Billionaires

All in the game

Andrew Lam
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All in the game

arts@sfbg.com

FILM How might filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki measure the success of Arbitrage, his debut feature about a hedge fund honcho’s attempt to sell his way out of desperate circumstances? Perhaps a gauge can be found in the response the writer-director received at a recent East Hampton screening for a roomful of magnates such as John Paulson, figures who provided some of the initial inspiration for Arbitrage.

"I think the net worth of the room was somewhere around $20 or $30 billion," recalls Jarecki on recent visit to San Francisco. "They came up to me after the screening and said, ‘You know, we really liked the film and we just have to tell you — it made us uneasy from beginning to end. Really, what you put up there is our nightmare.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you.’"

The boyish Jarecki looks as pleased as a high-roller who has just bought low and sold high; he’s crafted a capitalist all-American horror story of sorts, for billionaires as well as the fascinated and repulsed 99 percent. As Arbitrage opens, its slick protagonist, Robert Miller (Richard Gere), is trying to close the sale of his life, on his 60th birthday: the purchase of his company by a banking goliath. The trick is completing the deal before his fraud, involving hundreds of millions of dollars, is uncovered, though the whip-smart daughter who works for him (Brit Marling) might soon be onto him.

Meanwhile, Miller’s gaming his personal affairs as well, juggling time between a model wife (Susan Sarandon) and a Gallic gallerist mistress (Laetitia Casta), when sudden-death circumstances threaten to destroy everything, and the power broker’s livelihood — and very existence — ends up in the hands of a young man (Nate Parker) with ambitions of his own.

It’s a realm that Jarecki is all too familiar with. Though like brothers Andrew (2003’s Capturing the Friedmans) and Eugene (2005’s Why We Fight), Jarecki’s first love is documentaries (his first film, 2006’s The Outsider, covered auteur James Toback), his family is steeped in the business world. Both his parents were commodities traders, and Jarecki, who describes himself as a "computer geek in my youth," once owned his own web development firm and internet access provider, among other ventures. Nonetheless, the filmmaker —who graduated from New York University film school at 19, served as a technical adviser on the 1995 film Hackers, and co-wrote the script 2008’s The Informers — continued to hear the siren call of feature film.

"I had knowledge of venture capital and the markets, but at the same time it was, what’s a credit default? What is this?" he remembers of the time he started writing Arbitrage‘s script in 2008. Bernard Madoff interested him less than "someone who was a good guy but who became corrupted along the way and started to believe in his own invincibility and his own press releases."

Jarecki found his "King Lear-esque" nouveau robber baron in Richard Gere, after convincing the actor to take a chance on a first-time director. He ended up digging in deep with Gere and the rest of the cast during a month of rehearsals, research, and rewrites. "I was doing my own mad arbitrage and putting the film together — the voluminous amounts of documents they make you sign, and I borrowed many millions of dollars from a major bank," Jarecki explains. "So it was rehearsing in one room and calling the wire desk on the other."

As a result, the moviemaker found himself understanding Miller’s part only too well: "When I was writing and the characters had to do something, the person I modeled the decision on was myself. What would I do? And the more surprising and frightening the answers, the more I felt I was onto something."

There’s a memorable moment when Miller’s daughter confronts him on his transgressions and he explains, in a moment of startling, almost lamely ineffectual self-consciousness, that he’s a patriarch simply playing his part. Still, Miller doesn’t believe it’s the end of days for those men gathering in East Hampton screening rooms.

"There was a joke I had with the distributor, ‘Will this still be relevant when it comes out?’" he muses. "Yet every week there’s a new revelation of a new fraud: MF Global losing billions of dollars in customer funds in unauthorized trading. A Knight Financial computer glitch and they lose $420 million — I think that’s the exact number lost in the movie — and it just happened two weeks ago. And now it’s, ‘Where’s my morning coffee?’"


ARBITRAGE opens Fri/14 in Bay Area theaters.

Are free Golden Gate Park events fading away?

Sasha Cuttler
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Are free Golden Gate Park events fading away?

San Francisco’s countercultural community was built at least partly through free concerts and gatherings in Golden Gate Park, including the legendary Human Be-In and Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane concerts in the late-’60s. But these days, as corporations starve local government but seize public spaces, grassroots groups and populist performances are being forced out of the park.

Events without expensive tickets and corporate sponsorships (such as this month’s Outside Lands) or endowments from dead billionaires (Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, coming up in early October) just can’t afford the rising fees charged by the Recreation and Parks Department, a reality that is quietly ending an important San Francisco tradition and legacy.

A few weeks ago, organizers of the Power to the Peaceful Festival – a free concert featuring Michael Franti and Spearhead and other big acts, which drew tens of thousands of people to the meadow formerly known as Speedway annually for more than a decade – announced that it was canceling next month’s event because of onerous fees.

“The only way to have produced the festival this year would have been to turn it into a ticketed event,” organizers wrote in their July 31 announcement. RPD officials were going to charge the event $77,000 in permit fees this year, dealing it a death blow after also forcing the cancellation of last year’s event by instituting a strict 40,000 attendee cap, which was nearly impossible to enforce for a free event.

If we accept the neoliberal perspective that has taken hold of San Francisco – which sees government’s role as facilitating whatever corporations want to do and hoping they share some of their profits, or at least create some good jobs – it makes sense. After all, the cash-strapped RPD made $1.7 million in profit-sharing off Outside Lands this year, up from $1.4 million last year.

The same logic has caused RPD, under the mercenary leadership of Director Phil Ginsburg, to rent out its recreation centers to the highest bidders and fire the recreation directors that used to treat them as public resources, and to let the private City Fields Foundation cover many parks in artificial turf. Again, through a strictly economic lens, it makes a certain amount of sense.

“As the steward of our parks, the Department works with event organizers to host diverse events in our parks, it is our shared responsibility to make sure the City and the event organizers have plans and resources in place to care for our park land and ensure public safety. The Department is always ready to work with all event organizers to modify their event planning for safe and successful events,” RPD spokesperson Connie Chan told us.

Power to the Peaceful – ironically, an event celebrating the plight of ordinary people against powerful political and economic interests around the world – just didn’t have the resources to meet the standard, so out they go. Same thing with the venerable Anarchist Book Faire, which was also forced from the park by rising fees this year after 17 years in the park’s County Fair Building.

Again, there’s a note of irony to this exodus, with city officials suddenly deciding the anarchists could no longer police themselves and needed to pay for four Park Police officers to watch over a festival that has been without violent incident throughout its history, unless you count a speaker getting pied last year (which the self-sufficient anarchists easily dealt with on their own).

“We had put this thing on for 17 years and there were no problems until this new guy came,” Joey Cain of Bound Together Bookstore, which puts on a free event whose fees have steadily risen to almost $14,000. “We’ve had to increase our rates every year, and we were starting to lose some vendors.”

On top of that, city officials had also cracked down on free offerings that surrounded the free event, banning Food Not Bombs from serving free meals to visitors and people from setting up information tables outside the main event.

So now the event, coming up in March, will be held at the Armory. Cain admitted that rent on the building they used in Golden Gate Park was still fairly cheap compared to similar sized venues around town, “as it should be, being owned by the city.”

But when city departments like RPD become dependent on corporate contributions, public spaces become commodified, and we begin to lose access to the last places in town where our creator endowed us with the right to assemble freely and pursue our happiness: our public parks.

Dick Meister: The billionaire’s bill of rights

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Billionaire corporate interests and other well financed anti-labor forces are waging a major drive to stifle the political voice of workers and their unions in California that is certain to spread nationwide if not stopped – and stopped now.

At issue is a highly deceptive measure, Proposition 32, on the November election ballot, that its anti-labor sponsors label as an even-handed attempt to limit campaign spending. But actually, it would limit – and severely – only the spending of unions while leaving corporations and other moneyed special interests free to spend as much as they like.

Unions would be prohibited from making political contributions with money collected from voluntary paycheck deductions authorized by their members, which is the main source of union political funds.

 But there would be no limits on corporations, whose political funds come from their profits, their customers or suppliers and the contributions of corporate executives. Nor would there be any limit on the political spending of the executives or any other wealthy individuals. What’s more, corporate special interests and billionaires could still give unlimited millions to secretive “Super PACs” that can raise unlimited amounts of money anonymously to finance their political campaigns.

The proposition would have a “devastating impact” on unions, notes Professor John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, writing in  the Hill’s Congress blog.  As he says, it would likely all but eliminate political spending by unions while greatly increasing political spending by business interests and wealthy individuals.

 Anti-labor interests are already outspending unions nationwide by a ratio of more than $15 for every $1 spent by unions. Between 2000 and 2011, that amounted to  $700 million spent by anti-labor forces, while unions spent just a little more than $284 million.

 Proposition 32 would even restrict unions in their communications with their own members on political issues. That’s because money raised by payroll deductions pays for the preparation and mailing of communications to union members, including political materials.

Unfortunately, there’s even more – much more –to Proposition 32. It also would prohibit unions from making contributions to political parties and defines public employee unions as “government contractors” that would be forbidden from attempting to influence any government agency with whom they have a contract.

That restriction applies not only to unions. It also would cover political action committees established by any membership organization,  “any agency or employee representation committee or plan,” such as those seeking stronger civil rights or environmental protections.

Proposition 32 seeks to weaken, that is, any membership group which might seek reforms opposed by wealthy individuals or corporations and their Republican allies.  It’s no wonder the measure is actively opposed, not only by organized labor, but also by the country’s leading good-government groups, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

Yet the proposition’s sponsors have the incredible gall to bill their measure as genuine campaign finance reform. They obviously hope that claim, which Common Cause accurately describes as a “laughable deception,” will win over the many voters who have been demanding reforms and who, in their eagerness, will fail to recognize the measure’s true nature.

“This is not genuine campaign finance reform,” as San Francisco State’s John Logan says, “but a bill of rights for billionaires.”

The losers would include teachers, nurses, police, firefighters and other union members and those who benefit from the essential services they provide – students, the elderly, and the ailing, the poverty stricken, those who work and live in unsafe conditions and other needy citizens, and consumers, environmentalists and others who also are neglected by the profit-chasing corporate interests that dominate political and economic life.

Make no mistake: Lots of money is being funneled into the Proposition 32 campaign by some of the same wealthy backers who bankrolled such anti-labor efforts as the campaign that blocked the massive attempt to recall virulently anti-labor GOP Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin this year.

Should the anti-union forces also prevail, it will undoubtedly lead to what Logan says “will promote a tsunami of ballot initiatives in 2013 at the local level and in 2014 at the state level designed to drive down working conditions in both the public and private sectors.”

Logan adds, “Lacking the ability to oppose these reactionary measures under the new election rules, California’s workers could soon face the weakest labor standards in the country”. But if the measure is rejected, it “may slow the momentum behind other attempts to increase the corrosive impact of money in politics.”

It’s true that some states already have laws and regulations seriously limiting labor’s influence. But it’s certain that victory by the anti-labor forces in California will slow any attempts at reform in other states and lead as well to attempts to impose anti-union measures elsewhere, as well as expanding those that already exist.

The stakes are huge. If the 1 percent have their way in California, the country’s largest state, other states are certain to follow.

For more from John Logan, check his piece in the East Bay Express, “If you liked Citizen United, you’ll love Prop 32.” http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/if-you-liked-citizens-united-youll-love-prop-32/Content?oid=330613

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The NY Times and class struggle

Zelda Bronstein
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The NY Times and class struggle

The NY Times isn’t exactly a revolutionary left-wing publication — and while columnist Paul Krugman routinely talks about the income and wealth divide, it’s not typically a staple of how the Times cover the news. But David Leonhardt is starting a blog on the decline in the middle class and is going to turn it into an article during the later parts of the presidential campaign — and amazingly enough, he’s got it pretty much right:

In addition to the slow growth in overall size of the pie, the share that has been going to anyone but the richest Americans has been declining. The top-earning 1 percent of households now bring home about 20 percent of total income, up from less than 10 percent 40 years ago. The top-earning 1/10,000th of households — each earning at least $7.8 million a year, many of them working in finance — bring home almost 5 percent of income, up from 1 percent 40 years ago. In the simplest terms, the relatively meager gains the American economy has produced in recent years have largely flowed to a small segment of the most affluent households, leaving middle-class and poor households with slow-growing living standards.

It’s simple, and it’s pretty clear — as is the fact that it’s not random but the result of specific policies. From one of the (many intelligent) comments (my trolls, please take note):

The middle class is an artificial construct, something deliberately created through the enactment of policy. It emerged in the U.S. largely because of political, economic and social changes that were imposed: the New Deal, the Great Society, the creation of the suburbs and highway systems, strong unions that demanded fair wages and protections, etc. All of these developments happened only because people willed them and fought to ensure economic expansion benefited regular people. It could have just as easily gone the other way; indeed, it IS going the other way now (and has been for the last 30 years or so). The choices today are different: to let the markets decide, to deregulate and bolster corporations, to exacerbate the wealth divide, to enforce an unfair tax system, to shift essential costs (healthcare, environmental remediation, etc.) to the taxpayer, and so on. And so the middle class erodes. It should come as no surprise.

What’s talked about less in this NYT piece is the role of government in redistributing income. The idea that the US tax system should take more than half of the income people earn beyond a certain point is hardly radical; as early as the 1920s, the highest earners turned over as much as 70 percent to the government — and unlike today’s billionaires, they actually paid it. The JP Morgans of the world got really really rich AND paid high taxes AND gave a lot of money to public enterprises (public libraries, public museums etc.).

That as much as unionization and post-War industrialization created the middle class.

Another interesting comment:

Our “free-market” policies of the last 30 years have favored efficiency and productivity above all else. The result has been sending American jobs overseas on a massive scale. Now we have inexpensive tee-shirts and computers, but vast unemployment and underemployment. Instead, I believe our culture should favor creating as many high paying middle-class jobs as possible without regard to “productivity”. This requires protective trade barriers. Yes, prices will go up, but for a more affluent society, it’s a cheap price to pay.

Obama talks a good line about the middle class, but he’s not offering any specific ideas that would fundamentally change the direction of US economic policy. In fact, the biggest issue in the campaign isn’t even an issue.

Oh, and by the way: I have to note that Randy Shaw at BeyondChron is now talking about the important of “class diversity.” He’s right — there need to be more tenants (and working-class tenants) on the Planning Commission and Board of Appeals. There also needs to be a consciousness of class issues in general at City Hall — and a discussion of how policies that favor high-tech companies, like those of his beloved Mayor Lee, are pretty clearly NOT in the interests of protecting class diversity in the city.

 

 

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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yael@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY 29

Funeral for capitalism

Occupy Oakland declares capitalism dead with a funeral procession with New Orleans style brass band, eulogy, and “dancing on the grave to follow.” Organizers want you to “use your extra day to bid farewell to a system that brings us meaningless jobs, billionaires, shopping malls, structural poverty, and ecological collapse.” After all, this is a leap year, so celebrate it right!

6 p.m., free

Oscar Grant/ Frank H. Ogawa Plaza

Broadway and 14th, Oakl

www.leapdayaction.org/event/funeral-capitalism

 

THURSDAY 1

Occupy Education Part 1

As part of a national day of action, join Occupy City College of SF, Occupy SF State, and the Occupy SF Action Council for a teach-in and occupation at the California State Office Building. The event will be followed by a rally at Civic Center Plaza, with speeches and discussions about the causes and effects of deep cuts to the higher education system.

3 p.m., free

California State Office Building

455 Golden Gate, SF

www.occupyed.org

 

Occupy 4 Prisoners benefit

Legendary activist and professor Angela Davis, along with fellow prison-reform activists Elaine Brown and Barbara Becnel, will speak about the prison-industrial complex, followed by a film screening of Broken on all sides: Race, Mass Incarceration, and New Visions for Criminal Justice in the US.

7 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Grand Lake Theater

3200 Grand, Oakl

www.occupyoakland.org

 

SATURDAY 3

The Future of Palestine

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative and president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, comes to Berkeley. His talk will center on the impact of the Arab Spring on Palestinian politics, and how non-violent struggle there has succeeded in recent years. Proceeds from the event will benefit medical relief for children in Palestine.

7:30 p.m., $10

Martin Luther King Middle School

1781 Rose, Berk.

www.mecaforpeace.org


MONDAY 5

Occupy Education Part 2

Every year, students, teachers and supporters march on Sacramento to demand better access to education. This year, fueled by Occupy momentum, promises to be a big one. Hundreds of protesters plan to march from San Francisco to Sacramento—a four-day journey—for this day of rallies, a general assembly, and non-violent action trainings at California’s Capitol building. Join them, sign up for a seat on the bus, or head to Sacramento yourself.

10 a.m., free

Southside Park

2115 Sixth St, Sacra

www.occupyeducationca.org/wordpress

Film Listings

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. Due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

INDIEFEST

The 14th San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs through Thurs/23 at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, SF. For tickets (most films $11) and schedule info, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

Act of Valor Action movie starring real-life, active-duty Navy SEALs. (1:45)

*Bullhead Michael R. Roskam’s Belgian import scored an unexpected Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination this year. Unexpected, because it’s daring, disturbing, and a lot of other things that Foreign Language Film nominees usually are not (heartwarming, yes — gasp-inducing, no). The five-second description of this film, which is about a cattle farmer who injects both his livestock and his own body with illegal hormones, doesn’t do it justice. Who knew there was such a thing, for instance, as a “hormone mafia underworld”? While some of Bullhead‘s nuances, which occasionally pivot on culture-clash moments specific to its Belgium setting, will inevitably be lost on American viewers, the most important parts of the movie come through loud and clear, and you won’t soon forget them. (2:04) (Eddy)

*Dizzy Heights: Silent Cinema and Life in the Air The film medium’s first, sound free decades coincided with a sense of hurtling modernization throughout first-world society like nothing before or since — centuries of history had scarcely prepared for the sudden reality of such concepts as “world war” or “skyscraper.” Aviation in particular was such a fascinating wonder its potential seemed limitless, though commercial air travel was as yet many years and dollars from the average citizen’s reach. Curated by Patrick Ellis, this Pacific Film Archive series brings together some of the era’s most fanciful depictions of progress and peril in the skies. It includes 1918’s goofy, ambitious Danish A Trip to Mars, whose intrepid (if in-fighting) Earthlings land to promptly horrify the Red Planet of Peace’s entire vegetarian populace by shooting fowl and throwing a grenade. The influence of Isadora Duncan weighs heavily on the ensuing lessons learned, as wreath-bearing, toga clad peaceniks (“Come with me and look at the dance of chastity”) exhort our heroes to return home and preach pacifism — a very timely message, then. The 1929 British “disaster flick” High Treason more realistically depicts a very Jazz Age near future pushed away from the Charleston towards more catastrophic military conflict by unscrupulous war profiteers. Julien Duvivier, a director at the beginning of a long, sometimes pedestrian career in the French cinematic mainstream, was young and feckless when he made 1927’s Mystery of the Eiffel Tower, a long, antic conspiracy thriller that directly inspired the Tintin comics. This long weekend of rarities also includes a program of shorts encompassing animation from Disney and McKay, trick photography and Mack Sennett slapstick. Pacific Film Archive. (Harvey)

Gone A woman (Amanda Seyfried) who escaped a serial killer fears he has retaliated by kidnapping her sister. (1:34)

*In Darkness See “The War at Home.” (2:25)

*Khodorkovsky Russia today is a so-called “managed democracy.” Flawed a system as democracy is, though, it’s something you either live in or don’t — put a qualifier on the term, and it becomes something else. This particular something else is a nation where a popular, populist leader like Vladimir Putin can maintain an economically successful (at least for many) status quo and his own power by squelching any political opposition via decidedly un-democratic means. One of the most conspicuous such cases in recent years has been the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former owner of oil company Yukos and the most fabulously wealthy “oligarch” to emerge from Russia’s post-Soviet move toward capitalist privatization. Though initially considered as corrupt as any in that privileged class, he realized after a fashion that transparency actually encouraged investment, becoming a noted respecter of oft-abused minority shareholder rights and a sort of poster child for ethical business practice. This transition coincided with increased friction between him and Putin, who had given Khodorkovsky and others like him relatively free rein so long as they “stayed out of politics.” On the day before the latter was arrested in 2003 — returning against all advice from an overseas trip where he’d been expected to become another wealthy “political emigrant” — he continued to align himself with the reformist anti-Putin opposition by telling a TV host “As long as our country isn’t fully a civil society, no one is safe from the people with handcuffs.” Conviction on questionable charges, Stalinesque detention in remote Siberia, and still-ongoing excuses for sentence elongation have ensued. The subject of Cyril Tuschi’s documentary (finally interviewed directly at the end) is certainly not innocent of arrogance, incaution, and possibly more prosecutable crimes; but he has also clearly chosen the hardest path against an intractable, grudge-keeping foe on moral principal. How many billionaires would even consider losing their freedom, comfort, and wealth for such an abstract? Khodorkovsky the movie has its character flaws, too — but you can forgive a filmmaker some of those when he’s working on a subject, and from a perspective, that has gotten more than a couple fellow journalists “mysteriously” poisoned to death. (1:51) (Harvey)

*Roadie Michael Cuesta’s first film as both director and writer (again co-authoring with brother Gerald) since 2001’s startling debut feature L.I.E. is also his best work since then. After nearly a quarter-century spent schlepping equipment for Blue Oyster Cult — the arty metal band (“Don’t Fear the Reaper,” i.e. “more cowbell!”) that was already sliding from the spotlight when he signed on — Jimmy Testergross (Ron Eldard) is fired, the reasons unknown to us. With nowhere else to go, he lands on the doorstep of his childhood home in Queens, where he hasn’t been seen in at least 20 years. Mom (Lois Smith) is going senile, though somehow her disapproval comes through with perfect clarity (and hasn’t changed in all that time). Seeking a liquid solace at a bar, our hero instead runs into Randy (Bobby Cannavale), who bullied him mercilessly way back when — and is now married to “Jimmy Testicle’s” still-hot former girlfriend Nikki (Jill Hennessey), who has rock-star aspirations of her own. Taking place over less than 24 hours’ span, Roadie is a very small character study, but a well-observed one. “Developmentally stunted by rock ‘n’ roll,” as one character puts it (when it emerges 40-something Jimmy has never learned to make coffee for himself), its protagonist is the kind of likable boy-man loser usually found in Fountains of Wayne songs, an aging lifelong air guitarist pining over good old days that probably weren’t even that good. His nostalgia is as touchingly hapless as his dubious future. (1:35) SF Film Society Cinema. (Harvey)

*Straight Outta Hunters Point 2 See “Back to the Point.” (1:20) Roxie.

Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds Director Tyler Perry puts aside the Madea drag to star as a man torn between Gabrielle Union and Thandie Newton. (1:51)

Wanderlust Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston star in this David Wain-directed, Judd Apatow-produced comedy about a New York City couple who move to a commune. (1:38)

ONGOING

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) (Chun)

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much “Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue” — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) (Harvey)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) (Chun)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) (Chun)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) (Harvey)

Margaret Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is an Upper West Side teen living with her successful actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron, wife to writer-director Kenneth Lonergan) — dad (Lonergan) lives in Santa Monica with his new spouse — and going through normal teenage stuff. Her propensity for drama, however, is kicked into high gear when she witnesses (and inadvertently causes) the traffic death of a stranger. Initially fibbing a bit to protect both herself and the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) involved, she later has second thoughts, increasingly pursuing a path toward “justice” that variably affects others including the dead woman’s friend (Jeannie Berlin), mom’s new suitor (Jean Reno), teachers at Lisa’s private school Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), etc. Lonergan is a fine playwright and uneven sometime scenarist who made a terrific screen directorial debut with 2000’s You Can Count On Me (which also featured Ruffalo, Broderick and Smith-Cameron). He appears to have intended Margaret as a pulse-taking of privileged Manhattanites’ comingled rage, panic, confusion, and guilt after 9-11. But if that’s the case, then this convoluted story provides a garbled metaphor at best. It might best be taken as a messy, intermittently potent study of how someone might become the kind of person who’ll spend the rest of their lives barging into other people’s affairs, creating a mess, assuming the moral high ground in a stubborn attempt to “fix” it, then making everything worse while denying any personal responsibility. Certainly that’s the person Lisa appears to be turning into, though it’s unclear whether Lonergan intends her to be seen that way. Indeed, despite some sharply written confrontations and good performances, it’s unclear what Lonergan intended here at all — and since he’s been famously fiddling with Margaret‘s (still-problematic) editing since late 2005, one might guess he never really figured that out himself. (2:30) SF Film Society Cinema. (Harvey)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) (Harvey)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) (Rapoport)

W.E. Madonna’s first directorial feature, 2008’s Filth and Wisdom, was so atrocious, and the early word on this second effort so vitriolic, that there’s a temptation to give W.E. too much credit simply for not being a disgrace. Co-written by Madge and Alek Keshishian, it’s about two women in gilded cages. One is Wallis Simpson (the impressive Andrea Riseborough), a married American socialite who scandalized the world by divorcing her husband and running about with Edward, Prince of Wales (James D’Arcy), who had to abdicate the English throne in order to marry her in 1936. The other is fictive Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a childless Manhattan socialite in the late 1990s who’s neglected by her probably-unfaithful husband (Richard Coyle). Over-eagerly intertwined despite their trite-at-best overlaps (the main one being Wally’s obsession with Wallis), these two strands hold attention for a while. But eventually they grow turgid. We’re presumably meant to be carried away by their True Love, but the film doesn’t succeed in making Wallis and Edward seem more than two petulant, shallow snobs who were fortunate to find each other, but didn’t necessarily make one another better or more interesting people. (It also alternately denies and glosses over the couple’s fascist-friendly politics, which became an embarrassment as England fought Germany in World War II.) Meanwhile, Wally is a mopey blank too easily belittled by her spouse, and too handily rescued by a Prince Charming, or rather “Russian intellectual slumming as a security guard” (Oscar Isaac) working at Sotheby’s during an auction of the late royal couple’s estate. As is so often the case with Madonna, she seems to be saying something here, but precisely what is murky and probably not worth sussing out. Likewise, the attention to showy surface aesthetics — in particular Arianne Phillips’ justifiably Oscar-nominated costumes — is fastidious, revealing, and to an extent satisfying in itself. Somewhat ambitious and in several ways quite well crafted, the handsomely appointed W.E. isn’t bad (surely it wouldn’t have attracted such hostility if directed by anyone else), but the flaws that finally suffocate it reach right down to its conceptual gist. There is, however, one lovely moment toward the end: Riseborough’s Wallis, a well-preserved septuagenarian, dancing an incongruous yet supremely self-assured twist on request for her bedridden husband. (1:59) (Harvey)

Larry Ellison won’t miss $22 million

Zelda Bronstein
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Larry Ellison won’t miss $22 million

If the America’s Cup fundraising committee can’t come up with $32 million, the city’s going to be on the hook for a big chunk of change — as much as $22 million — budget analyst Harvey Rose says. Just for the record, I’d like to point out that the America’s Cup won’t just be an economic bonanza for the city (if it in fact turns out to attract a lot of people) — it will be a huge advertising and public-relations boon for Oracle Corp, which will have its singature logo and the sail of its boat. Larry Ellison, who will be helping skipper the boat, will be all over the news. You won’t be able to read a newspaper or watch the TV news or read anything online about the cup race without seeing the Oracle logo. You can’t buy that kind of exposure for any level of money.

And as far as I know, Ellison hasn’t contribute a dime to this fundraising committee.

For the record — and I’m pretty sure I have the math right — $22 million would be less than one tenth of one percent of Ellison’s net worth.

Larry, for god’s sake: Write out a check.

Ed Lee’s 100 percent

Zelda Bronstein
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Ed Lee’s 100 percent

I expected a lot of talk about togetherness at the mayor’s inauguration, but Ed Lee went a step further: He acually announced that he wants to be the mayor “for the 100 percent.” That’s a remarkable statement when you think about it, and it indicates to me that Lee doesn’t want to be, and isn’t going to be, and activist leader.

It’s nice to talk at political events about how we’re all in this together, how everyone in San Francisco is part of the same nice big city family, how we all really love each other and can hold hands and build a better city and all that happy horsehit. But the truth is, we aren’t, and we can’t.

San Francisco is a divided city, increasingly split between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. The politics are bitterly divided — and not because the progressives fought with former mayor Gavin Newsom. No: There are people who are used to getting their way in this town, and they have been for years, and they make up an oligarchy that stands with big landlords, and big developers, and big corporations, often using terms like “job creation”  to disguise an agenda of tax breaks, minimal regulation and a disdain for social justice.

That’s not conspiracy theory; it’s fact, and anyone who has been a part of this city for a long as me knows it.

It’s about political power. An activist, progressive mayor would acknowlege that fact — and the fact that power is never surrendered voluntarily. Sorry to spoil your spirit of togetherness, Ed, but Willie Brown and his clients, including Pacific Gas and Electric Company, have very little in common with me; I want to kick PG&E out of San Francisco and replace it with a publicly-owned utility. There is no compromise here, no middle ground — PG&E has to lose for us to win.

Not every issue in San Francisco is like that — some of the 1 percenters are all in favor of bicycle lanes and same-sex marriage and a lot of other wonderful things. There are plenty of areas where everyone in San Francisco can work together for the glory of our collective greatness.

But there are also issues that involve, yes, class warfare. Ed Lee must know that; he’s been around long enough, fought enough bad guys, stood up for the poor people. But he also apparently thinks he can be mayor and be pals with Brown and the billionaires — and still be on the side of the 99 percent. And it doesn’t work that way. Not if you want to make economic justice a part of the local agenda.

I think Lee’s going to be a lot better than Gavin Newsom, who was intractable and a jerk. But this notion that you never have to pick sides, that there is no 99 percent on one side up against a 1 percent on the other, is either cluelessness or bullshit. And I don’t think Lee is clueless.

The message of 1968

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The message of 1968

By J.H. Tompkins

LIT On October 16, 1968, in Mexico City, American Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos electrified the world by accepting their medals with heads down and gloved fists thrust proudly in the air. Their defiance provided a fitting end for a year that began with Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring and America’s military humiliation during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and saw the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and its explosive aftermath, the general strike in France, the riveting presence and influence of the Black Panther Party, mushrooming opposition to the draft, and rioting in Chicago during the Democratic Convention.

Like Mohammed Ali, who in 1967 went to prison rather than fight in Vietnam, Smith and Carlos wrote an important page in American history. Like Ali, they have remained true to the principles they embodied years ago. Now, 43 years down the road, it’s hard to find anyone to speak against what they did.

But at the time, precisely because their enemy was weakened by exposure and their supporters inspired, they faced a blistering backlash. They were banished from Olympic Village, and sent back to the United States. Their crime? Smith and Carlos were allegedly guilty of tarnishing the spirit of an Olympic games that were supposed to be above and beyond politics.

Author-columnist-cultural critic Dave Zirin, who with Carlos has just published “The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World,” has more than a few things to say about the sanctity of sports and the way political context shapes athletes as well as the games they play. These days, a conversation with Zirin has a special quality: not only has he written a book that sheds new light on an important, long-ago event, the present moment is energized by political turmoil that brings to mind the 1960s.

“I was an absolute sports junkie in the ’90s, when I was in college,” Zirin told me in a recent interview. “I memorized stats, followed every sport, it was my oxygen. I didn’t follow politics, much less politics in sports, until something happened that stopped me cold: In 1996 [Denver Nuggets guard] Mahmoud Abdul Rauf made a decision not to stand during the National Anthem. He was asked whether he understood that the flag was a symbol of freedom and equality throughout the world, and he said it may be to some, but to others it’s a symbol of oppression and tyranny. This was before the spread of the Internet, and Rauf’s stand was only covered by the mainstream media. They crushed him.”

Zirin realized then that there was an aspect of sports history he hadn’t concerned himself with, “the place where social justice and sports intersect,” as he put it. It has shaped the work he’s done since.

Among many other things, Zirin writes a column, “Edge of Sports” for the Sports Illustrated Website, has a weekly radio show called “Edge of Sports Radio” on XM, and contributes regularly to The Nation and SLAM Magazine. Along with “The John Carlos Story,” he was written books including “What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States,” “Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports,” and “A People’s History of Sports in the United States.”

As Zirin and Carlos point out in the book, the futures of both runners were shaped by what they did in Mexico City. They struggled to find jobs, stability, and peace of mind. Still, Zirin writes “Unlike other 1960s iconography — Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman, Richard Nixon — the moment doesn’t feel musty. It still packs a wallop.”

It resonates because the injustices they protested are still rife in America, and because the arena in which they took their stand — sports — creates common ground for so many people.

“I don’t think there’s any place where the contradictions in American society are on such sharp display as in sports,” Zirin told me. “Think back to African American boxing champions Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. Neither made explicit political statements, but they had representative political power, representing power and pride in the context of racism and white supremacy. They weren’t just entertainers but in fact their presence, the inspiration they provided, was a threat to the established order of things.”

In sports today, there’s no doubt that athletes, in particular African American athletes, play a similar role. NBA hall of famer Charles Barkley once objected — perhaps with his tongue somewhat in his cheek — to the idea that he was a role model. Zirin laughed at the mention of this, saying, “Yeah, and the sky isn’t blue. You don’t chose to be a role model, you are one. It’s an objective thing. And if people are going to be role models, like it or not, then we all have to examine what they’re modeling. If you believe that the fact that a player can dunk makes him a great person, that says one thing. If having a sense of purpose in politics is important, then that says something very different.”

When Zirin and Carlos planned their book, both agreed that they weren’t interested in producing a sports memoir. “We didn’t want to say ‘look at me, genuflect at my athletic greatness.’ We wanted to say that not everyone can run at a world-class speed, but anyone can live a life dedicated to a sense of purpose.”

That approach runs head-on into a mainstream media that has made a point of emphasizing how “today’s pampered athletes,” as the media often put it, want nothing more than a fat pay check. There’s truth in this perspective — although it should be noted that both the NFL and NBA have experienced lockouts this year and that the same media outlets rarely describe the fabulously wealthy owners of professional franchises as pampered billionaires.

“I wrote an article,” he explained, called “‘NBA Players: Welcome to the 99%.’ Despite their money and privilege, they found themselves in a position where they were facing arrogant billionaires asking for a bailout because they made a lot of bad business decisions as NBA owners. It’s just like Wall Street bankers want American working people to cover all their bad bets. Will their proposed savings go back to fans? I don’t think so, they’ll just get a bigger slice of the pie.”

Besides, Zirin pointed out that there’s a lot more to the story that rarely reaches the public. Professional sports will publicly punish athletes who are caught crossing certain lines. But when it comes to speaking to the politics of injustice, the leagues try to deal with transgressions behind the scenes.

“There’s a ton of corporate and financial pressure on these athletes,” he says. “And these players talk to each other about guys like Craig Hodges [a guard on three Chicago Bulls championship teams], who in 1992 passed a note to Bush Sr. about Iraq War I when the Bulls visited the White House. He was drummed out of the league for that and these stories are passed down almost like scare stories. At the end of the day, we have to remember what Carlos and Smith did was in the context of global revolt and crisis. It was a symbol of the moment and a perfect merging of movements and moments. We can’t forget that.”

Although Zirin makes a point in his work to include athletes of all nationalities and sexual preferences, he has particular insights into the role African American athletes play in American culture.

“John Thompson says that Black athletes have the blessing of the burden of representation,” he noted. “It’s a burden because if one athlete does something, then it’s an issue for all Black athletes to deal with, for instance Michael Vick’s involvement with dog fighting. It’s not Peyton Manning’s problem that Chris Herron [a white one-time basketball standout from the mid-2000s] got on drugs. It works in a different way for Black athletes. The blessing part is the you’re part of a tradition, you stand on the shoulders of men and women like Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Wyomia Tyus, and Mohammed Ali, and you have an ownership of that tradition. It’s true that Steve Nash and all athletes are part of the tradition, but it runs more seamlessly through the African American community.”

These days, the sports world is talking about another scandal, this time the ugly situation at Penn State. Zirin discusses those problems in the context of a bankrupt culture, where the NCAA — the self-proclaimed moral arbiter of college sports — refuses to speak to hypocrisy that links all the problems in order to ensure its own survival.

Sooner or later, he said, the NCAA will either sink beneath its own corrupt weight, or athletes — who because of the professionalization of youth sports know each other in many cases from their early teens — band together and demand some compensation for the money that they generate. College presidents are the loudest complainers and the most important enablers.”

About that “acrimonious fall”

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Catch this. Mayor Ed Lee’s mayoral victory had nothing to do with millions of dollars in campaign contributions from private interests, a sophisticated get-out-the vote effort targeting Lee supporters, the advantage of incumbency, some funny business, or a calculated campaign strategy concentrating efforts on absentee ballots.

Instead, the fact that Lee triumphed over voters’ second pick, the significantly less well-funded progressive candidate Sup. John Avalos, is proof that the left in San Francisco has plummeted into a dark abyss. In fact, the progressive movement has descended so far into disarray and become so irrelevant that its condition warrants front page news.

That’s essentially the narrative that Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi of the San Francisco Weekly offer in their cover article, “Progressively Worse: The Tumultuous Rise and Acrimonious Fall of the City’s Left,” in which they refer to the Guardian as “the movement’s cajoling ward boss, kingmaker, and sounding board.” Gosh, I feel so goddamn important right now.

Once the blood pressure returned to normal, my initial reaction to this piece was that Wachs and Eskenazi seem to misunderstand who and what progressives actually are. They portray the city’s left as a caricature, a brash bunch of power mongers now on the losing end that can be easily summed up with pithy video game references, Happy Meal toy bans, and bikes.

Witness the contrast between the Weekly’s portrayal of progressives (helped along by former Newsomite Eric Jaye), and the portrait of the left the Guardian offers this week with an Op-Ed written by NTanya Lee — an actual progressive who volunteered for the Avalos for Mayor campaign.

Here’s the Weekly on the left:

“This is an eclectic group, one often bound not by mutual interests as much as mutual enmity — toward Brown, his successors, and the corporate interests of ‘downtown.’ As a result, progressive principles are often wildly inconsistent. Progressives favor more government control over people’s lives for their own good, as when they effectively banned McDonald’s Happy Meals. But sometimes progressives say the government needs to let people make their own choices … Progressives believe government should subsidize homeless people who choose to drink themselves to death, while forbidding parents from buying McNuggets because fast food is bad for us. … Without consistent principles, it’s easy to associate progressives with the craziest ideas to come out of City Hall, and the movement’s bad ideas are memorable. … Daly’s pledge to say ‘Fuck’ at every public meeting makes a killer Internet meme. Hey, let’s legalize prostitution and outlaw plastic bags!”

Here’s Lee on the left:

“The Avalos coalition was largely community forces: SF Rising’s base in working class Black, Latino, Filipino and Chinese communities; the Bike Coalition’s growing base of mostly white bike riders; affinity groups like Filipinos, Queers, Latinos and Arabs for Avalos; progressive Democrats; social networks of creative, young progressive activists affiliated with the League of Young Voters; and loyal families and neighborhood leaders from John’s own District 11. The campaign prioritized communicating to voters in four languages, and according to the Chinese press, John Avalos was the only non-Chinese candidate with a significant Chinese outreach program. There were stalwarts from progressive labor unions (most notably SEIU 1021 and USWW) who threw down — but overall, labor played it safe and invested resources in other guys. And then, in the great surprise development of the race, supporters of the new national occupy movement came to be a strong part of the Team Avalos base because the campaign was so well positioned to resonate with the call to take on the one percent.”

When it comes to takeaways from the November election, the Weekly’s conclusion is essentially opposite that of progressives. While many on the left see themselves as regaining momentum and building the power to rise even in the face of defeat by the established powers-that-be, the Weekly casts San Francisco’s left as deflated and out-of-touch.

Speaking of out-of-touch, the SF Weekly refers to San Francisco’s “increasingly imaginary working class.”  But in reality, 61 percent of students attending public schools in S.F. Unified School District qualify for free or reduced lunch, and a majority of San Franciscans cannot afford market-rate housing.

However, the Weekly is correct in pointing out that shifting demographics have dealt a blow to the progressive base.

“Between 2000 and 2010, the city grew older (every age group over 50 increased), wealthier (there are now 58 percent more households earning $125,000 or more), and more heavily Asian (up from around 30 to nearly 35 percent of the city’s population): exactly the groups progressives don’t win with. These voters don’t respond well to campaigns against developments or for city services, because they’re often living in those developments and don’t need city services.”

I take issue with the Asian part of that statement as a sweeping generalization, however, having witnessed the solid organizing work of the Chinese Progressive Association, for example.

The Weekly also says progressives and the Guardian never called out former Mayor Gavin Newsom for ripping off their best ideas. Oh, they didn’t?  That’s news to me.

The Weekly article implies that progressives got trounced by moderates because jobs are priority No. 1 for voters, and the left has no feasible economic plan — but at the same time, the article completely dismisses ideas that the Guardian has put forth, like creating a municipal bank, implementing Avalos’ Local Hire legislation, or taxing the rich.

Taxing the rich is precisely the kind of economic solution the international Occupy movement is clamoring for, and the concept has even attracted a few unlikely supporters, like billionaires Warren Buffet and Sean Parker, who is not some conservative a*hole by the way.

“The Guardian … stays on the progressive agenda because they put it there, along with taxing the rich, tapping downtown to subsidize Muni, and other measures … Proposing the same old solutions to every new problem turns policies into punch lines.”

Speaking of predictable, no profile authored by the Weekly mentioning the Guardian would be complete without some dig about public power. “The Guardian has been flogging public power since Tesla invented the alternating-current generator,” the S.F. Weekly squawks. Those clever reporters, turning policies into punch lines.

But wait, I thought the problem was that progressives couldn’t get it together on the job creation thing. Consider the CleanPower SF program, which has been strongly advocated for by progressive Sup. and Sheriff-elect Ross Mirkarimi (who it turns out is “not toxic,” according to the Weekly, since he was elected citywide and all). According to an analysis by the Local Clean Energy Alliance, CleanPowerSF will create 983 jobs — 4,357 jobs when indirect job creation is factored in — over the course of three years, assuming the 51 percent renewable energy target is met. Presented with this kind of information, the Weekly will only yawn and say, “Are we on that again?”

That being said, our friends’ article might actually have a pearl of wisdom or two buried somewhere in that nauseating sea of sarcasm. Everyone needs to engage in self-reflection. So right after you’re done throwing up, think about how to take advantage of the opportunity this article presents for a citywide dialogue about progressivism in San Francisco.

Dick Meister: The lessons of Ohio

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has drawn some important lessons from last week’s election in Ohio that repealed a state law severely limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employees. Worse, it threatened to inspire passage of similar anti-bargaining laws elsewhere.

Listen to Trumka, a man who obviously knows what he’s talking about. In an article he wrote for Reader Supported News, he cites post-election polls showing that more than half of Ohio’s voters correctly “perceived the law as a political maneuver by Gov. John Kasich and state Republicans to weaken labor unions, rather than a genuine effort to make state government more efficient.”

Another poll, done for the AFL-CIO, showed that more than half the voters also found that Kasich and his allies “are putting the interests of big corporations ahead of average working people.”<–break->

Voters everywhere in the mid-term elections clearly wanted change. But, as Trumpka says, they did not want “political maneuvers and overreach” like those of Kasich and Republican legislators. They want effective action to curb unemployment, create jobs and deal with the other severe economic problems facing the country.

As Trumka notes, public employees, union members, Democrats and liberals voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Ohio law, but so did a majority of voters “from households with no public employee, workers without union representation and independents – as well as 30 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of conservatives.”

One of the key lessons Trumka draws from Ohio’s election is that “the myth of the pampered public employee has been busted. Public employees didn’t cause the economic crisis and they’re not the enemy. Demonization of public employees is neither a strategy nor a solution and the heartland Americans who voted to restore rights for public employees understood that.”

The election also reinforced the continued need for working people, public and private employees alike, to join closely together. That’s what happened in Ohio. There, as Trumka notes, “firefighters, teachers and other public employees were joined by plumbers, pilots and all kinds of private sector employees to win. Worker to worker, neighbor to neighbor, the message spread, and what began as an attempt to divide workers flopped famously. In the end, working people’s solidarity was the message.”

Politicians could also learn important lessons – if they will. For the Ohio voters “showed that when fundamental rights and livelihoods are targeted, working people will not only defend themselves, but come back stronger.”

The outcome of the Ohio vote should show politicians seeking office that it would be wise for them to pay much more attention to the wishes of working and middle class voters than to those of the wealthy and privileged. Says Trumka:

“Cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires, scapegoating working Americans and their unions and downsizing Social Security and Medicare may get you a standing ovation from the 1%, but the voters who decide elections will not be fooled – and you may just get more than you bargained for.”

Trumka’s correct. But despite the results in Ohio and the lessons they hold for the anti-labor political right, many undoubtedly will continue what the AFL-CIO sees as “part of Wall Street’s strategy to chip away at collective bargaining rights, piece by piece, law by law, until unions and collective bargaining rights are destroyed.”

Working people and their unions can be reasonably certain, at least, that they’ll have strong support in trying to withstand the attack – including support from the Occupy Wall Street movement, which Trumka credits with “redefining the political narrative.”

The next major test will come in the presidential and congressional elections in 2012. They’re especially looking for support from the swing voters who supported President Obama in the 2008 election and generally have the same political views as the majority of Ohio voters.

Trumka describes the swing voters as “working Americans with modest incomes, moderate views and little patience for polices that aren’t fair and don’t work.”

He says politicians seeking election or re-election next year must heed them and “support public policies for the 99 percent – policies that create jobs, invest in America’s future, safeguard Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and promote fiscal sanity by requiring millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share.”

OK, that’s asking for much more than we’ve been getting. But the Ohio vote demonstrated that it is possible to garner the votes necessary to overcome the forces that would deny us vital economic and political rights.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Vote for three but not Ed Lee

Andrew Lam
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16

OPINION Halloween 2011. Next week San Francisco will choose a new mayor. Is this a masquerade? Who is behind Mayor Ed Lee’s mask?

I’ll call it exactly how I see it: I am disappointed in Ed Lee. I’ve known him since before I was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2000. I wanted to be hopeful, but I actually can’t say that I’m surprised. Ed Lee has always been a go-along-to-get-along bureaucrat who has moved up the feeding chain by doing the bidding of former Mayor Willie Brown and Willie’s loyal lieutenant Rose Pak. I had a fantasy that maybe Ed would rise to the occasion, become his own person, and emerge as an independent leader free of those that orchestrated his appointment to “interim” mayor.

But in the first year since appointment (in one of the most masterful political plays since Abe Ruef got Eugene Schmitz installed as mayor in 1902), Ed has consistently sided with the powers and their “City Family” that “made” him. Even I was astounded when Ed moved legislation to displace hundreds of hotel workers at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. And I was actually shocked when he did the bidding of the right-wing Restaurant Association and vetoed common-sense legislation to stop the exploitation of local restaurant workers.

His list of disappointments grow. He orchestrated the demolition of more than 1,500 units of rent controlled housing at Park Merced. Then he had the audacity to laud Pacific Gas and Electric Co. as a “great local corporation” on the anniversary of the lethal San Bruno pipeline explosion.

Several pols have been credited with the statement that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Well, Willie and Rose and their friends at the Chamber of Commerce got milk! Willie Brown is fundraising for three different committees to get Lee elected, Rose Pak started two different fundraising committees of her own, and right-wing Republican billionaires like Ron Conway and right wing corporations like Pacific Gas and Electric are lining up to throw money into the coffers.

Why? Because Ed is their guy.

The proof is right in front of us. All of Willie’s trademark slights of hand are resurfacing in Ed Lee’s friends’ bag of tricks: money laundering, pay to play politics, allegations of voter fraud. These are all hallmarks of Brown and his cronies, all executed under the visage of the supposedly humble Ed Lee. And voters shouldn’t fall for it. Because if we do, we’ll go back to the days before Gavin Newsom when backroom deals, self-dealing, cronyism and out-and-out corruption were the rule of the day.

It is no coincidence that in a year gripped by the divide between the 99 and 1 percent, the latter is working feverishly to elect Lee. If you don’t believe me, look it up on the Ethics Commission website (sfgov.org/ethics). PG&E alone has contributed at least $50,000 to one such “independent” committee.

I know this is the first race for mayor with ranked choice voting—and it is confusing. That’s a concern. But frankly, at this point all I care about is that voters understand not to mark Ed Lee anywhere on their ballot.

The good news? The outcome of the Mayor’s race is far from a foregone conclusion. San Franciscans are seeing through the millions of corporate dollars being spent on behalf of Lee.

You have a choice—three, in fact. And you should use them strategically, because you can make a difference by voting not just with your heart, but also with your mind. That means making sure you do your research and vote for three candidates who represent your values—and have a chance to win.

The Guardian has endorsed three candidates—Avalos, Herrera, and Yee—who have demonstrated enough of a commitment to progressive values and an aversion to the powers of the once-dormant machine that, like a vampire, is attempting to rise from the crypt. These three candidates also happen to have the best shot to beat Lee. Your votes for all three—in any order—are your best guarantee not to elect Ed Lee.

Vote for three and don’t vote for Lee!

Aaron Peskin chairs the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.

 

The selling of Ed Lee

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The selling of Ed Lee

steve@sfbg.com

Ed Lee has gone through a remarkable makeover in the last year, transformed from the mild-mannered city bureaucrat who reluctantly became interim mayor to a political powerhouse backed by wealthy special interests waging one of the best-funded and least transparent mayoral campaigns in modern San Francisco history.

The affable anti-politician who opened Room 200 up to a variety of groups and individuals that his predecessor had shut out — a trait that won Lee some progressive accolades, particularly during the budget season — has become an elusive mayoral candidate who skipped most of the debates, ducked his Guardian endorsement interview, and speaks mostly through prepared public statements peppered with contradictions that he won’t address.

The old Ed Lee is still in there somewhere, with his folksy charm and unshakable belief that there’s compromise and consensus possible on even the most divisive issues. But the Ed Lee that is running for mayor is largely a creation of the political operatives who pushed him to break his word and run, from brazen power brokers Willie Brown and Rose Pak to political consultants David Ho and Enrique Pearce to the wealthy backers who seek to maintain their control over the city.

So we thought it might be educational to retrace the steps that brought us to this moment, as they were covered at the time by the Guardian and other local media outlets.

Caretaker mayor

The story begins quite suddenly on Jan. 4, when the Board of Supervisors convened to consider a replacement for Gavin Newsom, who had been elected lieutenant governor but delayed his swearing-in to prevent the board from choosing a progressive interim mayor who might then have an advantage in the fall elections. Newsom and other political centrists insisted on a “caretaker mayor” who pledged to vacate the office after serving the final year of the current term.

It was the final regular meeting of the old board, four days before the four newly elected supervisors would take office. What had been a bare majority of progressive supervisors openly talked about naming former mayor Art Agnos, or Sheriff Michael Hennessey, or maybe Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin as a caretaker mayor.

When then-Sup. Bevan Dufty said he would support Hennessey, someone Newsom had already said was acceptable, the progressive supervisors decided to coalesce around Hennessey. That was mostly because the moderates on the board had suddenly united behind a rival candidate who had consistently said didn’t want the job: City Administrator Ed Lee.

Board President David Chiu was the first in the progressive bloc to breaks ranks and back Lee, saying that had long been his first choice. Dufty became the swing vote, and he abstained from voting as the marathon meeting passed the 10 p.m. mark, at which point he asked for a recess and walked down to Room 200 to consult with Newsom.

At the time, Dufty said no deals had been cut and that he was just looking for assurances that Lee wouldn’t run for a full term (Dufty was already running for mayor) and that he would defend the sanctuary city law. But during his endorsement interview with the Guardian last month, he confessed to another reason: Newsom told him that Hennessey had pledged to get rid of Chief-of-Staff Steve Kawa, a pro-downtown political fixer from the Brown era who was despised by progressive groups but liked by Dufty.

Chiu and others stressed Lee’s roots as a progressive tenants rights attorney, the importance of having a non-political technocrat close the ideological gap at City Hall and get things done, particularly on the budget. So everyone just hoped for the best.

“Run, Ed, Run”

The drumbeat began within just a couple months, with downtown-oriented politicos and Lee supporters urging him to run for mayor in the wake of a successful if controversial legislative push by Lee, Chiu, and Sup. Jane Kim to give million of dollars in tax breaks to Twitter and other businesses in the mid-Market and Tenderloin areas.

In mid-May, Pak and her allies created Progress for All, registering it as a “general civic education and public affairs” committee even though its sole purpose was to use large donations from corporations with city contracts or who had worked with Pak before to fund a high-profile “Run, Ed, Run” campaign, which plastered the city with posters featuring a likeness of Lee.

Initially, that campaign and its promotional materials were created by Pak (who refuses to speak to the Guardian) and political consultant Enrique Pearce (who did not return calls for this article) of Left Coast Communications, which had just run Kim’s successful D6 victory over progressive opponent Debra Walker, along with Pak protégé David Ho.

During that campaign, the Guardian and Bay Citizen discovered Pearce running an independent expenditure campaign called New Day for SF, funded mostly by Willie Brown, out of his office, despite bans of IEs coordinating with official campaigns. That tactic would repeat itself over the coming months, drawing criticism but never any sanctions from the toothless Ethics Commission. Pearce was hired by two more pro-Lee IEs: Committee for Effective City Management and SF Neighbor Alliance, for which he wrote the book The Ed Lee Story, a supposedly “unauthorized biography” filled with photos and personal details about Lee.

Publicly, the campaign was fronted by noted Brown allies such as his former planning commissioner Shelly Bradford-Bell, Pak allies including Chinatown Community Development Center director Gordon Chin, and a more surprising political figure, Christina Olague, a progressive board appointee to the Planning Commission. She had already surprised and disappointed some of her progressive allies on Feb. 28 when she endorsed Chiu for mayor during his campaign kickoff, and even more when she got behind Lee.

Olague recently told us the moves did indeed elicit scorn from some longtime allies, but she defends the latter decision as being based on Lee’s experience and willingness to dialogue with progressives who had been shut out by Newsom, noting that she had been asked to join the campaign by Chin. Olague also said the decision was partially strategic: “If we get progressives to support him early on, maybe we’ll have a seat at the table.”

Right up until the end, Lee told reporters that he planned to honor his word and not run. During a Guardian interview in July when we pressed him on the point, Lee said he would only run if every member of the Board of Supervisors asked him to, although about half the board publicly said that he shouldn’t, including Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who nominated him for interim mayor.

And then, just before the filing deadline in early August, Lee announced that he had changed his mind and was running for mayor, the powers of incumbency instant catapulting him into the frontrunner position where he remains today, according to the most recent poll by the Bay Citizen and University of San Francisco.

Lee the politician

With his late entry into the race and decision to forgo public financing and its attendant spending limits, one might think that Lee would have to campaign aggressively to keep his job. But most of the heavy lifting has so far been done by his taxpayer-financed Office of Communications (which issues press releases at least daily) and by corporate-funded surrogates in a series of coordinated “independent” groups (see Rebecca Bowe’s story, “The billionaires’ mayor”).

That has left Lee to simply act as mayor, where he’s made a series of decisions that favor the business community and complement the “jobs” mantra cited relentlessly by centrist politicians playing on people’s economic insecurities.

Yet Lee has been elusive on the campaign trail and to reporters who seek more detailed explanations about his stands on issue or contradictions in his positions, and his spokespersons sometimes offer only misleading doublespeak.

For example, Lee’s office announced plans to veto legislation by Sup. David Campos that would prevent businesses from meeting their city obligation to provide a minimum level of employee health benefits through health savings accounts that these businesses would then pocket at the end of the year, taking $50 million last year even though some of that money had been put in by restaurant customer’s paying 5 percent surcharges on their bills.

Although Campos, the five other supervisors who voted for the measure, four other mayoral candidates, and its many supporters in the labor and consumer rights movements maintained the money belonged to workers who desperately needed it to afford expensive health care, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said it was about “jobs” that would be protected only if businesses could keep that money.

Lee parroted the position but tried to push the political damage until after the election, issuing a statement entitled “Mayor Lee Convenes Group to Improve Health Care Access & Protect Jobs,” saying that he would seek to “develop a consensus strategy” on the divisive issue — one in which Campos said “we have a fundamental disagreement” — that would take weeks to play out.

After a frustrating back-and-forth with Lee Press Secretary Christine Falvey by email, it’s still unclear how to resolve the contradiction between whether businesses could seize these funds or whether they belonged to employees, with her latest statement being, “The Mayor absolutely wants these funds spent on providing access to quality primary and preventative health care because this is the business’s obligation under HCSO. Making sure that these funds go to pay for health care is the most important objective.”

Similarly, when police raided the OccupySF encampment on Oct. 5, Lee’s office issued a statement that was a classic case of politicians trying to have it both ways, expressing support for the movement and its goal to “occupy” public space, but also supporting the need to police to clear the encampment of those same occupiers.

But now, in the wake of a repeat raid on Oct. 16 that has inflamed passions on the issue, the question is whether Lee can run out the clock and retain the office he gained on the promise of being someone more than a typical politician.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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tredmond@sfbg.com

I feel like was just getting over the 40th anniversary party, and now here comes 45. Guardian anniversaries are like birthday parties; they keep creeping up on you. Except that, in this case, getting older isn’t something to worry about. It’s a sign of strength that a weekly paper founded with a little money scraped together by two Midwesterners in 1966 has survived, grown, and become a standard-bearer for the alternative press in America.

I missed 15, but I was here for 16, and 20, and 25, and 30, and 40, and I’ve watched the Guardian — and San Francisco — emerge and change. And I can say, after almost 30 years as a reporter and editor here, that the demise of the old Brown Machine and the advent of district elections in 2000 were the most important advances in modern local political history.

District elections diffused power at City Hall. You didn’t need a huge downtown-funded campaign war chest to get elected supervisor. You didn’t need the support of the power brokers. And all parts of the city were represented.

By the time Willie Brown left office in 2004 — mostly in political disgrace — a long era of corrupt machine politics was ending. He had lost control of the Board of Supervisors. Almost none of the candidates he endorsed got elected. His approach to running the city was utterly repudiated by the voters. It was like the city drew a collective breath of very fresh air.

Yeah, we had to fight with Gavin Newsom. Yeah, we lost some critical battles. Yeah, the city’s till building housing just for millionaires. But at least with Brown gone and district supervisors calling the shots, I always thought we had a chance.

And maybe we will with Mayor Ed Lee, too, if, as projected, he wins in November. Maybe he can show some independence. Maybe the Ed Lee who started as a tenant lawyer will arise again in Room 200.

But Brown doesn’t think so. Neither do the billionaires and lobbyists and a cast of dozens from the old Brown Machine. They think they’re coming back into power.

And these folks are savvy, experienced and clever. They don’t put this sort of money and personal clout into candidates unless they’re pretty damn sure they’ll get a return on their investment. That’s how it works in Willie’s World.

The Occupy Wall Street platform

Andrew Lam
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6

EDITORIAL In New York City, the protesters who started the Occupy Wall Street movement remain camped out in Zuccotti Park. In Washington, DC, President Obama said at an Oct. 6 press conference that he understands the sentiment driving the activists. Yet in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee has approved a police crackdown and the confiscation of camping supplies in an effort to debilitate the occupation in front of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The move comes at a time when Lee is doing nothing to crack down on foreclosures that cost the city money, nothing to force the big banks that have the city’s deposits to lend more in the community, and nothing to promote local taxes on the wealthy.

While Lee says he supports the First Amendment rights of the protesters, he sent the cops in at 10:30 at night to confiscate their belongings — using, in part, the sit-lie law (which is only in effect until 11 p.m.)

His approach is just wrong. This city ought to be embracing and supporting the demonstrations. San Francisco makes room for all kinds of public events; this one should be no different. The people at City Hall should be working with the people in the streets to make San Francisco a central part of this growing national movement.

Make no mistake about it: What started as a small-scale, leaderless, somewhat ragtag group in lower Manhattan now has the potential to become a potent political force in this country. Occupy Wall Street has tapped into a deep feeling of frustration that’s shared by people in blue states and red states, in cities and towns and rural communities. The feeble economy impacts almost everyone — and this movement has managed to point the finger at the people who caused the problem, who are preventing solutions and who are making big money off the suffering of others.

We realize that at this point, there’s no specific focus for Occupy Wall Street. The civil rights movement and the anti-war movements of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1970s, the demonstrations against free trade agreements in the 1990s and the marches against the Iraq War in the past decade included people with hundreds of ideological agendas, but they had a pretty clear message — and, generally speaking, specific actions that government officials could take to address the issues.

Occupy Wall Street hasn’t called for any bills, regulations or policies. It’s still a group that is simply calling attention to a basic truth — the very wealthy in general, and the financial sector in particular, are enjoying economic gains at the expense of the rest of us. But that alone is a profound and potent message — if the demonstrators don’t have all the solutions, at least they’ve identified the problem. And that’s more than Obama, Congress, or the mainstream news media have done.

There’s been plenty of talk of a formal platform — one Occupy Wall Street activist posted a proposed list of 13 demands on the group’s website. It’s not a bad list (a guaranteed living wage, single-payer health care, free college education, debt forgiveness, a racial and gender equal rights amendment) with a few somewhat random elements (outlaw all credit agencies). Fox News has picked up the list, although the organization, such as it is, has made it clear that there is no consensus on any platform and agenda. And the labor unions that are joining the protests — with the proper respect for the folks who started things — have legislation in mind (a financial transaction tax, for example).

There’s a danger that the message becomes so diffuse, and imbued with every possible issue that anyone on the left cares about, that it loses the potential to have an impact on the 2012 elections. Occupy Wall Street could go a long way to providing a populist progressive message to counter the Tea Party (which is funded by and largely organized by billionaires but tries to claim grassroots legitimacy).

And there’s no need for a laundry list of agenda items. The focus is right where it ought to be: The richest Americans — and the big financial institutions — have been sucking all the money and energy out of the economy. The remaining 99 percent are suffering. Tax the top 1 percent and create a robust jobs program to put the rest of the country back to work; that’s a winning platform for 2012

Editorial: The Occupy Wall Street platform

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In New York City, the protesters who started the Occupy Wall Street movement remain camped out in Zuccotti Park. In Washington, DC, President Obama said at an Oct. 6 press conference that he understands the sentiment driving the activists. Yet in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee has approved a police crackdown and the confiscation of camping supplies in an effort to debilitate the occupation in front of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The move comes at a time when Lee is doing nothing to crack down on foreclosures that cost the city money, nothing to force the big banks that have the city’s deposits to lend more in the community, and nothing to promote local taxes on the wealthy.

While Lee says he supports the First Amendment rights of the protesters, he sent the cops in at 10:30 at night to confiscate their belongings — using, in part, the sit-lie law (which is only in effect until 11 p.m.)

His approach is just wrong. This city ought to be embracing and supporting the demonstrations. San Francisco makes room for all kinds of public events; this one should be no different. The people at City Hall should be working with the people in the streets to make San Francisco a central part of this growing national movement.

Make no mistake about it: What started as a small-scale, leaderless, somewhat ragtag group in lower Manhattan now has the potential to become a potent political force in this country. Occupy Wall Street has tapped into a deep feeling of frustration that’s shared by people in blue states and red states, in cities and towns and rural communities. The feeble economy impacts almost everyone — and this movement has managed to point the finger at the people who caused the problem, who are preventing solutions and who are making big money off the suffering of others.

We realize that at this point, there’s no specific focus for Occupy Wall Street. The civil rights movement and the anti-war movements of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1970s, the demonstrations against free trade agreements in the 1990s and the marches against the Iraq War in the past decade included people with hundreds of ideological agendas, but they had a pretty clear message — and, generally speaking, specific actions that government officials could take to address the issues.

Occupy Wall Street hasn’t called for any bills, regulations or policies. It’s still a group that is simply calling attention to a basic truth — the very wealthy in general, and the financial sector in particular, are enjoying economic gains at the expense of the rest of us. But that alone is a profound and potent message — if the demonstrators don’t have all the solutions, at least they’ve identified the problem. And that’s more than Obama, Congress, or the mainstream news media have done.

There’s been plenty of talk of a formal platform — one Occupy Wall Street activist posted a proposed list of 13 demands on the group’s website. It’s not a bad list (a guaranteed living wage, single-payer health care, free college education, debt forgiveness, a racial and gender equal rights amendment) with a few somewhat random elements (outlaw all credit agencies). Fox news has picked up the list, although the organization, such as it is, has made it clear that there is no consensus on any platform and agenda. And the labor unions that are joining the protests — with the proper respect for the folks who started things — have legislation in mind (a financial transaction tax, for example).

There’s a danger that the message becomes so diffuse, and imbued with every possible issue that anyone on the left cares about, that it loses the potential to have an impact on the 2012 elections. Occupy Wall Street could go a long way to providing a populist progressive message to counter the Tea Party (which is funded by and largely organized by billionaires but tries to claim grassroots legitimacy).

And there’s no need for a laundry list of agenda items. The focus is right where it ought to be: The richest Americans — and the big financial institutions — have been sucking all the money and energy out of the economy. The remaining 99 percent are suffering. Tax the top 1 percent and create a robust jobs program to put the rest of the country back to work; that’s a winning platform for 2012.

A new progressive agenda

Andrew Lam
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56
A new progressive agenda

Over the past three months, the Guardian has been hosting a series of forums on progressive issues for the mayor’s race. We’ve brought together a broad base of people from different communities and issue-based organizations all over town in an effort to draft a platform that would include a comprehensive progressive agenda for the next mayor. All told, more than 100 people participated.

It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone tried to do this — to come up with a mayoral platform not with a few people in a room but with a series of open forums designed for community participation.

The platform we’ve drafted isn’t perfect, and there are no doubt things that are left out. But our goal was to create a document that the voters could use to determine which candidates really deserve the progressive vote.

That’s a critical question, since nearly all of the top contenders are using the word “progressive” on a regular basis. They’re fighting for votes from the neighborhoods, the activists, the independent-minded people who share a vision for San Francisco that isn’t driven by big-business interests.

But those of us on what is broadly defined as the city’s left are looking for more than lip service and catchy phrases. We want to hear specifics; we want to know that the next mayor is serious about changing the direction of city policy.

The groups who endorsed this effort and helped plan the forums that led to this platform were the Harvey Milk LGBT Club, SEIU Local 1021, the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Human Services Network, the Community Congress 2010, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, San Francisco Rising, Jobs with Justice, and the Center for Political Education.

The panelists who led the discussions were: Shaw-san Liu, Calvin Welch, Fernando Marti, Gabriel Haaland, Brenda Barros, Debbi Lerman, Jenny Friedenbach, Sarah Shortt, Ted Gullicksen, Nick Pagoulatos, Sue Hestor, Sherilyn Adams, Angela Chan, David Campos, Mario Yedidia, Pecolio Mangio, Antonio Diaz, Alicia Garza, Aaron Peskin, Saul Bloom, and Tim Redmond.

We held five events looking at five broad policy areas — economy and jobs; land use, housing and tenants; budget and social services; immigration, education and youth; and environment, energy and climate change. Panelists and audience participants offered great ideas and the debates were lively.

The results are below — an outline of what the progressives in San Francisco want to see from their next mayor.

 

 

ECONOMY AND JOBS

Background: In the first decade of this century, San Francisco lost some 51,000 jobs, overwhelmingly in the private sector. When Gavin Newsom was sworn in as mayor in January 2004, unemployment was at 6.4 percent; when he left, in January 2011, it was at 9.5 percent — a 63 percent increase.

Clearly, part of the problem was the collapse of the national economy. But the failed Newsom Model only made things worse. His approach was based on the mistaken notion that if the city provided direct subsidies to private developers, new workers would flock to San Francisco. In fact, the fastest-growing sector of the local economy is the public sector, especially education and health care. Five of the 10 largest employers in San Francisco are public agencies.

Local economic development policy, which has been characterized by the destruction of the blue-collar sector in light industry and maritime uses (ironically, overwhelmingly privately owned) to free up land for new industries in business services and high tech sectors that have never actually appeared — or have been devastated by quickly repeating boom and bust cycle.

Instead of concentrating on our existing workforce and its incredible human capital, recent San Francisco mayors have sought to attract a new workforce.

The Mayor’s Office has, as a matter of policy, been destroying blue-collar jobs to promote residential development for people who work outside of the city.

There’s a huge disconnect between what many people earn and what they need. The minimum wage in San Francisco is $9.92, when the actual cost of living is closer to $20. Wage theft is far too common.

There is a lack of leadership, oversight and accountability in a number of city departments. For example, there is no officiating body or commission overseeing the work of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Similarly the Arts Commission, the chartered entity for overseeing cultural affairs, is responsible for less than 25 percent of the budget reserved for this purpose

There’s no accountability in the city to protect the most vulnerable people.

The city’s main business tax is highly regressive — it’s a flat tax on payroll but has so many exceptions and loopholes that only 8,500 businesses actually pay it, and many of the largest and richest outfits pay no city tax at all.

 

Agenda items:

1. Reform the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to create a department with workforce development as a primary objective. Work with the San Francisco Unified School District, City College and San Francisco State to create sustainable paths to training and employment.

2. Create a municipal bank that offers credit for locally developed small businesses instead of relying on tax breaks. As a first step, mandate that all city short-term funds and payroll accounts go only to banks or credit unions that will agree to devote a reasonable percentage of their local loan portfolios for small business loans.

3. Reform procurement to prioritize local ownership.

4. Link economic development of healthcare facilities to the economic development of surrounding communities.

5. Link overall approval of projects to a larger economic development policy that takes as its centerpiece the employment of current San Francisco residents.

6. Enforce city labor laws and fund the agency that enforces the laws.

7. Establish the Board of Supervisors as the policy board of a re-organized Redevelopment Agency and create community-based project area oversight committees.

8. Dramatically expand Muni in the southeast portion of the city and reconfigure routes to link neighborhoods without having to go through downtown. Put special emphasis on direct Muni routes to City College and San Francisco State.

9. Reform the payroll tax so all businesses share the burden and the largest pay their fair share.

10. Consolidate the city’s various arts entities into a single Department of Arts & Culture that includes as part of its mandate a clear directive to achieve maximum economic development through leveraging the city’s existing cultural assets and creative strengths and re-imagining San Francisco’s competitive position as a regional, national and international hub of creative thinking. Sponsor and promote signature arts programs and opportunities to attract and retain visitors who will generate maximum economic activity in the local economy; restore San Francisco’s community-based cultural economy by re-enacting the successful Neighborhood Arts Program; and leverage the current 1-2 percent for art fees on various on-site building projects to be directed towards non-construction-site arts activity.

 

 

LAND USE, HOUSING AND TENANTS

Background: Since the office market tanked, the big land-use issue has become market-rate housing. San Francisco is building housing for people who don’t live here — in significant part, for either very wealthy people who want a short-term pied a terre in the city or for commuters who work in Silicon Valley. The city’s own General Plan calls for 60 percent of all new housing to be below-market-rate — but the vast majority of the new housing that’s been constructed or is in the planning pipeline is high-end condos.

There’s no connection between the housing needs of city residents and the local workforce and the type of housing that’s being constructed. Family housing is in short supply and rental housing is being destroyed faster than it’s being built — a total of 21,000 rental units have been lost to condos and tenancies in common.

Public housing is getting demolished and rebuilt with 2500 fewer units. “Hotelization” is growing as housing units become transitory housing.

Planning has become an appendage of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, which has no commission, no public hearings and no community oversight.

Projects are getting approved with no connection to schools, transit or affordable housing.

There’s no monitoring of Ellis Act evictions.

Transit-oriented development is a big scam that doesn’t include equity or the needs of people who live in the areas slated for more development. Cities have incentives to create dense housing with no affordability. Communities of concern are right in the path of this “smart growth” — and there are no protections for the people who live there now.

Agenda items:

1. Re emphasize that the Planning Department is the lead land-use approval agency and that the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development should not be used to short-circuit public participation in the process.

2. Enact a freeze on condo conversions and a freeze on the demolition of existing affordable rental housing.

3. Ban evictions if the use or occupation of the property will be for less than 30 days.

4. Index market-rate to affordable housing; slow down one when the other is too far ahead.

5. Disclose what level of permanent affordability is offered at each project.

6. Stabilize existing communities with community benefits agreements before new development is approved.

 

 

BUDGET AND SOCIAL SERVICES

Background: There have been profound cuts in the social safety net in San Francisco over the past decade. One third of the city’s shelter beds have been lost; six homeless centers have closed. Homeless mental health and substance abuse services have lost $32 million, and the health system has lost $33 million.

None of the budget proposals coming from the Mayor’s Office have even begun to address restoring the past cuts.

There’s not enough access to primary care for people in Healthy San Francisco.

Nonprofit contracts with the city are flat-funded, so there’s no room for increases in the cost of doing business.

The mayor has all the staff and the supervisors don’t have enough. The supervisors have the ability to add back budget items — but the mayor can then make unilateral cuts.

The wealthy in San Francisco have done very well under the Bush tax cuts and more than 14 billionaires live in this city. The gap between the rich and the poor, which is destroying the national economy, exists in San Francisco, too. But while city officials are taking a national lead on issues like the environment and civil rights, there is virtually no discussion at the policy level of using city policy to bring in revenue from those who can afford it and to equalize the wealth disparities right here in town.

Agenda items:

1. Establish as policy that San Francisco will step in where the state and federal government have left people behind — and that local taxation policy should reflect progressive values.

2. Make budget set-asides a budget floor rather than a percentage of the budget.

3. Examine what top city executives are paid.

4. Promote public power, public broadband and public cable as a way to bring the city millions of dollars.

5. Support progressive taxes that will bring in at least $250 million a year in permanent new revenue.

6. Change the City Charter to eliminate unilateral mid-year cuts by the mayor.

8. Pass a Charter amendment that: (a) Requires the development of a comprehensive long-term plan that sets the policies and strategies to guide the implementation of health and human services for San Francisco’s vulnerable residents over the next 10 years, and (b) creates a planning body with the responsibility and authority to develop the plan, monitor and evaluate its implementation, coordinate between policy makers and departments, and ensure that annual budgets are consistent with the plan.

9. Collect existing money better.

10. Enact a foreclosure transfer tax.

 

 

YOUTH, IMMIGRATION, AND EDUCATION

Background: In the past 10 years, San Francisco has lost 24,000 people ages 12-24. Among current youth, 5,800 live in poverty; 6,000 have no high school degree; 7,000 are not working or attending school; 1,200 are on adult probation.

A full 50 percent of public school students are not qualified for college studies. Too often, the outcome is dictated by race; school-to-prison is far too common.

Trust between immigrants and the police is a low point, particularly since former Mayor Gavin Newsom gutted the sanctuary ordinance in 2008 after anti-immigrant stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some 70 percent of students depend on Muni, but the price of a youth pass just went from $10 to $21.

Agenda items:

1. Recognize that there’s a separate role for probation and immigration, and keep local law enforcement from joining or working with immigration enforcement.

2. Improve public transportation for education and prioritize free Muni for youth.

3. Create family-friendly affordable housing.

4. Restore the recreation direction for the Recreation and Parks Department.

5. Implement police training to treat youth with respect.

6. Don’t cut off benefits for youth who commit crimes.

7. Shift state re-alignment money from jails to education.

 

ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Background: When it comes to land use, the laws on the books are pretty good. The General Plan is a good document. But those laws aren’t enforced. Big projects get changed by the project sponsor after they’re approved.

Land use is really about who will live here and who will vote. But on a policy level, it’s clear that the city doesn’t value the people who currently live here.

Climate change is going to affect San Francisco — people who live near toxic materials are at risk in floods and earthquakes.

San Francisco has a separate but unequal transportation system. Muni is designed to get people downtown, not around town — despite the fact that job growth isn’t happening downtown.

San Francisco has a deepwater port and could be the Silicon Valley of green shipping.

San Francisco has a remarkable opportunity to promote renewable energy, but that will never happen unless the city owns the distribution system.

 

Agenda items:

1. Promote the rebirth of heavy industry by turning the port into a center for green-shipping retrofits.

2. Public land should be for public benefit, and agencies that own or control that land should work with community-based planning efforts.

3. Planning should be for the community, not developers.

4. Energy efficiency programs should be targeted to disadvantaged communities.

5. Pay attention to the urban food revolution, encourage resident owned farmers markets. Use unused public land for local food and community gardens.

6. Provide complete information on what parts of the city are fill, and stop allowing development in areas that are going to be inundated with sea level rise.

7. Prioritize local distributed generation of electricity and public ownership of the power grid.

8. Change Clean Energy San Francisco from a purchasing pool system to a generating system.

What the mayoral polls mean

Zelda Bronstein
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What the mayoral polls mean

We’ve seen a lot of polls on the mayor’s race, and they’re all pretty similar to the one the Examiner reported today: Ed Lee has about 30 percent of the vote, and everyone else is in a big, undifferentiated pack way back in the single digits. A couple of thoughts to put this in perspective:


One: All of these polls have a margin of error; a poll of 500 voters, like this one, has an MOE of at least +/- 5 percent. Which means that Lee has somewhere between about 25% and 35% of the vote. The rest of them? They’re all effectively tied. Yee and Herrera at 7 percent and Avalos at 5 percent is a statistical dead heat.


Two: What a poll like this shows, among other things, is that 70 percent of the voters are not supporting the incumbent right now. About as many are undecided as are supporting Lee. That’s not a whopping show of support for the front-runner.


Three: On the other hand, nobody else in the race is even close to Lee at this point, and he’s far enough ahead that he will be hard to catch — unless either (a) one of the other candidates catches fire, comes up with a campaign that really takes off and pulls away from the pack, or (b) the other candidates attack Lee enough, and the attacks are effective enough, to bring his numbers down significantly.


Four: There’s never been a ranked-choice vote for mayor, so nobody knows exactly how it will play out.


I don’t buy the line that Adachi is a “long shot” — not any more than anyone else. In fact, for better or for worse (and it cuts both ways) he’s better positioned than most of the candidates to get votes from both the right and the left. If I were running Adachi’s campaign, I’d be sending him out to the west side of town to tell everyone he was the only candidate tough enough to stand up to those damn city employee unions — then I’d be going to the east side of town and saying he was the only candidate who could stand up to the cops. Tell the conservatives that pension reform is about the greedy bureaucrats; tell the progressives that it’s about the greedy cops and firefighters. Wear a nice silk suit and look like a manager out west; take the tie off and talk about cops breaking into SRO rooms on the east. And with Ed Lee as an incumbent who supports a more modest pension reform plan, Adachi can run against City Hall wherever he goes.


I’m not saying he’s going to win, or even that he’s the number one challenger, but he did get 190,000 votes the last time he ran. And he can raise money. So he’s going to be a factor in the race.


What I’m waiting for is the breakout issue, the line that takes, say, John Avalos into striking range of Lee (at which point, he can start collecting “anyone but Ed” votes from the other candidates). Remember Harris Wofford, who was given absolutely zero chance of retaining his U.S. Senate seat in November, 1991? Wofford, who had been appointed that spring, was a virutal unknown (and something of a nerd) who was facing the slick and popular former Govenor Dick Thornburgh. Wofford’s campaign came up with a single-issue line that caught Thornburgh by surprise: “If every criminal has the right to a lawyer,” he asked in campaign ads, “then why doesn’t every sick person have the right to a doctor?” That  slogan, and that issue, brought him from about 30 points behind to a ten-point victory.


What’s going to catch the San Francisco public’s attention over the next two months? I don’t know. Here’s my suggestion:


“If San Francisco has 14 billionaires, why can’t we afford to buy pencils for the public schools?”


 

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