Billionaires

San Francisco’s 14 billionaires

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The new Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans is out, and San Francisco seems to be doing just fine, thank you. This city — which can’t fund decent services for the homeless, which runs a structural budget deficit every year because it can’t raise enough revenue to cover basic city functions — has 14 billionaires.

They run from Larry Page (Google) at $15.8 billion to poor old Walter Shorenstein, who barely makes the cut at $1.3 billion.

And they are a reminder that this is a very rich city that can afford to do a lot better for its poorest people.

Here’s the list:

Larry Page (Google)
Steven Roberts (leveraged buiyouts)
Riley Bechtel (Bechtel)
Steven Bechtel Jr.(Bechtel)
Ray Dolby (Dolby)
Gordon Getty (oil)
William Randolph Hearst III (Hearst)
John Pritzker (hotels)
John Fisher (Gap)
Robert Fisher (Gap)
Thomas Steyer (finance)
William FIsher (Gap)
Don Fisher (Gap)
Doris Fisher (Gap)
Walter Shorenstein (real estate)

Let’s remember those names next time the mayor says the city doesn’t have enough money.

Cassis

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› paulr@sfbg.com

In the Big Book of Troubled Restaurant Spaces, there will have to be a long chapter (with footnotes!) devoted to 2101 Sutter. Since the mid-1990s this unassuming but hardly forbidding site has been home to Nightshade, Laghi, Julia, Winterland, and now Cassis, and I might be forgetting a few. The comings and goings have been many and hasty. Why the address’s occupants should have such a nomadic bent, one after the other, isn’t obvious when considering the physical particulars. 2101 is a perfectly nice setting, a sort of fat reverse L with the entryway, bar, and small dining area on one axis and, on the other (beyond a psychedelic screen that resembles strips of vinyl studded with disks of glass, like a hippie’s belt collection), a larger dining area with an exhibition kitchen. The kitchen had been covered over during the brief Winterland era, the picture-window opening plugged with drywall, but now the view is back, and we notice a pizza oven among the other handsome implements.

Yes, pizza, though Cassis (as the name suggests) is a French restaurant. But the cooking isn’t generic French; the street signage advises us that the restaurant serves "cuisine niçoise," and Nice is a French Riviera town quite near Italy. The city’s most famous contribution to culinary annals is probably the salade niçoise, that likable jumble of tuna, red peppers, quarters of hard-boiled egg, and black olives, but the city is nearly as pizza crazy as Rome, and that’s saying something. To sit at an outdoor table at one of the many cafés along Nice’s pedestrian promenade, drinking chilled rosé and eating thin-crust pizza, could be the ultimate experience niçoise.

Cassis can’t match these plein air atmospherics, of course. For one thing, it’s in San Francisco, which is not an alfresco town, and for another, it sits in a remarkably nondescript building in a neighborhood filled with nondescript buildings. Even if you could sit at a sidewalk table, you almost surely wouldn’t want to, since Sutter and Steiner are not, to say the least, charming pedestrian promenades, while nearby Geary Boulevard is a roaring sluice of automobile traffic. So, inside! The big horseshoe bar is welcoming, the outer dining area relaxed — but you like to see your chefs in action, and that means a table in the main dining area, beyond the hippie-belt screen.

The screen is a Winterland holdover, but subtle changes to the sleek chill of that restaurant’s design have brought some cheering warmth to Cassis. The return of the open kitchen is one; another is the faux brickwork on the support pillars. The rise in ambient temperature has, like global warming, caused a palpable shift in the mammalian population; gone are Winterland’s droves of 30-year-old, gelled-hair, tech billionaires in black mock turtlenecks, and in is an older contingent, rather Pacific Heights–looking. These are people who might not have responded too enthusiastically to Winterland’s sea urchin foams but are perfectly happy with Cassis’s simple but intense lobster bisque (a steal at $6.25), enriched with cognac, or the pissaladière ($7.50), the classic tart of caramelized onion that’s like a solid version of French onion soup.

The master of the kitchen is Stephane Meloni, who opened the restaurant last year with his brother, Jerome. Jerome runs the front of the house. The brothers grew up in Nice, which among its other winning attributes is not far along the coast from Cassis, a picturesque, cliff-hanging village. Hence the restaurant’s name. Those with total recall might remember that there was another Cassis in the city in the mid-1990s, a bistro in Cow Hollow. But there is no other connection between the two places.

I would have dispensed with the coil of fried onion atop the pissaladière. It had been fried to toughness rather than crunchiness, could not be cut, and was generally an inconvenience. Otherwise, the kitchen didn’t miss a step; the cooking is a series of gentle euphonies, polished versions of bistro favorites. (There is a real difference in France between a bistro and a restaurant, and les frères Meloni calling their place a restaurant isn’t a casual choice.)

Duck confit ($22.50) is a rustic staple on many a bistro menu, but here the leg (good crispy skin!) was accompanied by a boneless half breast grilled to a gratifyingly steaklike medium rare. Lending the plate architectural interest and style: a cylinder of gratin potatoes, looking like a pillbox.

Potatoes — fingerlings — got a more natural treatment with the roasted monkfish ($23). They were simply steamed, halved, and thrown into a peppercorn sauce, velvety but with sharp edges. Lying at the edge of the sauce pool was a bundle of pencil-thin asparagus (too early to be local, I’m afraid), baby pattypan squash in green and yellow, and a fine dice of tomato. I would give this combination no better than a C for seasonality but an A for color and texture.

Even the small dishes are memorable. You hardly ever see panisses ($4.25) — the chickpea fries of Provence — anywhere, but Cassis’s are excellent: crisp outside, creamy within, and presented in a geometric stack. And spinach ($5), seared with garlic and shallots, unfurls on a long platter like a length of knotty, kelp-swaddled rope recovered from a long-sunken ship.

Cassis doesn’t seem to have generated the buzz of its most recent predecessors, and maybe this offers us a clue to its prospects. Although it’s a nice destination, it’s not a destination restaurant but a neighborhood one, and the neighbors, having reclaimed the space after a long struggle, seem to be pleased. Everybody likes a new chapter.

CASSIS

Tues.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

2101 Sutter, SF

(415) 440-4500

www.restaurantcassis.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Examiner sells out San Francisco

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The San Francisco Examiner called Prop. H “a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum.”
We should also be wary of self-serving Republican billionaires like Don Fisher, who is sponsoring Prop. H, and Phil Anschutz, who owns the Examiner and has used its editorial page to attack progressives values like smart planning and reasonable regulation of greedy capitalists who would harm the public interest.
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Why would I say such things about the Examiner, whose editorial also noted that “If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad congestion dramatically worse.”? Well, because it wrote this honest assessment of the measure back on Aug. 2, and even though Prop. H hasn’t changed since then, the Examiner yesterday used its front page endorsements to urge a “yes” vote on Prop. H. There was no explanation or arguments, just a simple position change on the most heinous and far-reaching ballot measure in years.

Something worth fighting for

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

REVIEW If you want a guide to the players who are trying to refashion the Democratic Party in America, Matt Bai’s The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics is a nice handbook. It’s easy to read, brings the characters to life, and reveals how big chunks of money from a few very rich liberals are going to a handful of organizations and think tanks most people have never heard of. Not everything Bai says is true, but even where he’s wrong, it’s an interesting read.

Bai, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, offers a lot of interesting and useful history about the Howard Dean phenomenon and the rise of bloggers and online politics in the Democratic Party. His portrayals of some key bloggers, like Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, as people who lack ideology but demand respect is a bit off base, though. I think Moulitsas, for one, could easily outline an ideology, and if you read his stuff regularly, you get a pretty good sense of it.

Bai gives some credit to Dean and his supporters for creating a successful "50 state" strategy — investing party resources throughout the country, not just in targeted swing districts — and then claims (not entirely inaccurately) that the battle within the organization has been more about empowering the grassroots than about any specific policy prescription. But he doesn’t seem to recognize the inherent politics in community organizing: Saul Alinsky argued half a century before Dean that teaching marginalized groups how to exercise power was in itself a radical act, whether or not it was driven by a specific political analysis or ideology. (The Marxists have typically disagreed, and that battle has raged on the left for a long, long time, but Bai, who rarely writes about anything outside the mainstream of political thought, pays that history no heed.)

Still, Bai’s overall point — that the reformers in the party, particularly the ones with the big money, lack a coherent ideological vision for the country’s future — is both accurate and alarming. Nobody, Bai says, is making "the Argument" — the case for electing Democrats. In the 2006 congressional elections, "what voters had not done was endorse any Democratic argument — because, of course, there wasn’t one." All the party under the likes of Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been able to do is point out that Democrats aren’t Republicans (and aren’t quite as bad on the Iraq war) — and that, he notes, will never be a recipe for long-term success.

Anyone interested in the future of the Democratic Party and progressive politics ought to read this book, if only to get the discussion started. Bai makes a powerful statement: that transformational political change has typically come when there is a set of issues and governing philosophies that can be presented to the voting public. But he leaves the reader deeply dissatisfied — because he doesn’t offer any answers. It’s all fine and good to bash the reformers in the party, and I agree with a lot of his criticisms. But if you want to whine about the lack of an argument, you ought to spend some time thinking about what that argument might look like and putting it on paper.

A couple of years ago I was on a right-wing talk show arguing that Pelosi wasn’t exactly a "San Francisco liberal," and one of the hosts asked what that term mean. I gave it a try, on the fly, in the few seconds they allowed me. A San Francisco liberal, I said, believes that we should tax the rich to feed the poor, that we should protect the environment, including the urban environment, from the attack of greedy developers. A San Francisco liberal believes in civil liberties and civil rights, including same-sex marriage, and isn’t afraid to say so.

A San Francisco liberal, I would have added if they hadn’t cut me off, thinks the invasion of Iraq was wrong, the occupation is a disaster, and the only sane approach now is to get the US troops out of there. A San Francisco liberal believes that money has ruined politics and that the answer is not for the Democrats to try to raise more than the Republicans. A San Francisco liberal believes this city can and should be a force for progressive thought and set the standard for the rest of the country.

A San Francisco liberal isn’t afraid to lose.

There’s a lot more I could say, but that’s the start of an Argument. That wasn’t so hard, Matt, was it?

THE ARGUMENT: BILLIONAIRES, BLOGGERS, AND THE BATTLE TO REMAKE DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

By Matt Bai

Penguin Press

336 pages

$25.95

Oppose Don Fisher’s museum

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EDITORIAL Not long after the US Army announced it no longer needed the Presidio for a military base, a group of powerful San Francisco business leaders began eyeing what would become the first privatized national park in America. Among the businesses aiming to grab a piece of the immensely valuable real estate were Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Transamerica Corp.; among the individuals was the founder of the Gap, a Republican named Don Fisher.

Fisher helped then–US representative Nancy Pelosi pull off an astonishing feat: she took more than 1,200 acres of land earmarked by federal law as a national park and handed it over to real estate developers (see "Stolen Base," 5/8/96). Fisher, who became one of the first members of the private board that manages the Presidio, was around to help George Lucas build a massive business park on the site — and pick up a $60 million tax break in the process.

Now Fisher, who along with his billions has amassed a pretty impressive collection of contemporary art, wants to build a gigantic private museum right in the heart of the park, at the site of the old post. His plan would drop a 100,000-square-foot Battlestar Galactica on the old parade grounds, wiping out a sizable amount of open space. The museum would be on public land, but he’d run it himself, in his own way, with no public oversight.

This is a terrible idea, and San Franciscans ought to be up in arms about it.

According to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fisher has been looking for some time for a way to display his art collection, and he has talked to people at the existing big museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the de Young. But those talks broke down — in part, we’re told by sources, because Fisher didn’t want the professional curators and museum directors calling any shots. He wanted complete control over the art — control over where it was hung, when it was displayed, who got to see it, etc. The folks who run those cultural institutions are too polite to say so in public, but they don’t generally go for that sort of demand. So Fisher did what billionaires around the country are starting to do: he decided to build his own museum.

That’s his right, of course, and if he’d sought a spot, say, South of Market near SFMOMA, it might not be a bad thing. But the Presidio is entirely the wrong place for this sort of institution.

For starters, there’s no easy way to get there. Transit to the main post at the Presidio is very limited — one Muni line, which runs infrequently. No BART, no light rail — nothing of the sort of access you would want for a major public attraction. Car access is through the crowded Marina neighborhood, and the museum would no doubt build a huge parking garage, meaning the park and the surrounding areas would be inundated with cars. That alone would be a violation of the spirit of all the nation’s parks, which are trying desperately to reduce the number of car visits. There are no other cultural attractions around, so visitor traffic to Fisher’s museum would have no spillover benefits for any other museums.

And he’s talking about a whopper of a structure. There’s no way to gently insert a building that big into the park; it can’t blend in with the existing structures or the natural scenery. It’s just going to stick out like a bloated, gangrenous sore thumb, ruining the view and the historical nature of the area.

The private Presidio Trust has sole discretion over the proposal, but city officials can speak up, loudly. The Board of Supervisors should pass a resolution opposing the museum, the arts community should demand that it be relocated, and the public at large ought to tell the trust and Fisher that his personal memorial edifice isn’t welcome in the park.*

Emergency exits

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› marke@sfbg.com

I’ve got one copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace strapped under my right foot, one strapped under my left. The new 1,400-page Penguin Classics translation by Anthony Briggs makes for a great pair of platforms. My fantasy party posse’s at my side: Felicia Fellatio rocking a hot red bandito bandanna, a full white tutu, and a number 5 Tim Hardaway jersey; Baby Char Char in an oversize pajama-print homeboy hoodie and a pair of random, paint-spattered Levi’s; Nova all angles on her retro-future ’80s Nagel dangling neon banana earrings, turquoise ruffled skirt, and shoulder-padded acid-washed cropped jacket trip; and Hunky Beau in Juicy Couture pipe pants and war paint.

Somebody else is in the corner, wearing pink panties on his head and a giant chain, but no one knows his name.

I feel great. I just finished six weeks of Third Street Gym boxing boot camp, and you could bounce a full congressional subpoena off my abs, darling. (OK, that’s a lie — but I think about going to the gym every time I light up a smoke. That should count for something, no?) We’re out the door to my drag idol Juanita More’s weekly Saturday all-nighter, Playboy, at the Stud (www.juanitamore.com), when suddenly it hits me: today is Saturday, right? I better check the Internet.

I put down my flask of Cuervo and log on, and this little box of "gay news" pops up. (How does the Internet know? Oh, that’s right: all my online porn accounts.) "UN Confirms Anti-Gay Death Squads in Iraq" the top headline reads. Kidnappings, mutilation, charred bodies found by the road. Hmm. A few clicks later: "Iraqi Leaders OK Gay Pogroms." According to activists, Shiite militias are engaging in one of the "most organized and systematic sexual cleansings in history" with the government’s two-cheeked kiss of approval, and the US is refusing asylum to gay Iraqis.

Oh dear. Suddenly the thought of whooping it up while my gay Iraqi rainbow family burns seems kind of, you know, gross.

I’m so fucking sick of feeling powerless against this stupid war. Of always tucking the grief of it somewhere in the back of my mind as I down another shot and hit the dance floor. Not only is it a major buzzkill among other omnipresent buzzkills — global warming, fundamentalist terror, constant surveillance, government-sanctioned queer discrimination, bad hair days — but, as a citizen of the allegedly participatory democracy that started the whole thing, I feel somehow responsible, no matter whom I voted for however many times. And just admitting that, I feel like a spoiled American. It sucks.

On top of that, I have to watch myself and many of those around me struggle to keep the flame of resistance sparkling. It seems exhaustion has seeped into our consciousness and may actually be taking root. I fondly recall the first exhilarating flush of protest — of taking back the streets until my pumps wore through on the first night of "shock and awe," of lying down and blocking traffic in an orange jumpsuit (on purpose for once) as the bombs continued to rain down on civilians half a world away, of wildly dancing with Code Pink and cute Puerto Rican socialists in the NYC streets during the 2004 Republican Convention, hoping the nets the cops threw over us wouldn’t snag my weave. Sure, I still bang my pan with a stick at the occasional ANSWER weekend protest, despite my massive hangover. But after four years of war, it often seems I’m banging fruitlessly. If a club freak chants in a vacuum, will the killing please stop now?

Thank goddess I’ve got the beautiful souls I’ve met at the clubs around me. The kind of nightlife I love is inherently subversive: when one kind of music, location, or style becomes dominant, a host of alternatives immediately springs up. That energy refuels my rebellious spirit and keeps my fight up during the day. Yes, yes, partying is an escape from reality — but it’s also a play space, a way to work out the anxieties of the world by fooling with your identity, a place to push the boundaries of society into a personal utopia.

To me, underground nightlife can also be a fascinatingly warped mirror of the problems facing the world, its trends the raw expression of deep-seated angst. As W. consolidated his political power in the early ’00s, nightlife fashions and music (and drugs) returned to the tastes of the Reagan and Thatcher ’80s, when angular pop and cold synths were a loud rebuke to false sincerity and hubris. The recent explosion of pre-AIDS-era disco and imagery in many gay clubs may be an unconscious wish to transport ourselves to the time before the Republicans’ disastrous "morning in America." And the vibrant local hyphy scene is based on auto sideshows: literally wasting gas (use it while you got it!). Now, well into W.’s second term, we’re reliving the rococo styles of Bush the Elder without irony. Dance floors are looking like a punk rock Cosby Show, and I’m into it.

But that’s all theoretical musing. The most important thing about nightlife is community, whether you’re a full-time club kid or just going out for a drink after work with your friends. You want to be around other people, to not feel so alone in this crazy world, to make a connection. You walk into a bar, and suddenly you’re in a minisociety, one you hope you can handle better than society at large.

Can this community make a difference? Sure. The nightlife community, gay and straight, was instrumental in the fight against AIDS (and still is). It banded together to defeat the antirave legislation of the early ’00s. Tons of parties raise money for good causes. Currently, party-oriented groups such as the League of Pissed Off Voters (sf.indyvoter.org), which reaches out to young people through DJ events, and the SF Party Party (www.sfpartyparty.com), which influences local politics by combining education with clubbing, are doing their best to change the world.

"People on the left these days seem to think that denying themselves pleasure is the only way to take back the government. The early energy of protest against Bush has turned into a kind of self-punishment. That’s so dry and boring — and ultimately useless," says Dr. Stephen Duncombe, editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and author of the new book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. I called him because I wanted to talk about the guilt some of us feel about partying when the world’s going to shit. He’s been a prime mover in theatrical resistance groups such as Reclaim the Streets, the Lower East Side Collective, and the utterly fabulous Billionaires for Bush. (He’s also kind of cute in a young-professor-at-NYU way.)

"We should be using the positive energy of nightlife to show people that politics can be both entertaining and transformational," he continues. "Politics should be a fun, interactive spectacle, like the kind nightlife provides. No one wants to get involved with something if it seems like more work."

Yet still I worry. What would life be like if the war were here? What if I were a gay Iraqi? I trolled the Internet gay hookup sites to find a gay Iraqi to talk to about it. All I could find at first were half-naked American soldiers stationed in the Middle East (we are everywhere!). I eventually came upon a Western-educated gay Iraqi refugee living in Jordan who identified himself as Arje. He said I was being foolish. "Go out and have fun," he replied when I wrote that I didn’t feel like partying off the weight of the world. "Have a dance for me."

The morning after

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
The plight of newspapers is a popular news story these days, from a late-August cover package in the Economist (“Who Killed the Newspaper?”) to National Public Radio’s On the Media last week (“Best of Times, Worst of Times”).
It’s usually told as the story of an industry on its deathbed, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds and those delivered by Wall Street, Main Street, Craigslist, and the blogger’s laptop. Ad revenues have nose-dived in recent years. Circulation is down nationwide. Journalism scandals and shortcomings have damaged the whole profession’s credibility.
And staff newspaper blogs alone won’t be enough to bring a new generation of tech-savvy Americans back to hard-copy publications that even smell stodgy and old.
Yet the bottom line is still the bottom line. The truth of the matter is that many publicly traded newspaper companies have healthy profit margins ranging between 15 and 20 percent. But the tendency of the doom and gloom business press to sensationalize bad news may actually make things easier for William “Lean” Dean Singleton, the cost-cutting king of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which recently announced a round of staff reductions at its Bay Area newspapers. The cuts came amid claims of a massive dip in ad income just a few months after Singleton promised that his company’s buyout of local newspapers wouldn’t diminish the quality or quantity of journalism here.
“Given continued declines in revenue, we need to reduce expenses significantly, and thus have no alternative but to implement a reduction in [the] work force,” George Riggs, who was recently appointed to lead the company’s Northern California operations, told employees in a memo Oct. 20. Several such memos have now been posted on the Internet.
If this is how quickly the news biz can turn ugly, it’s a wonder MediaNews was attracted to print journalism in the first place. Who knows what newspapers around here will look like in another few months? How much fat can they trim before they start hitting bone?
They aren’t just cutting staff. The Bay Area’s newspaper establishment is now outsourcing work to circumvent those pesky labor unions. The press operators’ union at the San Francisco Chronicle — which was the sole union holdout against management’s demand for expanded control and decreased benefits — could disappear in three years as a result of a new printing contract with a Canadian company. MediaNews recently announced plans to outsource ad production positions to India.
Consolidation already has amounted to fewer reporters covering individual stories that are distributed to several publications, including at least one story about the latest layoffs. That means fewer editorial perspectives on key public policies (and possibly fewer editorial positions) for readers in a market that’s notorious for its high intellectual demand and robust political participation.
Only an ongoing federal Justice Department investigation and a civil lawsuit threaten to slow down big changes going on at the Bay Area dailies. A federal judge ruled just before deadline in real estate mogul Clint Reilly’s antitrust claim against the Hearst Corp., publisher of the Chronicle, and MediaNews that for now, at least, the two could not combine circulation and advertising operations to save money.
The companies had secured a court order sealing key records unearthed during discovery, including depositions and exhibits, citing the right to protect confidential trade secrets. It’s an ironic move for a group of papers that have regularly sued government agencies for public records and made a great show of their First Amendment pieties.
Federal Judge Susan Illston on Nov. 28 blocked the two companies from merging some advertising and distribution operations, a consolidation she said was probably illegal under antitrust laws. And she sounded her concern that Hearst isn’t the “passive equity investor” it had represented itself in court to be. She also revealed the contents of letters written in March and April by company executives: “Hearst and MediaNews will enter into agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the Bay Area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitation required to ensure compliance with applicable law.” (For more extensive information on the ruling and related coverage, see www.sfbg.com.)
For those who regard newspapers as more of a public trust than an engine for deep profits, the future is starting to look a bit unsettling.
When Singleton expanded his control over the Bay Area threefold last summer, he temporarily quelled some discontent by assuring skeptics that there were no planned changes in staffing and salaries as a result of the transactions.
“We’re looking forward to doing a lot of good things here in Northern California,” Singleton told San Jose Mercury News staffers, according to the paper’s story on the buyout.
But employees at the papers still had every reason to be nervous about Singleton’s $1 billion takeover of the Contra Costa Times, the Mercury News, and other papers from the Sacramento-based McClatchy Co.
MediaNews already owned the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times, and the Marin Independent Journal among others in California before it carved excess properties out of McClatchy, which had grown too large following its purchase of the Knight Ridder chain earlier this year.
The purchases allowed Singleton to seize almost complete control of 14 metropolitan and suburban media markets. The only remaining daily print competitor in the Bay Area was the Chronicle and its parent company, the Hearst Corp., which subsequently purchased $300 million in MediaNews stock, a deal the feds are still investigating. When the transaction with Hearst was finalized, top executives at MediaNews were collectively awarded about $2 million in bonuses.
Some profiles of Singleton have depicted him as a good old-fashioned newspaper journalist, but knowing his cost-cutting reputation, only a fool would assume there were no plans to consolidate major operating functions to save money regardless of any promises made. Singleton has always been more about business than news.
Clustered ownership and shared management were prominent features of the company that MediaNews presented to investors at a Deutsche Bank “Global High Yield” conference in October. An April letter that reappeared in federal court last week during a hearing in Reilly’s suit confirmed that MediaNews and Hearst hoped to shed costs by possibly combining circulation and advertising operations.
Layoffs are also a big part of Singleton’s MO. Respected but tough Contra Costa Times editor Chris Lopez was let go in October because he’d become “redundant,” according to a memo company executive John Armstrong sent to employees.
“That came as a shock to a lot of people in the newsroom,” one source at the paper told the Guardian. Known for handing cash rewards out of his wallet to reporters who nailed concise stories for the front page, Lopez had attempted to play down Singleton’s reputation when the purchases were announced. Lopez had been at the paper for more than six years and had helped earn Singleton a Pulitzer Prize during a six-year stint at the company’s flagship Denver Post, received for its coverage of the Columbine shootings.
“In better times, we might have found a way to ignore an extra position or two or even three,” Armstrong wrote in the memo.
Lopez insisted to the Guardian in a phone interview that he had proposed his own termination to ease anticipated cuts elsewhere.
“My layoff from the paper was not unexpected,” Lopez said. “It caught the staff off guard, but I saw it coming. I made the recommendation. I was trying to save some jobs in the newsroom.”
The loss of an experienced editor may have saved some jobs … for now. But maybe not for long. Reporters have been asked to summarize their beats for managers to determine how they can cover single subjects for a number of papers. The idea seems to be maximizing staff output rather than ensuring broad coverage of the communities.
A story about Lopez’s departure written by a Times reporter also appeared on the Merc’s Web site. MediaNews is also looking into multimedia deals with local TV stations and arming reporters with cameras for podcasts, one source told us.
Armstrong told the Guardian in a phone interview that opinion columnists, for instance, could still cover the same stories. “But we had found some situations where reporters were sent to the same events like Oakland [Raiders] away games.” He said offering buyouts to staffers has been “successful,” but it wasn’t enough to stem declining revenue, triggering the need for “involuntary” layoffs.
All of this may make sense from a strictly economic perspective. After all, doing more with less is a widely accepted imperative for profit-driven corporations. But there is a public price that will be paid for this reality: Bay Area citizens will get less original reporting and fewer perspectives on the news.
A former senior staffer at a major Bay Area daily wrote an open missive outlining recent major stories covered by fewer reporters: “Three months after MediaNews Group added two major Knight Ridder dailies to its far-flung Northern California newspaper group, news coverage is well on its way to being homogenized in this formerly competitive market.”
The observation is borne out by a Guardian survey of three major MediaNews papers. Out of 10 top recent cultural and political stories in the Bay Area, nine were covered by the same reporter, who wrote the same article for all three papers. (For details, visit www.sfbg.com.)
Under the recent layoff announcement, the Merc could lose up to 101 employees, half from its newsroom, while more than 100 business-side positions will be reportedly moved to a new, nonunionized San Ramon office of the California Newspapers Partnership (CNP), a consortium of companies including Gannet Co. and Stephens Group that helped MediaNews fund its recent purchases. The centralized San Ramon space could continue to fill up with employees from the business side of the papers who have been forced to reapply for their jobs under the CNP corporate moniker. They would presumably fall out from under union protection.
The company’s Peninsula and East Bay papers saw cuts across their operations from Walnut Creek to San Mateo. Armstrong told the Times the layoffs were “broad but not deep.” East Bay Express writer Robert Gammon, a former Tribune reporter and union organizer, revealed in early November that MediaNews planned to leave behind the Tribune’s historic downtown tower and move many of its staffers to the San Ramon office. News-side functions could be moved to a cheaper spot across from the Oakland Coliseum.
“The question is how do we continue to put out a paper people want to read if we continue to cut further?” Luther Jackson, executive officer for the San Jose Newspaper Guild, which represents almost 500 workers at the Merc, asked the Guardian. “I have a concern that when newspapers face increased competition for advertising, why are we cutting service? Does it work for readers? Does it work for advertisers?”
The Bay Area isn’t alone. In the complex transactions that took place over the summer, Hearst bought the St. Paul Pioneer Press from McClatchy and shifted it to MediaNews in exchange for stock in the company. At the Pi Press, as it’s known in Minnesota, 40 positions were cut in November. A MediaNews paper in Los Angeles, the Daily News, recently axed its publisher and 20 other workers.
MediaNews enraged union workers at the Merc when it offered them a contract during September negotiations that was unlike anything they’d seen at the paper before. The company has since toned down some of its harsher demands but asserted that if a tentative agreement were accepted by Nov. 30, the Merc might see fewer layoffs, Jackson told the Guardian.
The proposal would grant management the right to modify insurance coverage without telling the union, freeze the paper’s pension plan and replace it with a 401(k), and change the types of work that could be assigned to nonunion employees. It would also allow the paper to hire new workers at “market-rate” salaries, which means their pay increases could be capped at lower rates.
The company may choose to simply not replace costly veterans who are retiring or accepting buyouts, meaning cub reporters could find themselves with fewer seasoned mentors around to help teach them government and private sector watchdogging.
The guild foresees losing nearly 200 members if the full number of layoffs and worker transfers are carried out. And many guild members fear it may also mean the beginning of the end of newspapers as we know them.
Corporations have the right to see to their bottom lines. But communities and individuals also have a right to the fruits that independent, competitive journalism bestows. And that’s the right being asserted now in civil court by Clint Reilly.
While federal and state investigators have largely been idling, Reilly sued Hearst, MediaNews, and its other business partners last summer. He asked Judge Illston to temporarily halt the transactions until the trial begins in his antitrust claim against the companies. She denied Reilly’s initial request for a preliminary injunction, in part because the Hearst investment had not been officially inked, even though the trial isn’t expected to start until this spring.
In her opinion, however, she suggested parts of the deal were troubling and has not ruled out forcing MediaNews to give up some of its newly acquired assets. Earlier this month Reilly’s attorney, Joe Alioto, again asked the judge for an injunction. The renewed appeal was inspired in part by the recently announced job cuts.
The plaintiffs are arguing Hearst and MediaNews previously withheld a letter from the court that the two companies had signed agreeing to discuss the possibility of combining some circulation and advertising functions to save money. In his request Alioto told the judge the companies were “rapidly consolidating, commingling, and irrevocably altering their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers so as to frustrate this Court’s ability to provide an effective remedy for their antitrust violations.”
During a tense hearing last week on the matter, Alioto asked that top Hearst and MediaNews executives be ordered to testify immediately. He suggested Hearst’s board of directors would never have agreed to invest $300 million in MediaNews if it couldn’t also merge distribution and ad sales with its competitor.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that they intend to end up with newspapers that are very different than they are today,” Alioto said. He wants any such discussions stopped by the court, adding, “We believe they intend to wipe out the possibility of any of these papers to remain freestanding. These papers will not be the same within a very short amount of time.”
Hearst attorney Daniel Wall angrily fired back that no one was trying to deceive the court with a price-fixing agreement and that the companies were merely discussing the possibility of “pro-competition collaboration,” which Wall described as a business partnership lawfully permitted by the Justice Department. He disclosed that the Chronicle was bleeding millions of dollars annually, partially because of lost revenue to the Web, and exclaimed that drastic cost reductions were necessary to keep the paper alive.
“These are tough times for newspapers, and they need to take cost out of the system,” Wall told the judge. “They need to find new revenue streams.”
Hearst has already faced something akin to all of this before. Reilly sued it in 2000 when the company bought the Chron and attempted to nix competition by shutting down its long-held San Francisco Examiner. Reilly didn’t block the deal, but the Justice Department forced Hearst to keep open the reliably conservative Examiner, today owned by another Denver-based company.
This week Illston ruled that Hearst and MediaNews must temporarily stop any agreements to combine advertising sales and distribution networks until Dec. 6, when she’ll decide whether to extend her prohibition on merging business operations.
Reilly has emerged over the last decade as a serious pain for corporate media executives and unshakable critic of concentrated newspaper ownership in the Bay Area. His most recent lawsuit charges that the Hearst and MediaNews partnership would dilute fair competition and limit alternatives for both readers and advertisers.
“They started the blood flow with the firings,” Alioto told reporters after the hearing. “We think when they’re done with this they’re going to have entirely different newspapers.”
Recent job losses don’t stop at just MediaNews. The Chronicle is getting in on the action too.
Divisive contract negotiations between the Chronicle and the Web Pressman and Prepress Workers Union Local 4 over the last two years ended recently when the union “reluctantly approved” an agreement, union treasurer Paul Kolter told us. The union was the last holdout at the paper to accept drastically reduced workers’ rights.
By successfully pushing its will on the unions, Hearst has virtually ensured that the press operators won’t pose much of a threat to the company anymore, because around the same time it signed a $1 billion outsourcing deal with the Canadian printing company Transcontinental.
The union’s new contract is up in about three years, and there are no assurances Local 4 will have any workers in the new plant Transcontinental has promised to build. That could mean the end of its relationship with the Chronicle and about 225 workers from the paper that it represents.
The previous contract ended in the summer of 2005, and under the paper’s new publisher, Frank “Darth” Vega, management called for drastic cuts in salaries and benefits. The two groups spent several intervening months battling over the proposed changes.
In July, Vega prepared the paper for a strike, issuing a memo that outlined exactly how to keep the paper operating throughout a work stoppage, and hired a notorious security firm that specializes in handling labor disputes.
The union points out that while the Chronicle complains of massive financial bloodletting, its parent company, Hearst, has somehow scraped together enough money for a brand-new $500 million office building in midtown Manhattan, the construction of which was completed over the summer. The company also sold the sprawling 82,000-acre ranch that surrounds Hearst Castle to the state early last year for nearly $100 million. It was once home to the notoriously belligerent and imperialistic newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Union members say there are wide ramifications to what’s happening here. In July the World Association of Newspapers published a report describing how more news services globally, including the New York Times, were outsourcing major tasks, even news reporting, to save money.
“There are a lot of labor unions that have an interest in what is happening with us,” Local 4 organizer and press operator Bruce Carlton told members at a meeting in late October. “If this flies, it will be a blueprint on how to break unions. We will be sent back into the ’30s.”
The mood is dark for many employees working under MediaNews and Hearst. The scrappy feel and hard-driving reportage of the CoCo Times under Lopez and Knight Ridder are believed by some to be at risk following the purchases. “No one thinks we’re going to be a better newspaper because of this,” one source at the paper told us.
In another memo MediaNews executive Armstrong wrote to Bay Area staffers last week, he stated that the company, in fact, predicted its “advertising revenue challenges.”
“We have no additional job reductions planned due to economic conditions, but we cannot guarantee that additional reductions might not be necessary in the future,” he wrote. “Our job level is dependent on our revenue performance.”
The memo also shows that the company plans to sell an office in Danville and two parking lots in downtown Oakland.
News accounts depicted third-quarter earnings for MediaNews based on Securities and Exchange Commission filings as a windfall profit caused by its purchases of the Times and the Merc. But the company’s ad revenue and circulation are actually down a few percentage points, and it made $16 million from the July sale of an office building in Long Beach, which offsets a simple analysis of its financial standing.
It’s still a company that topped $1 billion in revenue last year, a figure that has increased steadily since 2002, but Singleton has never feared doing business with loads of debt on the books, which he’s always used to fuel new purchases. For the Bay Area papers, MediaNews took on a $350 million bank loan in August.
MediaNews has still managed to take recent dire economic forecasts to a fever pitch despite its confidently large debt burden, enabling the company to implement a business model that’s hardly new for Singleton. He knows how to make money. Interestingly, for an industry that’s supposedly on the ropes, several billionaires (who didn’t become wealthy by investing poorly) have in the last few weeks publicly expressed interest in purchasing some of the nation’s largest dailies.
The Boston Globe noted earlier this month that rock industry tycoon David Geffen and grocery chain investor Ron Burkle were considering a bid for the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times. That paper recently endured a major shakeup when a top editor was fired for refusing to execute job cuts demanded by the company. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch has considered a run for the Globe, and more buyout rumors have floated around the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. Such deals could signal a fundamental shift in how newspapers are regarded with respect to their newsgathering responsibilities.
“Geffen has reportedly told associates that he’d be happy with returns comparable to the 3 or 4 percent he might get from municipal bonds,” the Globe wrote. Others have discussed turning individual newspapers into nonprofits.
But Singleton probably isn’t going anywhere, and a lot of people are going to have to learn how to get along with him around here, Texas drawl and all, unless the feds shut down his party.
Knight Ridder was a respected newspaper chain before investors grew restless and demanded greater short-term profit margins. It was sold earlier this year to McClatchy (begrudgingly for some top execs and Pulitzer-wielding journalists who openly fought with Knight Ridder’s financial backers prior to the sale). Knight Ridder posted a profit margin of nearly 20 percent in 2004.
Employees of the chain wrote a chilling open letter shortly before it was sold: “Knight Ridder is not merely a public company. It is a public trust. It must balance corporate profitability with civic purpose. We oppose those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more profit. We abhor those for whom good business is insufficient and excellent journalism is irrelevant.” SFBG

Clint Reilly wins a big one against Hearst and Singleton. Fighting to keep one newspaper towns from becoming a one newspaper region.

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

On April 26, 2006, the McClatchy newspapers and the Chronicle/Hearst and MediaNews/Singleton publicly announced a complex series of transactions that resulted in Singleton owning three major Bay Area dailies (Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and the Monterey Herald) that had been previously owned by Knight-Ridder and then McClatchy.

On the same day, April 26, 2006, Hearst and Singleton secretly signed a key centerpiece deal that set up a secret arrangement between Hearst and Singleton that in effect would allow them to join forces, destroy daily competition in the Bay Area, and establish a regional monopoly for the duration.

The key point: the two big publishing chains from New York and Denver lied in effect about the monopolizing features of their deal, and in effect concealed key evidence in the Clint Reilly antitrust case, according to Federal Judge Susan Illston. And then the two chains, who love to holler about freedom of the press and government suppression of documents, moved to keep the documents under seal, including the incriminating letter outlining the monopoly agreement. Their coverage amounts largely to rummy little business stories buried deep in their papers.

Illston neatly skewered the Hearst/Singleton lie that their deal was harmless and would not interfere with vigorous competition between the two companies. Illston quoted the April 26 letter, which she pointed out was not disclosed in the first hearing on a request for a temporary restraining order. (Alioto got the letter in discovery. It is an even bigger bombshell than his charge in the first Reilly trial that Hearst was “horesetrading” favorable coverage for political favors with then Mayor Willie Brown and others to get political help on its moves to create a morning monopoly.)

The letter of agreement was from Hearst Corporation Vice President James Asher to Joseph Lodovic, president of MediaNews. She quoted “in pertiment part” these statements: “The Hearst Corporation and Media News Group agree that they shall negotiate in good faith agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the San Francisco Bay area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitations required to ensure compliance with applicable law.

“In addition, Hearst and MediaNews agree that, with respect to the newspapers owned by each of them on the date of this letter, they shall work together in good faith to become affiliated with the networks operated by Career Builder…and Classified Ventures) on the same terms, and each of Hearst and MediaNews further agrees that neither of them shall enter into any agreement, arrangement, or understanding to participate in Career Builder or
Classified Ventures or their respective networks with respect to such newspapers unless the other party is offered the opportunity to participate on identical terms…”

Illston quoted extensively from the “secret” letter, but the Guardian and nobody else can see the letter, oor the supporting documents and depositions, that would further flesh out monopoly deal. That is a terrible position, let me emphasize, for big daily chains to be taking in federal court these days.

Illston said the letter “casts serious doubt on several key findings underlying” her previous order denying a temporary restraining order. She said that she had previously accepted Hearst arguments that “Hearst’s involvement in the transactions was solely that of a passive investor.” But she continued, “Though (Hearst and Singleton) offered no explanation why Hearst was willing to finance an acquisition that would only make competition stronger, the Court did not understand that Hearst expected, or would receive, any quid pro quo. However, the April 26 letter suggests, at the very least, that Hearst’s involvement was specifically tied to an agreement by MediaNews to limit its competition with Hearst in certain ways.”

This “cooperation” between Hearst and Singleton, she said, was “in fact, quid pro quo for Hearst’s assistance to MediaNews in acquiring two of the Bay Area papers.” (The quid pro quo was also a $300 million Hearst investment in Singleton, which I think might evaporate should Illston ultimately nix or water down the deal.) Illston also said the letter indicated that the Chronicle may not continue to be “strong competition” for the other Bay Area papers.

Had the letter been disclosed to the court, she said, it would have “affected the court’s analysis of the McClatchy-MediaNews-Hearst transactions in this case.” Summing up, she stated that “such agreements, the mere existence of the letter, and the cooperation between Hearst and MediaNews they reflect, increase the likelihood that the transactions at issue here were anti-competitive and illegal.”

And so she granted a temporary restraining order in part and temporarily restrained and enjoined Hearst and Singleton from entering into any agreements “of the nature described in the April 26 letter, including agreements to offer national advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and consolidation of the Bay Area distribution networks for their papers.” She ordered Hearst and Singleton to show cause at a Dec. 6 hearing why she should not impose a preliminary injunction. Quite an opinion.

As an antitrust attorney told us after reading the opinion, “How the hell does Joe Jr. keep getting the Hearst people to lie under oath, then cough up the documents that prove it? Haven’t they figured out that judges don’t react well to that little character flaw?”

Implicit in all of this is Brugmann’s Law of Journalism: where there is no economic competition, there is no news or editorial competition. Suddenly,for the first time ever by the terms of the proposed deal, daily competition would be eliminated and one of the most liberal and civilized areas of the world would be firmly under the monopoly thumb of conservative billionaires from New York and Denver. The result would give ad rates a monopoly boost, gut and centralize editorial staffs, make editorials and endorsements ever more uniform and conservative, and send all profits out of town on a conveyor belt to headquarters to buy more properties. The carnage is well underway (note our stories and those carried on ChainLinks, the newspaper guild publication)

Illston should disclose the letter and other documents in open court. And the U.S. Justice Department and California Attorney General should awake from their long naps and jump into this case and stop this secretive march to regional monopoly. Meanwhile, thank the Lord for Reilly and Alioto. Keep on rolling. B3, celebrating San Francisco values since l966

P.S. We are running lots of material on this story, including the judge’s order, because it amounts to a “censored” story in the mainstream media. Each year, as the local part of our Project Censored package, we cite the monopolization of the press story. We will follow the current version along in the Guardian and the Bruce blog. Send us your comments and evidence of Eurekas or Censored material. (See previous blogs)

The morning after by G.W. Schulz
While drunk on big newspaper purchases, Dean Singleton promised competitive papers and no layoffs. Now he’s swinging the ax, cutting deals with Hearst, and decimating local news coverage

Judge slams daily-paper chains by Tim Redmond
With a federal court ruling exposing a secret plan by Hearst and Singleton to join forces and end competition, the federal and state Justice Departments should intervene – and all records in the case should now be open

More on Singleton by G.W. Schulz

Read the judge’s decision
Judge Susan Illston’s ruling on Hearst-MediaNews collaboration

Shackling the tax man

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Late last month, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times managed to get a story about IRS layoffs picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and placed on page three. That’s no small challenge, even in one of the most politically charged cities in the nation. It was not a sexy story, neither to liberals nor to conservatives.
But the story’s timing was impeccable.
Johnston reported that the IRS was poised to lay off 157 of its 345 estate- and gift-tax attorneys working at agency offices throughout the country — a division of investigators that generates more revenue for the federal treasury by catching tax cheats than any other group of auditors, about $2,200 for every hour that they work.
Dismantling the estate tax has been among the most aggressive crusades taken up by the Republican Party and its friendliest contributors for at least the last decade. Leaked to the Times by IRS whistle-blowers, the story about the layoffs surfaced just days before Congress rejected for the fifth time since 2001 an attempt by fiscal conservatives to get rid of the estate tax. The legislation failed despite Republican control of both the House and Senate. Even tempting Democrats with the first federal minimum-wage hike in 10 years couldn’t do the trick.
So how could defending the estate tax and the right of the IRS to collect it survive two branches of the federal government dominated by a political party that holds most taxation in contempt? It’s because families awash in seemingly infinite wealth are the only ones who get hit by the tax — despite false claims made by the GOP that the estate tax kills small businesses.
California filed more estate-tax returns in 2001 than any other state in the country by a margin of thousands. The only state that came close was Florida, and California still filed around 6,000 more returns, according to the most recent IRS numbers.
In other words, the Golden State is filthy, stinking rich and more vulnerable to the estate tax than other states. GOP party leaders in Washington insist the issue will return in the form of a new bill, and the IRS is behaving as if the estate tax has already disappeared. If it does, the richest families in the United States — highly concentrated in California and the Bay Area — stand to collectively save billions of dollars.
The Bay Area contains within its sloping hills and mammoth upstart tech firms higher income levels and more general wealth than almost anywhere else in the country. In fact, the San Francisco metropolitan area is the fourth wealthiest in the nation, according to Merrill Lynch, and two tiny cities between here and Mountain View, where Google is based, have the highest per capita median income in the United States. Those two cities, Atherton and Hillsborough, have a combined population of about 17,000, and while many of these techie tycoons are young, the day will come when they die and pass millions of dollars on to their descendants. Will there be enough tax investigators available to audit those estates? Will there even be an estate tax?
Following Johnston’s revelations, a Times editorial suggested the layoffs were a politically motivated attempt by the Bush White House to circumvent the legislative process. What it can’t accomplish through Congress it can do by handcuffing the tax police.
“This is an election year issue,” said Jay Adkisson, a private sector tax lawyer from Laguna Niguel who documents egregious cases of fraud on his Web site, Quatloos! “They’re trying to appease Republican voters who were angry over the failure of Congress to do something about the estate tax.”
The story of the IRS layoffs didn’t just catch the attention of readers. Congress responded too. Twenty-three lawmakers — including, somewhat predictably, Democrat Tom Lantos of California’s 12th District — immediately fired off a letter to Bush-appointed IRS commissioner Mark Everson demanding to know if the agency could now effectively investigate estate-tax avoiders.
None but the most obscenely wealthy Americans pay even a dime in taxes when they earn an inheritance upon a death in the family. Estates aren’t hit with taxes until they reach a value of $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple. Only estates exceeding those amounts are assessed any tax, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
And if the family hires a savvy tax attorney or estate planner, those nontaxable values could easily rise to $10 million, according to Adkisson.
A research director at the Brookings Institution named Diane Lim Rogers opined in the Chronicle last May that because of current exemptions, about one half of one percent of dead people will actually be followed to the grave by the tax man. Besides, it’s the beneficiaries of an inheritance who pay. Despite grand claims made by Republicans that the beneficiaries of an estate will be paying half of what they’re handed in taxes, even the estates eligible for taxation see on average a 20 percent rate, according to the CBPP, which relied on the IRS for its statistics. For those who do pay estate taxes, deep discounts are available through charitable donations.
“The argument made about lots of people being ‘burdened’ by estate taxes is that they go through lots of convoluted tax-planning strategies in order to avoid the estate tax, so even if they don’t end up paying any estate tax, they are still adversely affected [burdened] by the existence of the tax,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.
But even considering the cost of estate planning, Rogers said, no one would rationally spend more avoiding taxes than they would actually paying them.
Keith Schiller, a respected private sector tax attorney based in Orinda, earns princely sums teaching millionaires how to take advantage of loopholes in the federal tax code. He’s not opposed to the estate tax on principle; he just wants to simplify the way his clients pay their dues.
“I do believe the estate tax serves a social function of breaking down generational dynastic wealth,” he said in a phone interview.
Schiller said the IRS is conducting nowhere near the estate-tax audits it once did and that may be the only justification for laying off auditors. Still, the knowledge required by agency investigators to analyze and understand complex estate-tax avoidance schemes is immense. About 50 estate- and gift-tax attorneys based in Southern California and the Bay Area exclusively handle returns filed for the IRS from inside the state.
David Dean, president of the San Jose–based National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Local 238, said it’s not clear which offices will have layoffs. All 350 estate-tax auditors are being offered buyout deals that include their pensions plus up to $25,000, or $13,000 after taxes.
Dean and the NTEU, which represents the auditors and opposes the layoffs, insist the IRS isn’t entirely sure how much money is hidden from the agency each year through either elaborate trusts or simple refusals to file. It’s known as the “tax gap,” and three days after Johnston’s story appeared, the inspector general of the IRS, J. Russell George, told Congress that the agency’s estimated figures for delinquent estate taxes hadn’t been updated in years. His report described a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the IRS expressed no desire to update the figures because “consideration is being given to eliminating or reducing the number of people required to pay estate taxes.” The last estimate was about $8 billion, but that figure is for the most part unreliable, he testified.
But the law still exists, regardless of whether an anti–estate tax agenda eventually succeeds in Congress.
“If a law is on the books, you still have to close down on the cheaters,” said JJ MacNab, an estate planner who spent 18 years in the Bay Area working for tech clients. “If you don’t enforce a law on the books, no one’s going to have faith in the system.”
MacNab now lives in Washington and as a hobby assists people who buy into tax-avoidance schemes that turn out to be illegal. She said these days, it’s low-income earners who are likelier to be audited, a conclusion Johnston also came to in his 2003 best-seller, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else. The book shows how the recent layoffs are a small part of a larger movement to weaken the IRS’s investigative capabilities.
And that movement begins with those who can afford to fund it. Who are they? Well, they’re not your average farmer.
Consistently during the debate over estate taxes, the GOP has co-opted the populist language that once dominated America’s agrarian communities by claiming that the “death tax” bleeds poor farming families dry. It’s a spectacular rhetorical tool, but it’s an ugly distortion.
In fact, it’s the nation’s wealthiest families who have led the charge to dismantle the estate tax, not its small farmers, according to an April report put together by two groups, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy. The analysis identified a handful of enormously wealthy families that stand to save more than $70 billion if their lobbying efforts succeed. And that lobbying effort, the report notes, has amounted to around $490 million in direct and indirect lobbying expenditures since 1998.
The list includes Ernest Gallo of the E & J Gallo Winery, based in Modesto, and John A. Sobrato of Sobrato Development, listed by Forbes as one of the largest commercial landlords in Silicon Valley, with a familial net worth of approximately $2 billion. The Gallo family is reportedly worth about $1 billion.
The rest of the list is in part a who’s who of America’s billionaires: Wal-Mart’s Walton family; Charles and David Koch of the nation’s largest privately held company, the Kansas-based Koch Industries (also benefactors of libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, founded in San Francisco); and the Dorrance family of the Campbell Soup Co.
Ernest Gallo’s participation in antitax measures is particularly well documented. Elected officials he has supported with contributions in the past sponsored federal legislation in the ’70s and ’80s that allowed for millions of dollars in estate-tax exemptions for the Gallo family. One bill was even dubbed by estate-tax supporters the “Gallo amendment.”
The Public Citizen report links the Gallos to anti–estate tax lobbyist Patricia Soldano and her Orange County–based Policy and Taxation Group (PTG), which has spent $4 million lobbying solely against the estate tax since 1998. While the authors are unable to pinpoint exactly how much the Gallos had given to PTG directly, both the Sobratos and the Gallos are listed as clients of the group. The Gallos have reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars supporting individual candidates.
It’s doubtful that very many people who actually paid estate taxes last year would know how to repair a grain harvester. In 2001, Johnston of the Times famously challenged the anti–estate tax American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bush administration to find just one example of a farm estate being sold to pay the taxes on it. Johnston reported they were unable to do so.
Estate planner Schiller likened opponents of the estate tax to medieval villagers who complained of gout to prove how well nourished they were.
“People want to believe they have an estate-tax problem,” he said, “so they can feel successful.” SFBG

Monopolies are forever

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July 28, 2006

By Bruce B. Brugmann
(henceforth to be known as B3 in this Bruce blog)

Earlier this week I dropped by Christopher’s Books on Potrero Hill, my favorite neighborhood bookstore, and was delighted to find a new grassroots newspaper that is published, written, edited, and distributed by a l3-year-old young lady.

Oona Robertson calls her paper “The hill, a Potrero Hill Kids newspaper.” She writes that she has “lived on Potrero Hill all my life. I like to read, write, fence, play sports and be in nature. I live with my mom, dad, sister, brother, fish and cats. I hope you enjoy my newspaper.”

She says her paper is “for kids of all ages.” The current issue has a poem titled
”Ode to my cat,” an essay headlined “The benefits of not owning a car,” part two of a serial about l5-year-old kids spying on a rich man in a mansion in Napa, four “fun summer recipes,” a synopsis of two kids movies (“Cars” and “Garfield, a Tale of Two Kitties”), a review of “The Alex Rider series,” a “Corn Cake Monster” comic strip, advice for bored kids during the summer (“try the ultimate water fight: invite all your friends and kids from your block to come to your house for the ultimate water fight…bring water balloons, water guns, water bottles, buckets, soakers, anything they can think of…Then go into your backyard or out front and either organize teams or have a free for all.”

The monthly paper is sold for $l at Christopher’s Books, but Oona says for an extra $3 she will hand-deliver her paper, but only to the houses of Potrero Hill kids. She will also take ads for $l. And she will take editorial submissions from kids. (Send ads and submissions to the hill, %Christopher’s Books, 1400 l8th St., SF 94l07.)

The hill is an amazing bit of entrepreneurial journalism, which I was reading as an email came in from my source in Contra Costa County, a news junkie and First Amendment warrior, who regularly alerts me to news in the Contra Costa Times that doesn’t appear in the San Francisco Chronicle. Did you see that the judge is going against Clint Reilly on his antitrust suit, he asked. No, I replied, I didn’t see the story. So I checked and sure enough, buried on page 9 in the Bay Area section, with a wimpy little head “Early ruling denies bid to halt big media sale,” was a story in the classic Chronicle tradition of minimalist and pock-holed media and power structure reporting. For attentive Guardian readers, you know our competitive-paper line. But this story had major whoppers and raised in 96 point Tempo Bold a new flurry of unanswered questions about a media monopoly move that will (a) allow Denver billionaire Dean Singleton to buy the Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury-News and Monterey Herald, plus a batch of weeklies and free dailies, and pile them up in his existing stable of papers that ring the bay, and (b) thereby gain a chokehold on Bay Area journalism for the duration, and (c) destroy the last remaining daily competition in the Bay Area–with the Chronicle– by getting Chronicle owner Hearst to assist and invest in the deal with undisclosed multi-million dollar stakes in other Singleton properties outside the Bay Area.

Whopper No. l: “In issuing the preliminary ruling (against Riley and for the Hearst/Singleton consortium), U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said the defendants faced greater harm than Riley if the sale of the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times was halted. ’I don’t see imminent irreparable harm to the plaintiffs,’ she said.”

Whopper No. 2: “Alan Marx, an attorney for MediaNews (Singleton), said there will be no cooperation between Hearst and MediaNews after the transaction. He said serious delays to the sale could force MediaNews to incur interest rate penalties of at least $22 million on loans that MediaNews has arranged to finance the purchase.”

Pow! Pow! Pow! If this single ownership chokehold on the Bay Area is not “irreparable damage,” then what is? Why is the federal judge worried about “irreparable damage” to billionaires in New York (Hearst) and Denver (Singleton), as well as the other billionaire partners to the deal in Sacramento (McClatchy) and MClean, Va. (Gannett) and Las Vegas (Stephens), and not worried about “irreparable damage” to the public, to readers, to advertisers, to competitive papers, to the health and welfare of their local communities, and to the marketplace of ideas principle underlying the First Amendment?

Some other key questions that the Chronicle and the other participants in the deal aren’t raising and answering: How can the publishers proceed before the Justice Department and the Attorney Generals approve and sign off on the deal? Why don’t they ask Attorney General Bill Lockyer about the status of his investigation? Lockyer, after all, is running for state treasurer and is on the campaign trail, as is Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who is running for Attorney General. Lockyer appeared on the Will and Willie show on the Quake last week and left the room, just before Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond came on. Redmond opened up his remarks by saying that he wished he had known Lockyer was on the show, because he would have asked him about his investigation. And then Tim and Will Durst and Willie Brown discussed the impact of the Hearst/Singleton issues in an open and lively way almost never done in the mainstream media. Why are Lockyer and Brown on the lam, and allowed to be on the lam, when they are once again running for major statewide offices? Let me note that they refuse to answer our repeated questions on the deal.

More questions: why, if Hearst and the other publishers feel they can’t cover themselves, don’t they get comments and op ed pieces from journalism or law professors at nearby UC-Berkeley, Cal-State Hayward, Stanford, San Jose State, SF State, USF? Why don’t they check with other independent experts such as Ben Bagdikian of “Media Monopoly” fame, who is living in Berkeley? Why don’t they quote Norman Solomon, a local media critic who writes a nationally syndicated column? Or Jeff Perlstein, executive director of Media Alliance or the Grade the News media reporting operation housed at San Jose State University? Why don’t they quote union representatives at the Chronicle and Merc? Why don’t they quote any one of the six U.S. representatives from the Bay Area that called on Justice and the AG to carefully scrutinize the sale? Why don’t they call on Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who introduced a local resolution opposing the sale, or any of the other supervisors who approved it unanimously? (Note: the Chronicle refused to run the Mirkarimi resolution even though I personally hand-carried it to the Chronicle City Hall reporters in the City Hall pressroom.) Why is it left to the handful of remaining independent voices to raise these critical questions?

I’m sending these questions to the local publishers, and I’ll let you know what they say.

Hearst has never been much good on local power structure issues (witness its blackout of the PG&E-Raker Act scandal), but things will only get worse when it is comfied and liquored up with Singleton and there is no real daily competition in the Bay Area. The way Hearst and the other billionaire publishers blacked out and minimalized this critical story–a story critical to their future credibility and influence–is a harbinger of the future of journalism in the Bay Area and beyond. Alas. Alas.

I sometimes think that Oona Robertson and the hill can do better.

This is my first blog, so please be kind until I get the hang of it and get safely out of my Royal typewriter past. I have much to say, in a journalism career that started at age 12 on the famous Lyon County Reporter in my hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa. I wrote a rousing story about catching a trout in the Black Hills on a vacation with my parents. I wrote a column for four years during high school, wrote off and on through the years and even worked a summer as the only reporter on the paper. I learned a couple of key things in the College of Community Journalism in Rock Rapids: that it is important to be accurate, and good spirited, because the locals know the story and read the paper to see if you got it right. And that, when you write about somebody, you write knowing you may seeing them later that day at the Grill Cafe or Brower’s Pool Hall or the golf club.

In Rock Rapids, I always felt I was having an ongoing conversation with the the people in town and on the farms. And, for the past 40 years at the Guardian, I have felt that the Guardian staff and I were conversing with our readers and the people of San Francisco. So now, with the magic of the internet and the blog, I hope to converse even more directly with our readers. Join the conversation. Join the fun. B3

Inside the belly of the dog

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I CARTOON DAZE

Homeland Security asked the usual dumb questions when I slapped my passport on the counter: what countries did you visit? Business or pleasure? The laser page did not trigger any alarms — yet. I advanced to the carrousel to pick up my luggage. My suitcase had burst apart in Mexico City, spilling incriminating documents all over the terminal floor. Now it came down the ramp swaddled in plastic. As I reached to pull it off, all hell broke loose — bells began to clang, buzzers burped jerkily, strobe lights flashed crazily on and off, and an automated voice on the intercom kept repeating “this is an emergency — walk do not run to the nearest exit.”

I did not walk, nor did anyone else in the San Francisco International arrivals terminal. We were under terrorist attack! The twin towers were coming down upon us! Young and old, some in wheelchairs even, stampeded for the sliding doors, luggage carts tipping, travelers stumbling, elbowing each other in their mad rush to escape as customs inspectors implored us to return to have our suitcases checked for contraband once the emergency had subsided. No one in his or her right mind ever did.

Meanwhile, the escapees kept jostling and tumbling and the bells and buzzers and whistles and lights kept yowling their siren song. Yow! Burrrp! Pow! It was like a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon.

Of course, in the end, the terrorist turned out be some poor schmuck caught smoking in the men’s room.

It was a prescient re-introduction to the land where my father croaked. My month inside the belly of the Dog was kind of like a perpetual cartoon. I often felt like poor Bob Hoskins surrounded by a world full of Roger Rabbits. Cartoons were, in fact, motoring worldwide mayhem. Bim! Baff! Boff! The irreverent Danish magazine Jyllns Posten had published a dozen blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad — in one, he wore a turban with a bomb in it, in another the Messenger of Allah was depicted as a pig (the magazine had reportedly turned down caricatures of Jesus Christ as being in poor taste.) The publication of the cartoons had opened the scab of Islamic wrath and the Muslim world was on a murderous rampage from Indonesia to well, Khartoum.

The religious leaders of 57 Islamic nations meeting in Mecca declared fatwa and jihad on the infidel Danes and their damned cheese. In Tehran, a smirking Ahmadinejad announced big-money competition for cartoons of the Holocaust (he doesn’t believe it happened) and spurious drawings appeared in Europe of Anne Frank in the sack with Adolph while she scribbles in her diary.

The Christian anti-Muslim cartoon backlash tumbled Muhammad’s rating to an all-time low in U.S. polls. The New York Times Style section reported that rebel youth were jumping out of the djalabahs and into “extreme Christian clothing.” In Nigeria, Christians slaughtered their Muslim brethren, daubing “Jesus Christ Is The Lord” on mosque walls in their victims’ blood.

Then came the anti-Christian, anti-Muslim cartoon backlash. Churches were neatly stenciled with icons equating the cross to the Swastika in Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) California. And to close the circle, three white boys in Alabama took the crusade a step up and just burned the tabernacles down to the ground.

If you don’t think our nation is being devoured by religious psychosis, consider two recent Supreme Court decisions. Just the other day, the Supremes voted unanimously, with Justice Roberts on board, to uphold the right of a religious cult to guzzle potions brewed from the hallucinogenic Amazonian root Ayahuasca while they gabbed with god. Last summer, that court, with Sandra Day O’Connor still in place, voted to deny brain tumor victims medical marijuana to ease their agonies.

The ultimate cartoon was Cheney plugging his hunting partner in the ticker just like good ol’ Elmer Fudd. Ping! Pong! Blamblam! Senator Lindsey Graham, who shares a similar war-mongering dementia with the veep, reports that Dick Cheney told him that killing small birds kept him “sane.” Blap! Splat! Shazam! The late night joke mongers had a ball with the caper: “This Just In! We’ve learned that Vice President Cheney tortured his hunting partner for an hour before he shot him!” Yuk! Yuk! Did you hear the one about the CIA agent caught rifling housewives’ panty drawers during working hours in Virginia (you could look it up)? Yok! Yok! The U.S. teaming up with Iran to keep Gays out of the United Nations? Tweet! Tweet! Bird flu in of all places, Turkey (and Iraq)? Kaplooey!

Elmer and Daffy Duck scoot off into the sunset and the screen rolls up into a little round porthole where Bugs is cackling, “th-th-th-the-that’s all folks!”

II SCOUNDREL TIME

The problem is that that’s not all folks, and this may be loony tunes but it certainly isn’t merry melodies. These bastards are for real and it’s not really very funny. The title of Lillian Hellman’s slim volume on how HUAC hounded her and Hammitt is an insufficient one to describe these scum and their perverted torture war.

Every day the Seattle Times runs a few inches slugged “Terrorism Digest.” Aside from the usual shorts on Moussaoui, a rumored attack during March Madness, and an elderly ice cream truck driver in Lodi California who is accused of planning to blow up skyscrapers in Hollywood, most of the news is not about terrorism at all but rather the torture of alleged terrorists, perhaps tens of thousands of them in secret torture chambers hidden away in U.S. client states like Bulgaria and Morocco.

Here’s one. Ali Shakal Kaisi was the hooded man on the box with the electric cables snaking from his limbs, the poster boy for the abuse at Abu Ghraib. The photo is now on his business card. Originally, he was arrested for complaining to occupation troops about throwing their garbage on a soccer field in his Baghdad neighborhood. The Pentagon, in a display of perhaps the most hideous chutzpah in the Guinness Book of Records, refuses to comment on Mr. Khaisi’s case because it would “a violation of his Geneva Convention rights.”

Connoisseurs concede that Bush et al (heretofore to be referred to as “the scum”) have added some innovative techniques to Torquemada’s little catalogue of horrors. The reoccurring sexual pathology is disturbing. One accused Jihadist at Gitmo was wrapped in an Israeli flag and forced to watch gay porn 24 hours a day by military interrogators who passed themselves off as the FBI. Sadistic commandants shove feeding tubes up the nose of hunger strikers and rip them out roughly as the men piss and shit all over themselves while restrained in what Rumsfeld euphemistically describes as “a rolling padded cell.”

Why are these men being tortured? We learn from 5,000 pages of heavily-blacked-out military depositions released on court order to the Associated Press that at least three were detained because they wore Cassio F91W watches that have compasses on their face pointing to Mecca. “But our chaplains here all wear the same watch” protested one detainee.

All of this pain and suffering is being orchestrated in the much shat-upon name of freedom, the “freedom” as Sub Marcos puts it, “to choose between the carrot and the stick.” You know, as in “free elections” — Iraq’s three fraudulent elections that have led to massive bloodshed in that benighted land being the role models. But elections are not “free” when the Bushwas don’t win, like Hammas and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez and most probably, Lopez Obrador in Mexico this July. Maybe free elections are not such a hot idea after all.

The third anniversary of this despicable war is only days away as I write these scabrous lines. Extrapoutf8g the Lancet study, it is probable that 150,000 Iraqis have been crucified in this infernal crusade. The 2,300 or so GIs who died with their boots on fill just a few slabs in the charnel house Bush has built in Iraq.

I suppose the up side is that two thirds of those Yanquis surveyed think he is a liar and a baby killer — but many more will have to fall before the infidels are finally run off. Clearly, the resistance is working on it. Blowing the Golden Dome sky-high was a malevolent stroke of genius by the terroristas to incite sectarian (not civil) war, a scenario designed to foil the White House’s scheme to pull out of this treacherous quicksand and start bombing before the body bags queer the November elections.

Will it work? Shia death squads operating out of the Interior ministry are kidnapping dozens of Sunnis every day now and hanging them for public consumption. We can expect roadside gibbets next. The imminent spread of Shia-Sunni hostilities into neighboring oil lands has Washington biting its nails. We’re talking $100 a barrel here.

Sasha has a Skype pen pal in Baghdad, call her Fatima. She is a medical-science professor at the University, a middle class, somewhat secular woman who lives in a high rise in a mixed neighborhood. She writes when there is power and an Internet connection — the last three generator operators on the block have been shot dead. Her absence on the screen is always a cause for alarm. Fatima says she no longer sits writing in her window to take advantage of daylight because she is afraid of being hit by a stray bullet. I am forever amazed how concerned she is for us. Last week, she wrote “I am sorry my dear for not writing. I am ok but I am more afraid than before. Things are going from bad to very bad.” If we never hear from Fatima again, the blood will be on George Bush’s hands.

Is George Bush impeachable? He has committed multiple felonies in spying on 350,000 unsuspecting citizens without a court order, a stain on the Constitution and way beyond the pale of even Nixonian paranoia. He sold the country an illegal war based on shameless perjury in collusion with oil barons and defense contractors who have grown obscenely fat on the blood of the Iraqi people.

And he sought to sell off vital U.S. ports to “Arab terrorists”! Or at least that’s what his fellow Republicans seem to perceive. Fanning the fumes of anti-Arab racism has come back to bite Bush and the corporate globalizers of the planet on the ass. Who does Bill Frist think was operating these ports up until now? The bloody Brits, that’s who! This is Globalization, Savage Capitalism, Dog eat Dog. It’s the American Way. What do you know about Sheik Mo? Vital elements of the food chain (Church’s Chicken and Caribou Coffee for example) have already fallen into the hands of “Arab terrorists.”

Where was I? The Bill of Particulars, right? I’m sorry — it’s my birthday and I’m on a vent fueled by the one good thing about this country, Humboldt County sinsemilla.

George Bush — guilty of nuclear proliferation! What else would you call giving India enough fissionable material to blow a hole in China and Pakistan?

George Bush — guilty of blatant racism and incalculable callousness, strumming his guitar while the levees were bursting down in New Orleans, an interval much like the goat story on 9/11 of which Osama has reminded us in a recent communique. J’accuse George Bush!

Will a mush-minded congress apparently dosed to the gills on Ambien, the new sleepwalking (and sleep voting) wonder drug, vote to impeach? “Que se vayan todos!” the cry of the 2002 Argentinazo, “that they should all be kicked out” is an anthem for our time.

III SLEEPING IN SEATTLE

I’ve spent the last month sleeping in Seattle. Daytimes, I’ve churned out tens of thousands of words on my soon-to-be-published-if-it-ever-gets-finished opus, “Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006.”

Seattle has spectral vistas but at heart, it is a city without a soul. It has been bitterly cold here, the wind whipping off Puget Sound like The Hawk off Lake Michigan. A sullen rain falls most days. When the sun comes out in Seattle, they say the suicide rate goes up because people can’t deal with the brightness.

I have been lucky to have had Sasha’s cozy room and half to hole up in. A lot of people in this city don’t even have a roof over their head. Old men sleep rough in Pioneer Square these freezing nights, young tramps camp out under the bushes up here on Cap Hill. There’s a Hooverville under the Viaduct.

The merchants don’t care much for all these deranged pariahs dragging around ragged sleeping bags like batman capes or curled up in fetal positions in one of Starbuck’s many doorways. Seattle has more pressing matters on its mind. Howard (Starbuck’s) Schultz is threatening to move the Sonics if he doesn’t get a new arena free of charge from the city. Then there is Bill and Melissa, the world’s wealthiest nation.

This is a smug city that has grown soft and wealthy on the backs of software billionaires, where no one gives a damn about anything that is not on a screen. The Stranger ran the Muhammad cartoons and no one flinched. The next week, the paper ran a feature on a man who was fucked to death by a horse. Again, no one flinched. Meanwhile, the homeless are dying out there in the street.

On Valentine’s Day, Sasha and I died in on the City Hall steps — she was the 50th victim to have died on the streets of Seattle in 2005. I was the 53rd. The Raging Grannies died in with us. I dedicated my dying to the spirit of Lucky Thompson, who recorded with Miles and Bird and spent his twilight years sleeping in Seattle parks. Seattle has a way of damaging its black geniuses. Octavia Butler, the towering writer of “conjectural fiction” whose work hones in on race and class like a laser, fell down the steps of her home here a few weeks ago. She lived alone — she always lived alone — and no one found her until she was dead. There is a statue of Jimi Hendrix right down the street.

What’s been good is watching Sasha blossom as an organizer. She’s been busy 25 hours a day putting together the visit of Eman Khammas, a courageous Iraqi journalist who speaks to the plight of women in Bush’s genocidal war. I saw Khammas last summer at the Istanbul War Crimes Tribunal and she is a firebrand speaker. Eman is part of the Women Say No To War tour put together by Global Exchange, two members of the delegation who had lost their families to the occupation, were denied visas because they did not have enough family left to “compel” their return to Iraq.

On the third anniversary of this madness March 18th, Eman Khammas will be a speaker at the march and rally set for the Seattle Federal building. That evening, she will talk at greater length at Trinity Methodist Church in the Ballard district. The kick-ass rebel singer Jim Page will open. No one turned away. Some of the moneys raised will go to the Collateral Repair Project (www.collateralrepairproject.org) which Sasha and her pal Sarah have created to help out the family of Mahmoud Chiad, an ambulance driver in al-Qaim who was gunned down by Bush’s crusaders October 1st, the first day of Operation Iron Fist in al-Ambar province, as he raced to aid victims of the massacre. There’s a widow and six kids, and Collateral Repair hopes to buy them a piece of land and some goats.

So I’m in the air back to Make Sicko City. The globalphobes are acting out at the World Water (Privatizers) Forum, which kicks off this week and when last heard from, Sub Marcos was trying to break into a prison in Guanajuato. I’ve got to finish this damn book in the next six weeks.

And Sasha and I? Who knows? I wear her name on a grain of rice around my neck and her door key is still wedged deep in my pocket and maybe it will open her heart to me again someday. We met in Baghdad with Bush’s bombs on the way and the bottom line is that we continue to fight this heinous war together. That’s good too.

John Ross has landed. But these articles will continue to be issued at 10-day intervals until “Making Another World Possible” is done. The deadline is May 1st. “Making Another World Possible” will be available at cost to Blindman Buff subscribers this fall.

 

 

 

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