Spies in blue,” April 26). It led to an ordinance that would limit that activity, which activists say Sup. Jane Kim will introduce next month.

“If our local police are going to work with the FBI at all, they have to observe our local laws,” says John Crew, the police practices expert with the ACLU-Northern California who has been helping develop San Francisco’s ordinance. “Far to often, the FBI has shown interest in protest activities that have nothing to do with illegal activities.”

For example, documents unearthed by a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Bay Guardian and through other avenues show FBI coordination with local police agencies related to the Occupy protests, those aimed at BART, and in the aftermath of the trail of Johannes Merserle, the former BART officer who shot Oscar Grant. The UC Board of Regents also canceled a meeting last month where a large protest was organized, citing unspecified intelligence about threats to public safety.

Crew noted that a right to privacy is written into California’s constitution, yet San Francisco has two experienced police inspectors assigned full-time to work with FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force. “They aren’t focused on laws being broken, but on collecting massive amounts of information,” Crew said.

 

SURVEILLANCE IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Veena Dubal of the Asian Law Caucus, which has also been involved with Berkeley coalition, is happy to finally be connecting various issues related to an overreaching police state. “What’s really exciting about the ordinance is it’s pushing back on all these very problematic federal polices that have really gone after communities of color,” she said. “The people being spied on in Berkeley are not the people who live in the hills, it’s the students and people of color.”

She said the Occupy movement, its broad appeal to the 99 percent, and police overreaction to peaceful protests have helped to highlight some of these longstanding policing issues and caused more people to feel affected by this struggle.

“The Occupy movement certainly brings these issues to an audience that wasn’t concerned about it before. Surveillance and police brutality, all the sudden that’s in the spotlight.” she said, noting that people have begun to question their willingness to give police more power after 9/11. “More and more people are understanding that the powers the government took aren’t just being directed at terrorists, but members of their families.”

Willie Phillips of Berkeley’s NAACP chapter, a lifelong Berkeley resident who has experienced discrimination and racial profiling by police his whole life, said it’s good to finally build a coalition that broadens support for addressing policing issues.

“It gets people discussing issues that overlap and creating that kind of dialogue is important,” he told us. “Separation only creates a division in addressing the issue that we’re facing…..We have to start looking at our commonalities and our hopes, instead of fear, because fear is what divides us.”

Phillips said the Occupy movement, with its engaged young people who have stood strong against aggressive police tactics, has helped place the spotlight back on policing issues after progress on combating racial profiling in the ’90s was derailed by 9/11.

“It’s shows that everyone can be marginalized,” Phillips said of the Occupy movement. “Ninety-nine percent of people have been marginalized and that context helps us understand each other.”

Arreguin hopes that Berkeley’s work in this realm sparks discussions with other Bay Area jurisdictions. “We want to work on a regional level to deal with these issues,” he said, later adding, “I’ve been alarmed as the police state has developed over the years.”

Asked whether he’s gotten any pushback from police to his efforts, Arreguin said Police Chief Michael Meehan and his department have been very cooperative and that “our police are just waiting for a dialogue about what kind of changes we want to see.”

A Berkeley Police spokesperson says the department won’t comment on political matters. Berkeley Police Association President Tim Kaplan said mutual aid agreements are important to public safety, but that “we do feel like we’re part of the Berkeley community and we want to work with the city and its citizens….We’re going to do what the law says.”

And the coalition is intent on writing some of the country’s most progressive laws for policing the police.

“The victory we had on mutual aid agreements is very exciting and we have an opportunity to make some real changes,” Arreguin said.

Buttar said his organization has helped to facilitate similar coalitions in about 30 cities, from Los Angeles to Hartford, Conn. But he said Berkeley’s is the biggest and has the most ambitious agenda. “I tend to think that just getting the coalition together is a win,” Buttar said. “So, to that extent, Berkeley is already a model.”

Plugging the flow

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Plugging the flow

rebeccab@sfbg.com

When significant events related to the Occupy movement occur in the pre-dawn hours, it usually means a protest encampment has been raided. But on Dec. 12, Occupy protesters were the ones carrying out a strategic plan before sun up.

Activists organized by OccupyOakland effectively blocked cargo shipments from moving through several Port of Oakland terminals that day, as part of a coordinated West Coast Port Blockade that featured similar actions in other cities including San Diego, Portland, Seattle, and Longview, Washington.

About 150 longshore workers were sent home from their morning shifts at Oakland shipping terminals because protesters were marching in circular picket lines outside the gates.

The day began when more than 1,000 protesters met up at the West Oakland BART station at 5:30 a.m., sleepily raising signs and banners in the chilly morning air as they proceeded down 7th Street toward the port. Once they reached the sprawling shipping hub, they formed picket lines outside terminal entrances. Police were on the scene and clad in riot gear, but no clashes with protesters occurred early in the day.

Around 7 a.m., when the morning shift would have typically started, two International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) dockworkers — who declined to give their names — stood near the Hanjin Shipping gate at berths 55 and 56. Past the gate, a cargo vessel which had likely come from Japan was berthed and waiting to unload.

The men calmly surveyed the roughly 200 chanting Occupy activists as they marched around and around in a circular picket. “Ain’t nobody going to cross it,” one offered. The other gestured toward the protesters. “These are Americans wanting American jobs,” he said.

Around 10 a.m. outside the same terminal, protest organizer and Oakland hip-hop artist Boots Riley declared the first part of the port shutdown to be a victory. “Longshoremen are going home now,” he said. “Effectively, the Port of Oakland is shut down.” Later in the afternoon, protesters returned to prevent the start of an evening shift.

Until recently, the nationwide Occupy movement manifested as tent cities springing up everywhere in rebellion against the lopsided economic conditions. After a series of police raids cleared the tents away, however, organizers in the Bay Area and beyond took a different tack with the port blockade.

Working in tandem with allies from labor, occupiers from San Diego all the way up to Anchorage directed their gaze at international shipping hubs, critical infrastructure for multinational businesses importing and exporting goods between Asia and North America.

Cargo terminals make for heavyweight targets, as five of the nation’s 10 largest ports are located along the West Coast. The value of annually traded goods flowing in and out of Oakland alone is $34 billion, and authorities there estimate some $8 million could be lost if business were to be halted for a full day.

 

MAKING HISTORY

OccupyOakland unanimously approved the call for a coordinated West Coast port blockade at a Nov. 18 General Assembly.

“The ports play a pivotal role in the flow and growth of capital for the 1 percent in this country and internationally,” occupiers explained on a website announcing the port shutdown. “For that reason alone it is the ideal place to disrupt their profit machine.”

The ports weren’t selected as a target for that reason alone, but rather as an affront to specific corporations whose labor practices have sparked the ire of port workers. Export Grain Terminal (EGT) and its parent company, Bunge, Ltd., came into Occupy’s crosshairs because of their ongoing dispute with ILWU Local 21 in Longview, Wash., stemming from what longshoremen characterize as union-busting practices.

Port terminal operator Stevedoring Services of America (SSA Marine) and its parent company’s primary shareholder, Goldman Sachs, were also singled out in support of low-wage port truckers whose employment classification as independent contractors bars them from unionizing.

The third objective of the blockade, according to organizers, was to strike back against a series of police raids that dismantled Occupy encampments nationwide.

It wasn’t the first time cargo ships traversing the Pacific would be stalled by a politically motivated coast-wide port blockade. In 2008, ILWU members coordinated a West Coast port shutdown in dissent of the Iraq War.

In 1984, longshoremen and anti-apartheid activists blocked South African cargo to boycott the apartheid regime, noted ILWU member Stan Woods. Similar shutdowns, carried out in response to politically explosive issues going back to 1934, have been led by community activists forming picket lines at port entrances to prevent dockworkers from beginning their shifts.

Occupy’s call for a coordinated blockade brought an unprecedented twist to this historic trend, representing the first time a group unaffiliated with dockworkers had called for a shutdown spanning the entire West Coast. It left some seasoned organizers wondering anxiously how things would unfold, while others saw it as a gust of wind in the sails of the labor movement.

“One of the good things about the Occupy movement is that it’s challenging leaders of progressive institutions,” Woods said. “The old way … isn’t working. There’s been a one-sided class war, and there has to be a two-sided class war.”

Organizer Barucha Peller noted that the Occupy movement could be galvanizing for non-unionized workers, too. “Our movement is giving a framework for the 89 percent of workers who are not in unions,” she said.

For occupiers up and down the West Coast, the port shutdown also seemed to present a kind of test as to whether their young movement could successfully “exert its collective muscle,” as an OccupyOakland press statement put it, and effectuate a mass mobilization even after police raids flattened their encampments.

 

A ROUGH VOYAGE

In the weeks leading up to Dec. 12, even as Bay Area Occupy organizers plastered fliers about the blockade everywhere, met with union members, and organized outreach events to garner community support, they stumbled into challenges. Robert McEllrath, the president of the ILWU, publicly criticized the blockade plan, saying organizers had failed to reach out to union officials before unanimously approving the call to action.

“Any decisions made by groups outside of the union’s democratic process do not hold water, regardless of the intent,” McEllrath wrote. He seemed troubled that Occupy had attached itself to a union struggle without adequate communication, but an official endorsement of a third-party blockade by the ILWU would have landed the union in legal trouble.

“Whenever a group of people decide to march into a workplace in an effort to shut it without respecting the democratic decision-making process, it’s not an ideal situation,” ILWU spokesperson Craig Merrilees told the Guardian.

Some rank-and-file ILWU members saw things differently. “The rank and file do support the principles of the community, and Occupy,” said Anthony Lavierge, an ILWU steward. “Longshoremen had a good response to [the Nov. 2 port blockade]. It was empowering to a lot of people that so many came out.”

Another rank-and-file union member said, “the majority of ILWU workers are supportive of what’s going on, definitely.”

One rank-and-file ILWU member and self-described anarchist published a critique online raising concerns that OccupyOakland had failed to bring local union officials on board before approving the call to action.

In response, OccupyOakland organizer Mike King said, “We never brought it to them, because it’s not something they could endorse.” Yet he added that they had sought to include the rank-and-file from the start.

“We have done far more outreach for Dec. 12,” than in the days prior to the Nov. 2 port shutdown, which brought tens of thousands of activists to the street, King said. “Leading up to Nov. 2, we never expected half that many people would show up.”

Occupiers in San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver, Anchorage, and other cities all signed up to participate, and the idea drew support from activist groups as far away as Japan who vowed to perform solidarity actions in their own communities.

Nevertheless, the international union president’s statement prompted a flurry of mainstream news articles — along with some downright derisive columns — casting occupiers as out of sync with the very workers they claimed to stand with.

In Oakland, authorities of the targeted facility posed another obstacle. The Port of Oakland took out full-page ads in local daily newspapers and the New York Times urging the community to “Keep the Port Open.” The ads borrowed the language of the movement by proclaiming that the port “employs the 99 percent.” Port spokesperson Robert Bernardo emphasized this message in an interview with the Guardian. “When you shut down a port, you lose jobs,” he said. “Local jobs.”

Sue Piper, special assistant to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, noted prior to Dec. 12 that the mayor was working with police and port officials to ensure that the port remained open for business. On the morning of the port blockade, however, police stood down and did not prevent protesters from circling up in front of terminal entrances.

 

BIG FISH TO FRY

Lost in much of the mainstream coverage of the port blockade were Occupy Oakland’s three main objectives. The protesters aimed to demonstrate solidarity with low-income port truckers laboring in service of the powerful SSA Marine; stand with ILWU Local 21 members in their face-off against EGT; and deliver a show of resistance against coordinated police raids of Occupy encampments nationwide.

In October, 26 Los Angeles truckers working for a port company called Toll Group were fired after wearing Teamsters truckers’ union jerseys to their shifts to demonstrate their wish to unionize. Because they’re classified as independent contractors instead of employees, it’s illegal for the truckers to join unions. They’re paid per shipment rather than per hour, which translates to hours of unpaid labor spent in the queue, and must cover their own job-related costs.

Occupy Los Angeles caught wind of the incident and began to talk about doing an action in solidarity with the truckers.

“The date of Dec. 12 was originally suggested by people in Los Angeles,” explained Dave Welsh, a delegate of the San Francisco Labor Council and secretary of the Committee to Defend the ILWU. “It’s also Our Lady of Guadalupe feast day, a Mexican holiday. Since many truckers of the Port of LA are Mexican, they picked that date. One focus [of the blockade] is support for truckers and their demand for better wages, working conditions, etc.”

On the day of the blockade, an open letter from port truckers was published on the website of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, an advocacy group. “We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people,” the message read. “Thank you ’99 Percenters’ for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.”

The second major target of the blockade was EGT, which constructed a new grain terminal on Port of Longview property at the edge of the Columbia River in southern Washington, about an hour’s drive from Portland, Ore.

EGT’s parent company is Bunge, Ltd., a major agribusiness firm that has come under fire for everything from tax evasion, to rampant clearing of Amazon rainforest lands for soybean cultivation, to the use of slave labor in Brazil.

Although the terminal construction first brought hope to a small community inflicted with 15 percent unemployment , ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman says things soured when EGT brought in out-of-state laborers to build the facility, then refused to hire members of his union.

Coffman contends that EGT’s lease with the port means the company is required to hire Local 21 workers, but EGT disputes this, and has been locked in a federal court battle with the port. The dispute has prompted union members to stage port blockades of their own, resulting in some arrests.

Peller, the Occupy Oakland organizer, announced on a megaphone Dec. 12 that occupiers in southern Washington had shut down the Port of Longview, according to a text message from ILWU Local 21. Union members wanted to thank the movement for the show of support, she added.

“They thought they could just run over a small local,” Coffman told the Guardian, referencing EGT. “Well, David met Goliath. We’re going to fight them till the bitter end.”

Man/machine

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Man/machine

arts@sfbg.com

Year in Music "Here in my car / I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors / It’s the only way to live in cars." — Gary Numan, "Cars"

Are friends electric? In 2011, synthpop sounded like a safe vehicle with which to whirl forward, one wheel in the quickly receding past and the other in the fast-coming future.

As the light turned green on ’11 and roared on through 11/11/11, those binary 1’s pointed to the synthetic pleasures harking back to Human League, Yazoo, and Depeche Mode. Early in the year, La Roux’s Elly Jackson took home a Grammy for her eponymous debut — signifying the U.S. music mainstream’s approval.

You could detect the synths popping beneath the beckoning, bright textures of Vetiver’s "Can’t You Tell," the Paisley Park-meets-"Enola Gay" washes of Nite Jewel’s "One Second of Love," and the Doppler effect textures of Toro y Moi’s "Talamak," while the much lamented departure of James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem from the intersection of synth beats and rock squall threw up yet another sign that synthpop was on the move. Tellingly, Holy Ghost!, on Murphy’s DFA imprint, cast its eyes back longingly to the chilly dreamtime of the Ministry’s "I Wanted to Tell Her," lodging it in a busy thicket of bumping, rumbling bass and keys.

Don’t fear the ’80s: Yesteryear synth populists the Cars released its first LP with Ric Ocasek since its ’88 split, and the year closed with Gary Numan getting the avant seal of approval as an honored guest at the recent Battles-curated ATP show. Adding fuel to the firing pistons, locally, was a look back at the real Bay underground article: this year’s comp BART: Bay Area Retrograde (Dark Entries) wiped the "Clean Me" messages written in dust from tracks like Voice Farm’s "Voyager." The latter almost seemed to lend its synth tone directly to the sinewy, eerily sensual "Nightcall" by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx off the Drive soundtrack (Lakeshore).

Much like that violently dreamy film’s Danish-American hybrid, "Nightcall" and College’s "A Real Hero" teetered between the almost OTT strain of romanticism and superchilled detachment embodied by the best of synthpop— the simple hooks and breathy, girlish vocals perfectly complementing the propulsive, forward-thrust mechanism of the tracks. You can’t drive those songs from your head.

In one of the strongest contenders for (double) album of the year, M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (Mute), synthpop was only one component of the deep, ambitious, magnificent sprawl, a recording much like French transplant Anthony Gonzalez’s adopted L.A. home. Its breakout single, "Midnight City," tapped both the brooding nihilism of Grand Theft Auto and the noirish retro-epics of Michael Mann in collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, as leader Anthony Gonzalez emotes wistfully, "Waiting in a car /Waiting for a ride in the dark / Drinking in the lounge / Following the neon signs / Waiting for a roar / Looking at the mutating skyline / The city is my church / It wraps me in the sparking twilight."

Cue the orchestral, rollercoaster synths, faux bird calls, and reclaimed-from-the-cheese-bin skywalking sax. It may say as little as Numan’s "Cars"—making it the perfect tabula-rasa fodder for both Victoria’s Secret commercials and capitalism-happy How to Make It in America —but like a European native finding inspiration in the simultaneously alienating and freeing highways of El-Lay or J.G. Ballard, both songs prove that you needn’t rely on language to move a listener.

Occupy shuts down morning shift at Port of Oakland

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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40

Usually, when significant events related to the Occupy movement occur in the pre-dawn hours, it means an encampment has been raided. But this morning, Occupy protesters were the ones carrying out a strategic plan before the sun came up.

A main objective of today’s Port of Oakland shutdown — the second in two months initiated by Occupy Oakland — was to strike back against the police raids that dismantled their camps.

Protesters led by Occupy Oakland effectively shut down the morning shift at the Port of Oakland today, Dec. 12, as part of a Coordinated West Coast Port Blockade that Occupy groups from San Diego to Anchorage have been planning since Nov. 18, when Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly unanimously approved the call to action.

Several hundred activists met up at the West Oakland BART station at 5:30 a.m. and proceeded to march down Seventh Street to the sprawling shipping hub, where they formed picket lines outside terminal entrances to prevent workers from entering the gates for the 7 a.m. shift. Shortly after they began picketing, truckers waiting to load or unload cargo began turning around to exit port property.

There were several busloads of protesters in addition to those who traveled to the port on foot, as well as a bicycle contingent. While most protesters filed through the streets in an uncharacteristically quiet march that seemed muted due to a lack of sleep, a few displayed gusto with a sound system, shiny homemade flags, and flashy outfits. Some showed up toting a life-sized cut-out of Lt. John Pike, the University of California Davis officer who became notorious for dispersing teargas into student protesters’ eyes, with the face cut out so people could pose for photos.

Police arrived on the scene clad in riot gear, but did not attempt to prevent protesters from circling up around the gate entrances and forming picket lines. They stood in formations in front of the gates weilding batons and teargas launchers, though protesters had no intention of entering the gates and only sought to block them. Alameda County Sheriff buses circled the area as well.

Around 7 a.m., when the morning shift would have typically started, two ILWU dockworkers (who declined to give their names) stood near the Hanjin Shipping gate at berths 55 and 56, surveying the picket line. Past the gate, a cargo vessel which had likely come from Japan was berthed and waiting to unload.

“Ain’t nobody going to cross it,” one of the men offered. The other gestured toward protesters and said, “These are Americans wanting American jobs.” Asked how he felt about the picket, he responded, “We don’t support it, because it’s not in our contract — but I do see some issues, like we’re hurting, too.” The ILWU members said longshoremen turned away because of the picket line wouldn’t be paid for the day, because they’re only registered as having reported to work if they’re physically on the terminal. They also noted that there was a relatively light workload at Oakland terminals on this particular day.

The official objectives of the port blockade, aside from showing resistance against crackdowns on Occupy encampments, were to demonstrate Occupy’s solidarity with longshore workers and port truckers. The International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21, based in Longview, Wash., has been locked in a legal dispute with Export Grain Terminal (EGT) stemming from what workers characterize as union-busting practices.

Port truckers, particularly in Los Angeles, have been unable to unionize due to their employment classification as independent contractors, and protesters sought to highlight their struggle as well. Picketers held signs declaring solidarity with the ILWU and truckers against the one percent — global shipping companies owned in part by agribusiness giant Bunge, Ltd. and Goldman Sachs, respectively, who profit from their labor.

Speaking into a megaphone, organizer Barucha Peller announced that occupiers in southern Washington had shut down the Port of Longview, according to a text message from ILWU Local 21. Union members wanted to thank the movement for the show of support.

By around 10 a.m., an independent arbitrator had ruled that the picket posed a health and safety risk to longshore workers, so the dockworkers were sent home, effectively halting port activity for the first part of the day. “I’m really impressed that so many people got up at five o’clock in the morning,” Anthony Lavierge, a steward with ILWU, said into the megaphone. “It’s officially shut down. The longhshore labor is officially going home.” However, protesters planned to return to the port later on to prevent the start of an evening shift.

Following the announcement that workers had gone home for the day, protesters marched back to West Oakland BART station. A second march to the port is planned for 4 p.m., leaving from 14th and Broadway streets in downtown Oakland following a 3 p.m. rally. A third march to the port is scheduled to leave the West Oakland BART station at 5 p.m.

Style Paige: Be funneled

Andrew Lam
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0
Style Paige: Be funneled

Well-dressed men always make me a little weak in the knees. What can I say; I’m a sucker for fashion. But in a city like San Francisco, where men’s clothing stretches from one end to the style spectrum to the other, it is the simplest of styles that catch my eye.  

Wearing a wool trenchcoat, dark blue jeans, and tassel loafers, Rolando Brown was waiting for his BART train to arrive when I interrupted him mid-text message.

Making his outfit edgy and modern, Brown wore his funnel collar coat with a black hoody tucked underneath. Designers Richard Chai for Penguin and John Varvatos have created similar looks recently — trenchcoats in tweeds, camel, cashmere, and solids that make it easy for men to be trendy when bad weather arises. 

My be-styled traveler was also wearing brown leather loafers, footwear that you really can’t go wrong with regardless of the decade. I once read in GQ that if Michael Jackson can rock loafers with white socks, then there’s no reason why everyone else can’t follow his lead. 

 

That high-priced high-speed rail

Zelda Bronstein
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20
That high-priced high-speed rail

Even Democrats in the state Legislature are starting to get nervous about continuing the high-speed rail program. After all, the price has gone up to close to $100 billion. That’s such a vast sum of money; the state can’t possibly afford that, right?

Well, let’s think about that and put it in a little historical perspective.

The Golden Gate Bridge was constructed during the worst years of the Great Depression. Cost in today’s dollars: $1.2 billion. That’s for one bridge.

BART was built in the 1960s. Cost in today’s dollars: $6.4 billion. For a transit system serving (at the time) three counties.

The California Aqueduct was also built in the 1960s. Cost in today’s dollars: $31 billion.

I can’t find good figures on the historical cost of building the California freeway system, but in 2006 dollars, highway construction runs between $3 million and $19.5 million per lane-mile. That is, a four-line highway costs between $12 million and almost $80 million a mile. If you take just the ten biggest highways in the state (a total of 3,547 miles) and figure a middle-of-the-road average of $40 million a mile, building the backbone of the state’s freeway system would cost $141 billion today.

High-speed rail, of course, gets cars off the road, reduces pollution and fossil-fuel dependence, and offers a much better transportation experience for people moving around California.

Sounds like a bargain to me.

Occupy movement targets foreclosed homes

Sasha Cuttler
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14

Throughout the Bay Area on Tuesday (Dec. 6), Occupy activists and housing advocates launched what they said will be an ongoing effort to place families back into their foreclosed homes, seizing bank-owned homes to put pressure on the banking industry to cooperate with homeowners in loan trouble.

In San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, activists highlighted the nation’s foreclosure crisis by occupying foreclosed homes as part of the Occupy movement’s national day of action against foreclosures. Occupy Oakland activists said the tents are gone in downtown Oakland, but the move toward house occupations represents a new phase for the movement.

“I am here fighting for my home,” said Margarita Ramirez, addressing a crowd of 150 supporters at the West Oakland BART station. Ramirez said her family fell behind on their mortgage payments after her husband was laid off at the onset of the recession. The Ramirez family applied for a loan modification under the federally subsidized Home Affordable Modification Program(HAMP) hoping for some relief, but their lender, Bank of America, denied their request. Though HAMP is a federal program, it is administered though individual mortgage lenders.

According to Ramirez, with time left before her foreclosure, Bank of America urged them to explore other options to save their home. Then, inexplicably, Bank of America sold her home to Fannie Mae, leaving her family out of options despite what Ramirez says is Bank of America’s later admission to the error and willingness to work with the family. Fannie Mae however has held firm that the sale was valid, leaving the Ramirez family in an uncomfortable comprise of renting their own home.

In order to pressure Fannie Mae on behalf of the Ramirez family, activists with Occupy Oakland and Just Cause seized a vacant Fannie Mae owned foreclosure at 1417 Tenth street in West Oakland.

“This house is owned by the federal government, who we pay taxes to,” said Occupy Oakland activist Thaddeus Guidry, who said that he had struggled hard to get by during the recession. As he stood over a grill cooking hotdogs for the crowd gathered in the yard of the newly occupied house, he said he had found new inspiration and hope after becoming part of Occupy Oakland.

“Tonight will be the first night here in the house,” said Guidry. “This is my home now. We hope to house eight people here.”

Fannie Mae, which was effectively foreclosed on by the U.S. Treasury in 2008 under a process know as conservatorship, has received $169 billion in federal bailout money and remains under federal control.

The house on Tenth street is modest but spacious, with electricity and water. Downstairs, Just Cause is getting ready to start an eviction defense clinic. Just Cause organizer Maria Zamudio told the Bay Guardian that the group holds regular eviction defense clinics in San Francisco and Oakland, but the freshly occupied house in West Oakland would serve as a community space that people can drop into to learn their rights.

“We have been doing eviction defense for a long time. Since the recession, we have seen a change to tenants being pressured to leave by banks after landlords lose a house to foreclosure,” said Zamudio. “It is important for tenants to know that they do not need to leave a foreclosed property. The tenant has more rights in these situations then the homeowner.”

Only blocks away, Gayla Newsome stood in front of her house at 1536 Adeline St with another crowd of supporters from Occupy Oakland, and housing advocates from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment(ACCE). She has been out of the house for six months after the foreclosure, leaving her and her children to stay with family in an overcrowded situation as the house sat vacant.

“This is the moment I take my house back. I’m a little scared, a little nervous, but I have to do this for my kids and grandkids. I have to do this for the other people who are going through this,” said Newsome.

Newsome said Chase Bank repeatedly denied receiving her HAMP loan modification paperwork. When she finally sent a copy by certified mail, they acknowledged the application and denied her eligibility in the program.

The eviction came swiftly. Unaware of the looming eviction, and believing she still had time to save her house even though Chase was outside the HAMP program, Newsome was called by her children while at work the morning of July 19.

“The kids were given 10 minutes to grab what they could before they were put on the sidewalk in their pajamas by the bank representative and the sheriff. They called me frantic,” recalled Newsome.

The recession has been hard on West Oakland. One out of 236 houses in West Oakland are in foreclosure, with many more families hard-pressed to hang on. Housing advocates say that foreclosures destabilize entire neighborhoods, as surrounding property values plummet and blight spreads.

“I’m not just here personally to reclaim my house, I’m here to say it is time to reclaim this neighborhood,” said Newsome, who laid the blame for the neighborhood’s sharp decline at the feet of the banks.

Residents of the neighborhood gathered for the rally shared stories of realtors cruising the neighborhood stopping to photograph even properties that are not in foreclosure or for sale.

“This was not an accident, this is redlining,” said Nell Myhand of Just Cause about West Oakland’s housing troubles.

“It’s time to take this to the politicians,” said ACCE organizer Shirley Burnell. “If they are not willing to help us, then they got to go. We will take them to the streets.”

Outside, activists signed up for shifts to help defend Newsome’s home from eviction, and started an emergency phone tree in case of trouble.

“The tents are gone but we are still here!” yelled an Occupy activist from the crowd as home defense clipboards circulated.

“I appreciate everyone doing this with me,” said Newsome. “That’s what Occupy is all about. We will take our homes back one at a time – no, five at a time.”

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