Chamber of Commerce Archives — Page 8 of 13 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Civil disagreements

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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August 31, 2010

rebeccab@sfbg.com

On Aug. 24, San Francisco’s simmering debate about Proposition L, a proposed ordinance that would ban sitting or lying down on city sidewalks, bubbled over at a neighborhood meeting held on the block where all the controversy originated. Merchants affiliated with the Haight-Ashbury Improvement Association (HAIA) — a neighborhood association that backs Prop, L — got an earful from Jim Siegel, who owns a Haight Street shop called Distractions. “I told them, you better be prepared to put your money where your mouth is,” Siegel, still steaming, recounted to the Guardian shortly after the HAIA meeting.

A Haight Street business owner for 34 years who once endured a period of homelessness himself, Siegel said he views Prop. L as an unnecessary law that would target the homeless and advance gentrification along a historically alternative strip. He was gearing up to rally Haight Street businesses that oppose Prop. L, and had gone on Facebook to publicly call for a boycott of HAIA-affiliated businesses. (“I will monitor HAIA activities and keep you posted,” he wrote in a recent Facebook post.)

Kent Uyehara, who owns FTC Skateboards and SFO Snowboards on Haight Street and chairs HAIA’s merchant group, is in many ways Siegel’s foil on this issue. Asked about the meeting, he chided Siegel’s in-your-face approach and delivered a line one might expect from someone touting something dubbed the Civil Sidewalks Ordinance: “I was like, can’t we just agree to disagree?”

Uyehara told us he’s been canvassing businesses up and down Haight Street to try to garner support for Prop. L. “This legislation is not targeting any individual group. It’s not targeting the homeless,” he said. “It’s targeting behavior.” He had a friend who was stabbed on Haight Street, he added, and wanted to do something to prevent future violence.

As for the merchants up and down the strip, it’s tough to say just how many are in Uyehara’s camp versus Siegel’s camp. When the Guardian called Haight Street businesses to try to gauge opinions, we learned that — contrary to reports suggesting that a unified corridor of fed-up merchants is driving the push for the new law — perspectives on Prop. L were nuanced, varied, and without much of a consensus.

And some merchants complain that the drum-beat of publicity for sit-lie — based on reports that the Haight has become dangerous — have hurt the local business climate and driven away customers.

A lot of it comes down to perspective. Rick Braun, a co-owner of Positively Haight, a shop that has been selling tie-dye for 18 years, described himself as “a live and let live” kind of guy — and his attitude applies to the kids who hang out in front of his store as well as the businesses that support Prop. L. “I realize how hard it is to make ends meet,” he said. “But there are already enough ways to deal with it without being so police state about it.”

Usually, he said, when he asks people blocking his storefront to move, they do. Braun said he tries not be mean about it — in a way, he can relate to kids who just aren’t interested in being part of the mainstream. Recalling the mid-1980s when he arrived fresh out of UC Santa Cruz with a backpack and a car to live in, he said, “We could’ve gone that route — but we found a way to make a life out of it.”

Justin Lawrence, who has been the shop manager for 10 years at Haight Ashbury Tattoo & Piercing (formerly Anubis), also struck a note of balance. “On some levels, it’s a good idea,” he said. “A lot of times, it discourages people from coming to Haight Street. At the same time, I think it’s not really the right answer. More foot patrol of police would be more effective than making it illegal to sit on the sidewalk.”

Joey Cain, a member of the Haight Street anarchist collective Bound Together Books since 1979, voiced strong opposition to the ordinance and said he felt Prop. L was being pushed by a small minority who weren’t really representative of the merchants. Cain is the president of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), which is often at odds with HAIA. He views the whole thing as a political move on the part of HAIA, the Chamber of Commerce, and the San Francisco Police Department. “We just see it as a nasty, divisive, unnecessary action,” he said. “I have no doubt it will pass. People are looking for a scapegoat, and homeless people are the scapegoat of the age.”

Cain was also miffed at HAIA’s cooperation with San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, who penned articles that triggered the debate. “HAIA worked with Nevius on trashing the neighborhood — just before the Christmas season,” he said.

Tony Green, a manager at Amoeba Music, said there was certainly some genuinely bad behavior on Haight Street. “The trouble is, making one law that covers everybody is difficult,” he said.

Kimberly Digregorio, store manager at Crossroads Trading Co. on Haight, said her own gripe is that the sidewalks are filthy, and she welcomes the sight of the high-pressure hose crews that come through to blast away the grime. Although she attributes the problem in part to pets of kids who camp on the street, she doesn’t think a law banning sitting or lying on the sidewalk is the solution. “You just ask them to move away from the business. I’ve never had an issue with that,” she said.

The Civil Sidewalks web page features videos of the owners of Iris, Recycled Records, and an employee at Pure Beauty voicing support for Prop. L, and there is a fourth who does not give his name or business. Uyehara claims to have spoken with most of the roughly 140 businesses along the block and found that the majority support the law. But only 55 supporters are listed on the Civil Sidewalks page under “Upper Haight Street Merchants.”

Calls to The Alembic, Squat & Gobble, the Red Vic Movie House, Braindrops, and the Haight Street Market went unreturned. The owner of The Looking Glass Collage-Stained Glass declined to comment, a retail clerk at Ben & Jerry’s said the manager was vacationing, and the phone at Martin Macks rang unanswered. A call requesting an interview with Park Station Police Capt. Teresa Barrett was not returned.

Ted Loewenberg, the president of HAIA, is a strong advocate for Prop. L. “The problem is real and it needs to be dealt with,” he said. “The problem is not whether they’re standing or sitting,” he said, it’s “being territorial.” He added that “one of the key focuses we have is to bring merchants and residents together to give people a reason to go back to Haight Street.”

Praveen Madan, an owner of The Booksmith, is a relative newcomer to Haight Street, and says he’s still gathering information before deciding how to vote on Prop L. “While there are some genuine issues, they’ve gotten blown out of proportion and distorted,” he said. “I don’t feel an outright threat to my safety.” He said that if he asks someone to move from outside his bookstore, “nine times out of 10, they leave. They just pick up and go to a different spot.” For his part, Madan is trying to encourage a more informed dialogue. He told us there’s a lot of misinformation floating around and “a paucity of good info and facts.” Soon after he and his wife moved onto the street three years ago, they noticed that homelessness was a problem — so they decided to host community forums exploring the topic in depth. Since the Prop. L debate surfaced, “We have been thinking of organizing another one,” he said. “We bring people together … so people can get some real insight on these issues and make up their own minds.”

It’s not about taxes

Zelda Bronstein

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August 31, 2010

3

I heard an executive from Coda Automotive, which makes electric cars, talking on NPR this morning about why the company is going to locate its manufacturing plant in Southern California. He talked about the quality of the workforce, about the demographics of the state, about the fact that Californians understand environmental issues … all sorts of reasons to build a plant here. And he never once mentioned taxes.

That’s not surprising — for all the whining the California Chamber of Commerce does, corporate taxes aren’t a major factor when businesses look at setting up shop in this state. We’d do a lot better to raise taxes to the level where we could afford to educate the next generation of workers. That’s far more important in building a strong economy.

The Chamber of Commerce is clueless

Zelda Bronstein

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August 27, 2010

7

Check out the Chamber of Commerce and its vice president for public policy, Jim Lazarus, commenting on the state of the city’s finances in the Chron:

The Chamber opposes forcing the mayor to appear at “question time,” — “pure political theater,” — and an increase in property transfer tax — “Why do we need it? The budget is balanced.”

Yes, Jim — the budget is balanced. That’s a legal requirement. And it’s balanced by cutting all sorts of essential services. You like what’ s happening to Muni, and to public health? You like having mentally ill homeless people on the streets because there’s nowhere for them to get treatment?

But don’t worry — the budget is balanced.

SF Chamber attacks — lamely

Sasha Cuttler

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August 18, 2010

0

The right-wing San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has had a pretty bad track record in local electoral politics in recent years, and its latest attack ads on progressive members of the Board of Supervisors demonstrates why: the group’s muddled and hypocritical messaging is barely comprehensible to the average San Franciscan.

The San Francisco Chronicle this morning announced the new ad campaign, the first salvo resulting from strategy sessions with Mayor Gavin Newsom and other downtown players, and the article included a funny conflict about whether or not the Chronicle is giving free advertising space to the effort.

But the ads themselves are even funnier – although inadvertently so – asking voters whether “your city supervisor” prefers “buses or benefits,” “parks or pensions,” or “paychecks or pinkslips.” Apparently, the Chamber is trying to capitalize on this political season’s fashionable attacks on public employee pensions and benefits, but the false choices that the Chamber sets up actually say more about its own promotion of this sort of zero-sum game within the public sector.

Hundreds of city employees have gotten pink slips in the last couple years directly because Newsom and the Chamber have sabotaged proposed revenue measures, even those that would help small businesses. They’ve played cynical political games that have cut Muni service and caused fares to double since Newsom became mayor, with Muni money diverted to help fund the paychecks, benefits, and pensions of police and firefighters – core Newsom constituencies to whom he gave overly generous deals to secure their early support for his 2007 re-election – while recently negotiating a deal that would exempt them from being affected by Jeff Adachi’s pension reform measure for another two years.

But targets of the ads don’t even need to know this whole backstory to see that the ads are simply false choices, lamely presented. Another swing and a miss from the once-mighty Chamber.

Chiu left out of Gascon’s Community Ambassadors loop

Mary Magee

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August 5, 2010

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SFPD Chief George Gascon kicked off today’s press conference about a Community Ambassadors program on the Third Street corridor by saying that it’s a grassroots pilot.

“This is not a police program, it’s a community program,” Gascon said, as he introduced Adrienne Pon from the Mayor’s Office to speak about what is being framed as a trailblazing effort to address violence on public transit at a time when money is tight all around.

Board President David Chiu, Sups. Carmen Chu, Sophie Maxwell and Eric Mar, and Chinese Chamber of Commerce consultant Rose Pak were also in attendance and everyone was all smiles and put on an apparent show of solidarity for what appears to be a desperately needed program

But Chiu did not know that the press conference was happening, when I called him last night for details. I’d assumed that he would be in the loop as the Board President and the most visible of the city’s top Asian American political leaders. But as Chiu confirmed today, he only was briefed a few hours before it took place.

Asked what was going on, Chiu waxed diplomatic.
“As you know, I didn’t know about it yesterday when you called,” Chiu said. “So, when I heard about it, I called the Chief and he sent the information. I’m happy this is happening.”

Oddly, when I called the SFPD this morning to confirm that today’s press conference was happening, I was asked who had told me about it. By then, I also knew that D. 10 candidate Marlene Tran was going to be speaking at the press conference. And while it’s great that Tran is an advocate for public safety programs, it’s weird that a candidate on the November ballot was in Gascon’s press conference loop, when Board President Chiu was not.

“We are in a neighborhood with serious public safety concerns,” Chiu told reporters today. “The issues that come from one of our ethnic communities are of concern for us all.

“We are working with the Mayor’s Office and the Chief,” Chiu continued, noting that the Board has been working hard to restore funding for violence prevention programs and to ensure there is funding for a new program for translation services.

“A multi-ethnic program is the type of program we need to move the healing process forward,” Chiu said, thanking the SFPD and the District Attorney’s Office for working to help victims of violence get help and translation services.

Sup. Maxwell talked about how the Ambassadors Program will be good for seniors, young people and very very young people.
“We need to make sure we continue these kinds of programs,” Maxwell said.

Sup. Eric Mar thanked AT& T for providing cell phones to the 12 outreach workers who have been trained as Community Ambassadors.
And Pon of the Mayor’s Office promised that this would be the first of many efforts to address public safety concerns.
‘There is no place for violence in the community,” Pon said. “Any time anyone gets hurt, it rips a hole in the fabric of society. It’s not just the recent acts of physical violence and threats against some of our residents. No one should have to contend with being spit upon and name-calling and threats.”

Thanking Sharen Hewitt, Rose Pak and “the courageous community members who came forward,” Pon said the pilot program will last until mid-September and will focus on the Number 9-San Bruno bus and the T-Third line. Funding is coming from the city’s general fund and federal job stimulus funds.

“Unfortunately, those funds are going to end in September, so we’re looking for funding from the corporate community,” Pon said, referring to AT&T.

She described the Community Ambassadors program as a “non-law enforcement presence.”
“People can get along regardless of their cultural and linguistic differences,” Pon said.

AT& T California President Ken McNeely talked about his company’s “long and storied history”, noting that the first transcontinental call happened over 100 years ago and involved a call from San Francisco’s Chinatown to New York City.

“We’re in the business of really connecting people,” McNeely said.

Sup. Carmen Chu said the pilot program is the beginning of efforts to build community across ethnic lines.
“It starts to sends a message about what we want to accomplish,” Chu said.
“Crime is not something we want to see tolerated,” Chu continued.

On August 3, the Board considered legislation that Chu authored to implement higher penalties for crimes on and around Muni. Like the Community Ambassadors program, Chu’s legislation came in response to recent attacks on Asian Americans by African-American teens. In one case, a group beat a 57-year-old woman then pushed her onto the tracks. In another, an 83-year-old man died in the hospital after he was assaulted.

If passed, Chu’s legislation would increase the penalties for aggressive pursuit and loitering while carrying a concealed weapon to $1,000 if the crime occurred on or around MUNI (as opposed to $500 for the same crime committed elsewhere.) The Board also recommended that juveniles convicted of these crimes be given community service or in-home sentences instead of probation or juvenile hall.

Police Commission President Dr. Joe Marshall was also on hand today to voice his enthusiasm for the Community Ambassadors pilot.
“This is pretty cool,” Marshall said. “We got a model. I don’t know if any other cities are doing this, but they should be. I commend the ambassadors for being involved.”

And D. 10 candidate Marlene Tran said the program represented an opportunity to work “for peace and harmony.”
“This is an auspicious occasion,” Tran said, noting that there would be “double happiness” in the Asian American community over two community hubs, one in Viz Valley, the other in the Bayview.
“We encourage more collaboration amongst our community,” she said.

Rose Pak, consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, hinted that she would be squeezing more money out of AT&T.
“I knew we had a problem, and I knew who to go to,” Pak said, noting that she wasn’t not going to let AT&T “get away with pilot support.”
“I expect them to write a big check,” she said.

Pon told reporters that the Community Ambassadors speak a total of seven languages: English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Samoan and Hawaiian.

But when reporters asked how City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s newly announced gang injunction against two warring street gangs, the Down Below Gangsters and Towerside Gang, in Viz Valley, might be compromised by the Community Ambassadors program, Gascon stepped forward.
“If thoughtfully implemented, gang injunctions can be a powerful tool,” Gascon said, noting he believes the Community Ambassadors will be a model that “we’d like to take to other neighborhoods.”

But how can 12 people armed solely with AT&T cell phones and fluorescent yellow jackets tackle what seems primarily to be youth violence against Asians? And what will happen in six weeks when the pilot program’s funding dries up?
“For the past two weeks, and continuously until mid-September, they are going through training at the SFPD and the MTA,” Pon said, noting that some of this training involved cultural and linguistic competency training.

“We’re building a pilot,” Pon continued. “The phones are preprogrammed to speed dial the SFPD, and we recruited these 12 ambassadors from over a hundred candidates in the Jobs Now program’s census outreach team. So, they are used to working in public and are comfortable with working with individuals of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities.

Pon acknowledged that the pilot has a shoestring budget.
“We are seeking private and foundation funding, so I’ll be doing lots of grant writing,” Pon continued, noting that a permanent program would need “at least half a million dollar budget.”

Asked if the Mayor’s Office was kept in the loop about today’s event more than Chiu, Pon smiled.

“SFPD called the conference and we are all making sure that we are working together,” Pon said.

But AT&T’s Ken McNeely was happy to talk about his company’s efforts to provide cell phones for connecting with first responders.
“Public-private partnerships are critically important,” McNeely told the Guardian.
“We’ve made education one of our key pillars for giving back,” he said. “ For us all to do well, it’s going to take public private partnerships.”

The politics of unity and division

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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August 3, 2010

7

steve@sfbg.com

These are strange days for the San Francisco Democratic Party, which is seeking to overcome bitter divisions on the local level and come together around candidates for statewide office that include Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose fiscal conservatism and petulant political style are the main sources of that local division.

The tension has played out recently around the Board of Supervisors deliberations on the new city budget and November ballot measures and in dramas surrounding the newly elected Democratic County Central Committee, where the battles during its July 28 inaugural meeting previewed a more significant fight over local endorsements coming up Aug. 11.

Almost every elected official in San Francisco is a Democrat. Newsom, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, has been the main obstacle to new taxes that progressives and labor leaders say are desperately needed to preserve public services, deal with massive projected deficits in the next two years, and quit balancing budgets on the backs of workers.

“We balanced the budget without raising taxes. I don’t believe in raising taxes. We don’t need to raise taxes,” Newsom said proudly at his July 29 budget signing ceremony, during which he also effusively praised the labor unions whose support he needs this fall: “Labor has been under attack in this state and country. They’ve become a convenient excuse for our lack of leadership in Sacramento and around the country.”

That hypocritical brand of politics has been frustrating to his fellow Democrats, particularly progressive supervisors and DCCC members. At the July 27 board meeting, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Board President David Chiu reluctantly dropped their pair of revenue measures that would have raised $50 million, bowing to opposition by Newsom and the business community.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has become such a vehicle for antitax and antigovernment vitriol that the DCCC on July 29 approved a resolution calling for the organization — which hosted a speech by Republican National Chair Michael Steele in June — to renounce the platform of the Republican National Committee.

“The Chamber is not a knee-jerk right-wing organization,” Chamber President Steve Falk felt compelled to clarify in a July 28 letter to DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin, closing with, “Anything you can do to avoid painting the Chamber as a pawn of the GOP would be greatly appreciated — because it just isn’t true.”

Yet Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the resolution and is a progressive supervisorial candidate in District 8, told us the Chamber’s fiscal policies are indistinguishable from those pushed by Republicans. “They’re the leading force pushing the Republican agenda in San Francisco,” Mandelman said, calling the stance short-sighted. “It’s not in the long-term interests of the business community for our public sector to fall apart.”

Chiu’s business tax reform measure is a good example of how conservative ideology seems to be trumping progressive policy, even among Democrats. Only 10 percent of businesses in the city pay any local business tax, and the measure would increase taxes on large corporations, lower them on small businesses, create private sector jobs, bring $25 million per year into the city, and expand the tax burden to 25 percent of businesses, including the large banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions that are now exempt. But even the Small Business Commission refused to support the plan, prompting Chiu to drop the proposal and tell his colleagues, “There is still not consensus about whether this should move forward.”

Sup. Chris Daly, the lone vote against the budget compromise with Newsom and the removal of revenue measures from the November ballot, noted at the July 27 board meeting how the business community has sabotaged city finances, citing its 2002 lawsuit challenging the gross receipt taxes, which the board settled on a controversial 8-3 vote. “This is a large part of our structural budget deficit,” Daly said.

But antitax sentiment has only gotten worse with the current recession and political dysfunction, causing Democrats like Newsom to parrot Republicans’ no-new-taxes mantra, much to the chagrin of progressives.

“A lot of this is being driven by statewide politics. [Newsom] needs to not have taxes go up but he also needs the support of the labor unions, so we get weird stuff happening in San Francisco,” Mandelman said.

The situation has also fed Newsom’s animus toward progressives, who have enjoyed more local electoral success than the mayor. Newsom responded in June to the progressive slate winning a majority on the DCCC by placing a measure on the November ballot that would ban local elected officeholders from serving on that body, which includes four progressive supervisors and three supervisorial candidates.

Nonetheless, Newsom then unexpectedly sought a seat on the DCCC, arguing that his lieutenant governor nomination entitled him to an ex officio seat (those held by state and federal elected Democrats) even though the DCCC’s legal counsel disagreed. While noting the hypocrisy of the request, Party Chair Aaron Peskin took the high road and proposed to change the bylaws to seat Newsom.

Some progressives privately groused about giving a seat to someone who, as DCCC member Carole Migden said at the meeting, was “picking a fight” with progressives by pushing a measure she called “disrespectful and unconstitutional.” But in practice, the episode seems to have hurt Newsom’s relations with progressives without really strengthening his political hand.

Newsom ally Scott Wiener — a DCCC member and District 8 supervisorial candidate (who told us he opposes the mayor’s DCCC ballot measure) — proposed to amend Peskin’s motion to change the bylaws in order to seat Newsom with language that would allow Newsom to continue serving even if he loses his race in November.

That amendment was defeated on a 17-13 vote that illustrated a clear dividing line between the progressive majority and the minority faction of moderates and ex officio members. Even with Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris (who was seated as the Democratic nominee for attorney general) being seated — and counting the one absent vote, Sen. Leland Yee, who is expected to sometimes vote with progressives and sometimes with moderates — progressives still hold the majority going into the process of endorsing local candidates and allocating party resources for the fall campaign.

“Presuming that 17 people of that 33-member body all agree on something, then the presence of Mayor Newsom doesn’t change anything,” Peskin said. He also noted that even if Newsom’s measure passed and the progressive supervisors were removed, “the irony is that the chair of the party [Peskin] would appoint their successors.”

Also ironic is the political reality that it is Newsom who most needs his party’s support right now, while it is progressives who are adopting the most conciliatory tone.

“We should all be working to turn out the vote and help Democrats win,” Peskin told us. “I implore our mayor and lieutenant gubernatorial candidate to work with us and get that done.”

Yet after Newsom gave a budget-signing speech that included the line, “At the end of the day, it comes down to leadership, stewardship, collaboration, partnership,” he told the Guardian that he has no intention of removing or explaining his DCCC ballot measure, saying only, “If the voters support it, then it would be the right thing to do.”

Chiu responded to the news by telling us, “I hope the mayor can move beyond the politics of personality and build a party vehicle that is about unity.”

Safety first!

David Talbot

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July 23, 2010

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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

The number of serious on-the-job accidents this year have yet again made very clear the urgent need for expanded and tightened government safety regulation. The toll on workers has been high, as President Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers union told the House Education and Labor Committee in mid-July.

Roberts noted the explosion at a mine in West Virginia that killed 29 coal miners, a blast at a refinery in Washington State that killed seven workers, the BP oil rig blast in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11, an explosion that killed six workers at an Energy Systems facility in Connecticut.

Those were but a very small sampling of the on-the-job accidents that kill nearly 6,000 U.S. workers every year. More than two million other American workers are seriously injured yearly. And another 50,000 or more die yearly from cancer, lung and heart ailments and other occupational diseases caused by exposure to toxic substances.

The Mine Workers’ Roberts came before the House committee to urge passage of a bill, the Miner Safety and Health Act, that focuses on mine safety but also includes provisions that would strengthen safety protections in all other workplaces.

Joe Main, who heads the federal Mine Safety and Health Agency, said the bill would do nothing less than “change the culture of safety in the mining industry, and put the health and safety of miners first.” That indeed would be a major shift in focus, a very much needed and most welcome shift.

It’s sad but true that the safety of miners has often been a secondary consideration of many mine owners and government regulators. Greater profit and productivity – not safety – has been the overriding concern, and far too many workers have suffered because of that.

Too many have been maimed, too many killed for lack of proper protections, some required by law but ignored, some not required at all, however essential they are.

The Mine Safety and Health Agency’s Main says the proposed law would give his agency the tools to make employers live up to their legal and moral obligation. And if they don’t meet their obligation, the agency would be empowered to step in to see that they do so.

As the AFL-CIO’s general counsel, Lynn Rinehart, told the House committee, the federal job safety laws – now 40 years old – are way out-of-date. They have never been significantly strengthened, Rinehart noted, and their penalties are slight compared to those imposed for violations of other labor laws.

What’s more, Rinehart said, the law gives workers little protection from employer retaliation against those who raise safety concerns. Current law, he added, “simply does not provide a sufficient deterrent against employers who would cut corners on safety and put workers in harm’s way.”

Among the bill’s most important provisions is one that would guarantee workers the right to refuse to work in unsafe conditions. That right is guaranteed in mineworker union contracts, and for good reason: Non-union miners have long complained that they fear employer retaliation if they speak out about mine safety problems.

The bill would give the mine safety agency authority to close a mine if there’s a continuing threat to workers safety, and would subject mine owners to increased civil and criminal penalties for safety violations.

The AFL-CIO’s Rinehart noted that the median penalty for having working conditions that cause a fatality was a mere $5,000 in 2009. The penalties generally have been mere slaps on the wrist.

One of the most important parts of the proposed safety law would extend coverage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act – OSHA – to the millions of local and state government employees who are not covered by the law.

Sponsors of the proposed law face formidable opposition – the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and nearly two dozen other industry groups whose members aren’t eager to spend money on safer workplaces.

The Bush administration was openly on the side of those groups. Safety laws were only lightly enforced – if enforced at all – by the Bush appointees who ran the federal safety agencies. Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s safety and health director, figures it will take years to reverse and undo the “many bad policies and practices that were put into place” under Bush.

It will indeed be a long time before the government can provide the full protection from on-the-job hazards that will continue to needlessly harm millions of American workers. But the proposed new safety law, and the worker-friendly Obama administration, give us a fighting chance to finally do what must be done if we are to have truly safe workplaces.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Small biz should support Chiu tax plan

David Talbot

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July 20, 2010

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EDITORIAL It’s rare to see a fairly conservative city agency, created in part to make it harder for progressives to push measures that might affect business, come down in favor of a new business tax. But the San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis has concluded that the proposal by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to change the local payroll tax and impose a new tax on commercial rents would actually help local businesses, particularly small businesses. The proposal presents a crucial opportunity for progressives to make the case that the Chamber of Commerce and big downtown corporations are not advancing the interests of small businesses — and local merchant groups need to pay attention.

Chiu has taken on a problem that has lingered in San Francisco for decades. The city’s business tax is terribly regressive: Only 10 percent of the companies in town even pay the payroll tax, in part because banks, insurance companies, and financial services firms are exempt under state law. That means the burden falls the heaviest on small and medium-sized companies — the ones that provide most of the net job growth in the city.

The new proposal would make the flat payroll tax more progressive and would exempt more small businesses. It would also raise $28 million more a year for the cash-strapped municipal coffers by taxing commercial rents of more than $60,000 a year.

The commercial rent levy would force the big outfits that now pay no city taxes whatsoever to take on at least some of the burden of financing San Francisco government. Smaller companies with modest leases, and small commercial landlords, wouldn’t pay the new tax at all.

Chiu originally had proposed an even broader tax, which would have raised more than $35 million. But after the Small Business Commission expressed concerns, he changed the measure, reducing the burden on small business even further. And at this point, Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist at the Office of Economic Analysis, reports that the tax would lead to greater job creation in the private sector (because of the reduction in the payroll tax) as well as greater job creation in the public sector (because of the additional revenue to the city).

It’s the kind of idea that ought to have broad-based support — progressives looking to fund crucial services see it as a way to bring in money, and small businesses ought to see it as a way to cut taxes and create jobs in the sector of the city that most needs economic stimulus.

Unfortunately, the response from small business leaders hasn’t been encouraging. The commission hasn’t taken a stand on the measure; on July 12th, the panel deadlocked 2-2, with one member absent and two slots still vacant (the mayor hasn’t filled them). That lets the big downtown players — the Chamber, the Building Owners and Managers Association, the Committee on JOBS, etc. — in a position to claim that the Chiu proposal is anti-business.

We’ve seen this pattern far to often. Small business groups allow big corporations, which have no interest in the real issues that impact local merchants, stick the little folks out front on political issues. We’ve seen it over the years with public power, commercial rent control, downtown development, and taxes — and it needs to stop.

The Small Business Commission, the Council of District Merchants, all the local community merchant groups, and anyone else who really cares about the interests of small business in San Francisco should support the Chiu measure. It’s a tax plan that’s good for small business. And if the advocates don’t realize that, they’re hurting themselves, the customers, and the city.

Small biz should support Chiu tax plan

David Talbot

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July 20, 2010

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A new proposal to make the flat payroll tax more progressive and exempt more small businesses

EDITORIAL It’s rare to see a fairly conservative city agency, created in part to make it harder for progressives to push measures that might affect business, come down in favor of a new business tax. But the San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis has concluded that the proposal by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to change the local payroll tax and impose a new tax on commercial rents would actually help local businesses, particularly small businesses. The proposal presents a crucial opportunity for progressives to make the case that the Chamber of Commerce and big downtown corporations are not advancing the interests of small businesses — and local merchant groups need to pay attention.

Chiu has taken on a problem that has lingered in San Francisco for decades. The city’s business tax is terribly regressive: Only 10 percent of the companies in town even pay the payroll tax, in part because banks, insurance companies, and financial services firms are exempt under state law. That means the burden falls the heaviest on small and medium-sized companies — the ones that provide most of the net job growth in the city.

The new proposal would make the flat payroll tax more progressive and would exempt more small businesses. It would also raise $28 million more a year for the cash-strapped municipal coffers by taxing commercial rents of more than $60,000 a year.

The commercial rent levy would force the big outfits that now pay no city taxes whatsoever to take on at least some of the burden of financing San Francisco government. Smaller companies with modest leases, and small commercial landlords, wouldn’t pay the new tax at all.

Chiu originally had proposed an even broader tax, which would have raised more than $35 million. But after the Small Business Commission expressed concerns, he changed the measure, reducing the burden on small business even further. And at this point, Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist at the Office of Economic Analysis, reports that the tax would lead to greater job creation in the private sector (because of the reduction in the payroll tax) as well as greater job creation in the public sector (because of the additional revenue to the city).

It’s the kind of idea that ought to have broad-based support — progressives looking to fund crucial services see it as a way to bring in money, and small businesses ought to see it as a way to cut taxes and create jobs in the sector of the city that most needs economic stimulus.

Unfortunately, the response from small business leaders hasn’t been encouraging. The commission hasn’t taken a stand on the measure; on July 12th, the panel deadlocked 2-2, with one member absent and two slots still vacant (the mayor hasn’t filled them). That lets the big downtown players — the Chamber, the Building Owners and Managers Association, the Committee on JOBS, etc. — in a position to claim that the Chiu proposal is anti-business.

We’ve seen this pattern far too often. Small business groups allow big corporations, which have no interest in the real issues that impact local merchants, stick the little folks out front on political issues. We’ve seen it over the years with public power, commercial rent control, downtown development, and taxes — and it needs to stop.

The Small Business Commission, the Council of District Merchants, all the local community merchant groups, and anyone else who really cares about the interests of small business in San Francisco should support the Chiu measure. It’s a tax plan that’s good for small business. And if the advocates don’t realize that, they’re hurting themselves, the customers, and the city.

The martyrdom of Mooney and Billings

David Talbot

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July 16, 2010

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Dick Meister , former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

It was an unusually hot July day in San Francisco. There was a parade on that day in 1916 – a “Preparedness Day” parade organized by local Republican businessmen. It was intended to drum up support for U.S. entry into World War I and embarrass Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, who was running for re-election on a platform that stressed, “He kept us out of war!”

A lot of people supported neither the war nor the parade, however. The opponents particularly included the union organizers who were the radicals of that period – “reds” who were trying to establish the right of unionization in the face of often violent opposition from the business interests who controlled the city and who most assuredly supported the war.

Many thousands of spectators, as many as 100,000 by some accounts, lined the parade route down Market Street, cheering and enthusiastically waving American flags. At precisely 2:06, less than a half-hour after the parade of more than 25,000 marchers had begun, just as contingents from the Grand Army of the Republic and Sons of the American Revolution were passing the crowded corner of Steuart and Market streets. . . Boom!

It was the thunderous blast of a bomb that had either been thrown into the crowd or planted there. The horrific explosion killed 10 bystanders and seriously wounded 40 others.

Within a few hours, the authorities had their culprits. Not surprisingly, all of those arrested as suspects were union organizers. Among them were two men who were especially despised by the city’s virulently anti-labor business establishment — Tom Mooney, 34, a burly Irish-American organizer for the International Molders Union who was one of San Francisco’s most prominent labor activists, and his close friend, slim, short, boyish Warren Billings, a 23-year-old shoe factory worker.

Mooney and Billings were San Francisco’s “most notorious reds,” declared the SF Chamber of Commerce in one of its typically frenzied assessments of those who dared challenge the status quo in which workers were treated as mere chattel.

The others who were arrested were soon freed, but Mooney and Billings were put on trial and eventually found guilty. Mooney was sentenced to death by hanging, Billings to life imprisonment.

There’s absolutely no doubt Mooney and Billings were framed. Federal investigators, investigative newspaper reporters and others proved that beyond any doubt. The city’s famously corrupt district attorney, Charles Frickert, was found to have suppressed evidence that proved the pair’s innocence, joining with corrupt policemen to fabricate evidence that supposedly proved their guilt, and failing to call witnesses who, as he knew, had solid evidence that they were not guilty. Frickert hired other witnesses and coached them to give perjured testimony implicating Mooney and Billings.

Eventually, every major witness confessed to lying to the juries at both the Mooney and Billings trials. Some of them claimed to have seen the men plant the bomb on the day of the explosion, although it turned out the supposed eye-witnesses hadn’t even been in the city at the time.

Some gave their perjured testimony in exchange for such favors as the parole of relatives who were serving prison sentences, others for the pay District Attorney Frickert offered them. All were after the $17,500 reward posted for evidence leading to the conviction of Mooney and Billings.

The judge who presided over Mooney’s trial told California’s governor he had determined through personal investigation that “every single witness who testified against Mooney had lied.” Mooney’s lawyer declared them “the weirdest collection of God-damned liars” he’d ever seen.

A federal fact-finding commission concluded that “there was never any scientific attempt made by either the police or the prosecution to discover the perpetrators of the crime. The investigation was in reality turned over to a private detective, who used his position to cause the arrest of the defendants.”

Fremont Older, the crusading editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, concluded that the authorities “conspired to murder a man with the instruments that the people have provided for bringing about justice. There isn’t a scrap of testimony that wasn’t perjured.”

The cases quickly drew widespread national attention, right up to the White House. President Wilson argued against Mooney’s hanging on grounds that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support his guilt.

It was obvious that the Chamber of Commerce’s so-called Law and Order Committee had played a major role in framing Mooney and Billings as part of the chamber’s drive to change San Francisco’s status as one of the country’s most heavily unionized cities.

Mooney and Billings, of course, had been attempting to enhance that status, in part by helping wage major organizing drives among the city’s vital transit workers and the equally vital employees of the company that supplied the city’s gas and electricity. Which was a very good reason the utility company – Pacific Gas & Electric – hired the private detective cited by federal fact-finders to help District Attorney Frickert and the police fabricate evidence against Mooney and Billings. Not incidentally, Frickert was backed financially by Pacific Gas & Electric in his election campaigns for district attorney.

The convictions prompted protests across the United States and worldwide, much like those raised five years later in behalf of two other union radicals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vinzetti, who were executed in Massachusetts for a murder they clearly did not commit.

The Mooney and Billings case was dubbed internationally as “America’s Dreyfus Case,” a comparison to the famous French case that also drew worldwide protests. The protests stemmed from the rigged conviction of Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 for allegedly attempting to turn over secret military documents to the German government. Although the “Dreyfus Affair,” as it was called, was based on another issue – anti-Semitism – it similarly involved the use of false evidence against an innocent man by powerful authorities.

Protestors in the United States and abroad quickly formed a network of defense committees in behalf of Mooney and Billings, and mounted rallies and other noisy and highly visible public demonstrations.

Freeing the two men became labor’s cause célèbre. Unions everywhere voiced loud and frequent protests, as did all other segments of the left, ranging from liberal to Communist. Eventually, they helped force California authorities to reduce Mooney’s death sentence to life imprisonment, ironically on the basis of evidence that should have freed him.

President Wilson’s request that Mooney be spared was probably the main reason his sentence was commutated, but the heavy pressures of the Mooney-Billings defense committees and the American Federation of Labor, which Wilson most certainly felt, also had much to do with it.

Mooney finally was freed in 1939, twenty-one years later. Culbert Olson, California’s first Democratic governor in 44 years, granted him a full and unconditional pardon. Mooney, said Gov. Olson, was “wholly innocent,” and his conviction “wholly based on perjured testimony.”

Mooney’s release sparked great celebration among his supporters, who had fought so long for his freedom. Thousands paraded up Market Street behind Mooney shortly after his release, the street cleared for them by police, past the site of the explosion 23 years earlier that had sent Mooney to prison.

The next day, Mooney joined a picket line of striking department store employees on Market Street and donated to their cause half of the $10 the state had given him on his release from San Quentin Prison. Mooney sent the other half to Newspaper Guild members who were waging a major strike in Chicago.

Tom Mooney hadn’t much time to enjoy his freedom. His health had been broken in prison and he soon was hospitalized with a serious stomach ailment. He remained in a hospital bed until his death at age 60, less than two years later.

Billings got his freedom a few months after Mooney left San Quentin. Gov. Olson commutated his life sentence to time served – 23 years for a crime that no one really believed he or Mooney had committed. Finally, in 1961, Gov. Edmund G. Brown granted Billings a full pardon. But, as Billings complained, it was granted on grounds that he had been “rehabilitated” rather than because he was innocent.

After leaving prison, Billings married and settled down in San Mateo, working in San Francisco as a watch repairman, a trade he had learned in prison, and later set up his own repair business at home. Billings quickly resumed his labor activism, as a member of the Watchmakers Union executive board and delegate to the San Mateo Labor Council. He was active as well in the anti-Vietnam War movement and various other political, economic and social causes.

I interviewed Billings just before his death in 1972 at age 79. I expected to encounter a bitter, angry old man. Yes, he was old, but his spritely manner belied that basic fact of his life, and he showed absolutely no bitterness over the great injustice that had been done him – none! He talked instead of injustices that were being done to others, and of joining in efforts to help overcome them.

“I don’t have anything against anybody about anything,” Billings told me. “The people who testified against me were after that reward, but it all went to the police who arrested me. I’ve never felt any bitterness, but the fact that the witnesses against me didn’t get any of the reward money should make them bitter.”

Warren K. Billings was a great inspiration to me and others who knew him, and to many who just knew of him. He was a man possessing a spirit that could not be broken by circumstances far more severe than most of us have ever had to endure. A man who would not even raise his voice in anger or bitterness against the terrible injustice that was done him. A man who maintained his convictions through it all. A strong and courageous man, but kind and gentle, and possessed of an incredible measure of tolerance and understanding.

The Preparedness Day bombing has never been solved.

NOTE: For more on the Mooney-Billings case, See “Frame-up” by Curt Gentry, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism book covering all aspects
of the case.

Dick Meister , former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Hotel Fairness Initiative qualifies for fall ballot

Sasha Cuttler

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July 14, 2010

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Hotel Fairness Initiative qualifies for fall ballot

By Brittany Baguio

The Department of Elections has announced that the Hotel Fairness Initiative was approved for the November ballot. Labor and community groups last week turned in 10,544 signatures, a little more than the required 7,168 signatures needed to put an initiative on the ballot. The Department of Elections did a sample of 500 signatures to check the validity and reported that 478 of the 500 signatures sampled were valid, resulting in a 95.6 percent accuracy rate.

The Hotel Fairness Initiative would increase revenue by imposing a 2 percent hotel tax on San Francisco hotel rooms temporarily for 4 years, with an average surcharge of $3 per hotel room per night, and close loopholes that let some visitors avoid paying the hotel tax. The hotel tax is currently 14 percent. According to the Controller’s Office, if the Hotel Fairness Initiative passes, it is expected to raise $25 million a year in revenue.

The hotel tax is one of five measures proposed to help close the budget deficit, which we discuss in more detail in this week’s paper. Mayor Gavin Newsom has also placed a measure of the ballot to also close the loopholes that lets airline employees and those who book hotels online avoid paying hotel taxes, as the Hotel Fairness Initiative would also do, but it includes a provision that would invalidate the hotel tax if his measure gets more votes.

Supporters of the Hotel Fairness Initiative claim that online booking companies and airline companies have been using corporate loopholes that have cost the city about $6 million per year. In total, online booking companies have escaped paying $70 million in hotel taxes through its loophole of taking the hotel tax out of a portion of the money the hotel receives, rather than the total amount the customer pays.

For example, Internet booking companies would charge customers $200 for a room and then pay the hotel $170. Internet booking companies argue that the hotel tax comes from a portion of $170, instead of $200. Similarly, airlines have avoided paying hotel taxes by renting blocks of rooms for its flight crews and claiming that airline companies are protected by the Permanent Resident Exclusion law. This law was originally intended to help the homeless and states that individuals who occupy a room for at least 30 days are tax exempted. However, airlines have been taking advantage of this law by moving different flight crews in and out of their hotel rooms rather than an individual person occupying the room for 30 consecutive days that is implied by the law.

Opponents of the Hotel Fairness Initiative, such as the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Hotel Council, contend that the hotel tax would hurt tourism to San Francisco as well as cause job cuts. In a press release, Steve Falk, President & CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said, “This misguided effort will discourage travel to San Francisco, hurt our city’s largest industry, and eliminate many of the union jobs the Labor Council seeks to protect. Raising city revenue at the expense of hotels and hospitality workers is not the answer to the city’s fiscal problems.”

A Hotel Council press release states that “the Hotel Fairness Initiative will lead to 7.3 jobs lost for every million dollars in revenue gained.” If this is true, about 182 jobs could be lost as a result of this initiative, offset by the city being able to save many public sector jobs and services with the revenue. The hotel industry already fluctuates in the number of positions available as a result of the market. According to California Labor Market Info’s latest data, the average amount of hotel jobs lost per month in 2009 was 143 jobs.

Although the Hotel Council and the Chamber of Commerce claim that the initiative would eliminate jobs, one of the biggest supporters of the hotel tax is UNITE HERE LOCAL 2, a union of hotel workers. UNITE HERE representative Ian Lewis emphasized that opponents of the issue are conveniently ignoring the lack of fairness in current hotel booking practices. “Hotel workers live in San Francisco,” Lewis told the Guardian, “We’re taxpayers like everyone else. We are in a severe budget crisis and everyone needs to carry their fair share.”

Community groups, retirees, and hospital workers all volunteered their time to collect signatures supporting the Hotel Fairness Initiative. Community groups such as UNITE HERE collected 1700 signatures, Keep the Arboretum Free collected 1000, and a collection of nonprofit groups collected more than 4000. With the efforts of these community groups, the coalition was able to collect an estimated 15,000 signatures.

Family health advocate for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Bobbi Lopez, said she found that those who signed the petition saw the hotel tax as a necessary step in closing the budget deficit, “They understood that the necessity of fighting the cuts, particularly the cuts to MUNI, to parks, and to hospitals,” Lopez told us, “I think that they were getting the idea that in desperate budget times, we need a temporary solution and long term solution and that’s exactly what the Hotel Fairness Initiative is.”

Community groups remain optimistic that this grass roots effort will pass. Brenda Barrows, a health care provider at San Francisco General Hospital, told the Guardian, “My hope is that in November it passes and the city’s financial situation gets better so that people who live in the city don’t have to suffer and also people who work for the city don’t have to suffer.”

Lopez told us she thinks that the initiative will pass if there is an ongoing effort on the issue. “We want to remind folks that this is just the beginning and now we have to embark on a long term campaign,” Lopez told us, “so it’s really about sustaining the energy that we had on June 1 when we kicked off and reminding folks that its going to necessitate all the same volunteers to work together and make it reality.”

Bad faith

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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July 13, 2010

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steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his business allies are actively trying to sabotage the various revenue measures that have been put forth by the labor movement and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, employing deceptive rhetoric, sneaky tactics, and a refusal to bargain in good faith.

In fact, Newsom — the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor — is so averse to supporting anything that could be called a “tax” that he rejected a hard-won compromise measure created by powerful developers, affordable housing advocates, a pro-business think tank, the building trades, and his own directors of housing and economic development.

Just as that story was breaking in the New York Times (produced by Bay Citizen) on July 9, members of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee discovered that Newsom’s proposed ballot measure to close loopholes in the city’s hotel tax that favored airline employees and online travel companies — a widely supported change, but one worth just $6 million per year — contains language that would nullify any increases in the hotel tax. Earlier in the week, labor unions turned in signatures on an initiative to increase the hotel tax by 2 percent, which would bring in more than $30 million per year.

“This poison pill is an intentionally deceptive, underhanded move,” Gabriel Haaland, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which sponsored the hotel tax, told us. “It’s so frustrating. It’s not even a good faith fight. He’s trying to create confusion and fool the voters. If our measure passes fair and square, it should be implemented.”

Meanwhile, Newsom and business groups have been attacking a reform measure by Board President David Chiu that would make the currently flat payroll tax more progressive, exempt more small businesses from paying it, and create a commercial rent tax to spread the tax burden more widely than the 10 percent of businesses who now pay tax to the city.

Critics complained that the measure would hurt local businesses — but that’s just not true. The city’s Office of Economic Analysis concluded that Chiu’s original proposal would have no effect on private sector jobs and would generate $34 million annually for the city, preserving some government jobs and spending.

Then Chiu amended the measure to spare even more small businesses. Now the OEA says that the measure would actually create private sector jobs — and still bring $28 million in to the city. Yet Newsom and the business community are still withholding their support.

This trio of Machiavellian moves comes just a week after Newsom pulled out of budget negotiations with board progressives concerning about $40 million in board add-backs to programs that Newsom proposed to cut after they wouldn’t agree to his precondition that they withdraw unrelated measures proposed for the November ballot, such as splitting appointments to the Rent, Recreation and Park, and Municipal Transportation Agency boards and requiring police officers to do foot patrols.

The series of events has led many progressives to say that conservative ideological blinders — a knee-jerk opposition to anything that saves government jobs and services or that Republicans might criticize — is the only logical explanation for the intransigent stance adopted downtown and by Newsom.

“It’s ideological. It’s not economic, and it’s not even political,” said Calvin Welch, the affordable housing activist who helped negotiate the transfer tax compromise with developer Oz Erickson, San Francisco Planning Urban Research Association director Gabriel Metcalf, Mayor’s Office of Housing Director Doug Shoemaker, and others.

That measure would have created a transfer tax on sales of properties over $875,000 and generated approximately $50 million annually for affordable housing (funds that were drastically reduced in Newsom’s proposed 2010-11 budget) while cutting in half the current requirements and fees on market-rate developers to create below-market-rate units. The plan would have stimulated both types of housing and created desperately needed construction work — an approach those involved called an elegant solution to several problems.

“To me, this was a win-win, solving two problems that are each a big deal,” Metcalf told us. “I don’t know what his reasons were for not supporting it. I was surprised.”

But Welch said, “It collapsed straight up because the mayor didn’t want to support a tax.” Although Newsom told the Times it was because there wasn’t broad enough consensus yet, “the mayor’s reason is whole-cloth bullshit,” Welch said, noting the role of the Mayor’s Office in brokering the deal. “The mayor walks away from it because everyone wasn’t in the room? Well, it’s your room, motherfucker. Show some leadership.”

Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker refused to discuss these issues by phone, responding to our written inquires by noting that Newsom opposes taxes and thinks the best way to address budget deficits are privatizing city services and pension reform (although he opposes Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s initiative, the only pension reform measure on the fall ballot).

“The mayor is opposed to the Board of Supervisors’ proposals to increase taxes because they’re not needed to balance the budget and they will strangle our still young economic recovery,” Winnicker wrote, refusing to answer follow-up questions or support a statement about Chiu’s measure that the OEA concludes is not accurate.

Like many political observers of all stripes, those from downtown and progressive circles, Welch criticized Newsom for his lack of engagement with city business and its long-term fiscal outlook, contrasting him with former Mayor Willie Brown, who met regularly with former Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano even as the two ran a bitter campaign for mayor against one another in 1999. “They dealt with the city’s business like two adults who cared about the city,” he said.

Welch acknowledged that there was still work to be done building political support for the transfer tax measure. He and other progressives would have had to win over city employee unions who wouldn’t like the budget set-aside aspect, and Erickson and Metcalf would need to placate some of their downtown allies who oppose taxes on ideological grounds. But given how downtown groups are behaving right now, that might not have been an easy sell.

“There are members of the small business community that are averse to any taxes,” said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business and staffer to the Small Business Commission, which was withholding a recommendation on the Chiu measure but planned to meet again to consider it July 12 (look for an update on the sfbg.com Politics blog). She said the small business community is having tough times and “they are just not sensitive to keeping city workers employed.”

Larger commercial interests are being even more forceful in opposing the revenue measures. While a parade of workers, social service providers, and progressive activists testifying at the July 9 Budget Committee hearing implored supervisors to place all the proposed revenue measures on the ballot, representatives from the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce were the only two speakers urging supervisors to drop the measures and focus instead on creating private sector jobs.

“You’re trying to create a little revenue here and it’s not going to work,” said Ken Cleaveland, director of BOMA SF, arguing that big banks and financial services companies — entities exempt from the payroll tax that Chiu is hoping to target with the commercial rent tax — will buy their buildings to avoid paying the tax. “They aren’t going to create more jobs and they really aren’t going to create more revenue.”

Yet Chiu noted that it was the business community and fiscal conservatives who pushed to create the Office of Economic Analysis, whose work they have regularly used to attack progressive legislation. Now that the office has concluded that a piece of progressive legislation is good for the local economy, Chiu told Cleaveland and the Chamber spokesperson Rob Black at the hearing, “I ask you to respect the work this office has done.”

Black said the Chamber board will consider Chiu’s amended legislation, but said businesses are in no mood to help the city. “How many times have you gone to your neighborhood merchant and had them say, ‘Gee, my rent’s too cheap’?<0x2009>” he said during his testimony.

Yet Chiu said landlords of small tenants (those paying less than $65,000 in rent per year) are exempt from the rent tax and only 26 percent of SF businesses would pay any city business tax under his plan. “I hope the mayor will support this proposal and the business community will give it a good look,” Chiu said as the hearing ended.

At the beginning of the hearing, Chiu framed the dire situation facing San Francisco, citing Controller’s Office figures showing this year’s $500 million budget deficit (out of a $6 billion total budget) will be followed by a $700 million deficit next year and a $800 million gap the following budget cycle as a result of a deep structural budget imbalance.

“We have budget deficits as far as the eye can see,” Chiu said at the hearing. “We have to consider measures that will provide more stable sources of revenue.”

He also noted that city employee unions have agreed to give back about $250 million in salary and had their ranks reduced by about 2,000 workers in the last two years. So he and the other progressive supervisors say it’s time for the rest of San Francisco to help address the problem.

“We, as a city, should not be trying to balance this budget simply through cutting,” Sup. David Campos said.

Sup. John Avalos, the committee chair, amended his transfer tax measure in the wake of Newsom’s rejection of the deal by making it a simple 2 percent tax on properties that sell for more than $5 million, and 2.5 percent tax on properties over $10 million. He estimates it will bring in about $25 million per year from the city’s wealthiest corporations and landlords.

“That’s who we’re socking it to,” Avalos told us, saying he was disappointed the compromise fell through. “The amendment is going to be more progressive than what was originally planned.”

Even Sup. Sean Elsbernd, a strong fiscal conservative who announced early in the hearing, “You want to do that [balance future budgets] by adding taxes, but I want to do it through ongoing service cuts,” later told the Guardian that he was intrigued by the amendments Avalos and Chiu made to their measures and has not yet taken a position on them.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is also sponsoring a measure to increase the city’s tax on parking lot operators from 25 percent to 35 percent, the first change to that tax in 30 years, and will include valet parking for the first time. The measure would bring in up to $24 million per year, and OEA analysis shows it would decrease the number of cars trips by 1.3 percent, another benefit.

SFMTA supports the measure, with board member Cameron Beach testifying that the money will be used to subsidize Muni and “it links the use of private automobiles and is consistent with the city’s transit-first policy.” Mirkarimi, who chairs the Transportation Authority, also has proposed a $10 local vehicle license fee surcharge that would bring in another $5 million per year for Muni.

All the revenue measures require six votes by the full Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to consider them July 20, after which they would need a simple majority approval by voters in November to take effect.

The mayor has the authority to directly place measures on the ballot, so the committee hearing on his hotel tax loophole measure and a $39 million general obligation bond that he’s proposing to create a revolving loan fund for private sector seismic improvements were mere formalities, so supervisors criticized aspects of each but were unable to make changes.

Avalos even grudgingly acknowledged the hotel tax poison pill was an effective way to kill that revenue source, saying at the hearing, “This is very smart. I don’t agree with it, but it’s very smart.”

Haaland was less charitable, criticizing a provision designed to confuse voters. “This kind of move means both measures won’t pass because now we have to oppose [Newsom’s measure],” he said, criticizing the mayor for running away from the hard decisions facing the city. “He won’t be around next year, when we have an even bigger structural budget deficit, to clean up this mess. Absent new revenue sources, this city starts to fall apart.”

Put on a happy face

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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June 22, 2010

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arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Twenty-first-century post-9/11 gay America doesn’t get a makeover in Paul Rudnick’s new collection of short plays, it goes out for one. Rudnick (The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told; Valhalla) surveys the state of the gay nation through four small, broadly comical vignettes in three far-flung American locales — all slouching toward Manhattan — and finds it taking itself and everything else far too seriously.

Admittedly, this is an opportune moment for some accounting. The Proposition 8 battle rages its way toward the Supreme Court; the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy looks set to become a quaint anachronism; and in another cunning argument for atheism, the bishop of Essen, Germany — hip-deep in an ongoing clerical sexual abuse scandal — has just declared that all gays are bound for hell.

Time sashays on. But The New Century, taking its local bow in director George Maguire’s sporadically effective production at New Conservatory Theatre Center, already feels a bit stale, despite dependable one-liners from its witty playwright.

In the first playlet, "Pride and Joy," well-to-do Jewish mother Helene Nadler (Marie O’Donnell, in a smart skirt and blouse and a less well-fitting New York accent) addresses us from the linoleum floor of a school auditorium. Backed by a banner whose utter inclusiveness demands the most estranging acronym, Helene relates her determination to be "the most loving mother of all time" in the face of three children whose homosexual orientations range from the hum-drum to the downright pootré ("In this house we use the toilet," she tells son David, "not a friend from Tribeca!"). The spirit of can-do parenting achieves a kind of crescendo when David (Seth Michael Anderson) briefly appears in full BDSM attire.

"Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach" opens on the eponymous late-night cable-access flaneur (a solid Patrick Michael Dukeman) in an explosion of pastel finery. He’s a former Manhattanite forced into South Florida exile, we are told, for being "too gay." True to form, Mr. Charles flounces about in unabashed embrace of his self-proclaimed title as the last of the true queens. Answering viewer letters, he reads, "Mr. Charles, do you enjoy gay theater?" and responds, with perhaps too much truth, "I am gay theater!" Assistant Shane (Anderson) brings the beefcake to this on-air party, whose point again has to do with the embrace of radical — if heavily stereotyped — difference over conformity to the dreary American norm.

"Crafty," the third playlet, offers yet another angle, this one from a not so with-it but terribly handy mother from Decatur, Ill., (a sharp, genial Deborah Rucker) addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce with her eye-poking assortment of craft treasures. "Crafts allow me to express myself," she says sweetly, "to create something worth dusting!" As she reminisces about her gay son Hank, a talented Broadway designer long dead of AIDS, we find an expansive note of acceptance peaking out from an unlikely assortment of tea cozies and sock monkeys.

All points and characters converge in the eponymous closer, set in a Manhattan maternity ward. There, Mr. Charles trains his "gay ray" on the next generation, and Shane describes an epiphany at the site of the old WTC brought on by the Century 21 sign beaming in neon above it. To Shane, the discount chain is like Prozac with parking, offering a way out of everyone’s funk. "It’s like if Patti LuPone were a store," he enthuses. That image of a new material neon dawn rising over the emptiness of ground zero is probably about right. But is it really so great or new?

THE NEW CENTURY

New Conservatory Theatre Center

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (through July 11), $22–$40

25 Van Ness, SF

www.nctcsf.org

Following Recology’s $$$ to Environment Commission and DCCC

Mary Magee

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June 18, 2010

7

Following Recology’s $$$ to Environment Commission and DCCC

If you’ve been looking for a financial connection between the city’s tentative decision to award the next landfill disposal contract to Recology, which plans to dispose of our trash in Yuba County, then you’ll be interested in this campaign finance item: Because records show that Recology contributed $5,000 last year to SF Forward, a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce political action committee, which also got Money from Bechtel, Medjool, PG&E, Charles Schwab, and Shorenstein Realty.

Recology Vice President and Group Manager John Legnitto is Chamber’s Chair Elect.

In the last two years, the Chamber contributed $10,000 to Plan C, a political action committee that advocates for more condo conversions and less tenants’ rights.And Plan C gave Commission of the Environment President Matt Tuchow $3,300 for his failed 2010 Democratic CCC bid.

So, while the transactions were legal, with the money laundered twice in between, these dollar connections will probably have folks opposed to the city’s plan to dispose of its waste in Recology’s landfill in Yuba County asking if this explains why Tuchow decided to limit public comment to only one minute when folks wanted to voice concerns at a March 23 hearing at the Environment Commission about an alleged lack of fairness and transparency in the decision to award the contract to Recology.

Especially those folks who drove three hours from Yuba County, which is where Recology proposes to send our trash. And folks who helped negotiate the city’s current trash disposal contract and were shocked that the city would set a one-minute time limit on what they claim is a $1 billion contract, once you factor in the cost of transportation, new trash processing facilities and an as yet unbuilt rail spur that Recology needs inYuba County to transfer trash from the Union Pacific line to its landfill in Wheatland,

Tuchow, who works in the Global Compliance and Ethics Division of McKesson Corporation in San Francisco, had not returned calls as of blog post time, but if and when he does, I’ll be sure to post an update here.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t look as if Recology’s bucks and/or Mayor Gavin Newsom’s powergrabbing antics, are going to be able to help shoehorn Tuchow onto the DCCC, even in light of Newsom’s newly hatched plan for dominion for the following reasons:

1. Results from the June 8 election show that Tuchow was fourth failed runner up in the DCCC 12th district. (Milton Marks, Sup. Eric Mar, Melanie Nutter, Arlo Smith, Connie O’Connor, Tom A. Hsieh, Jane Morrison, Mary Jung, Sandra Lee Fewer, Michael Bornstein, Sup. John Avalos and Bill Fazio were the top vote getters to win seats, beating out Larry Yee, Jake McGoldrick, Hene Kelly and then Tuchow, in that order.)

2.. It’s not clear if Newsom’s plan for the DCCC is even legal.

3. Even if Newsom’s plan survives a legal challenge, it’s not clear that the law would have the retroactive effect necessary to oust Mar and Avalos.

4. And even if it did, under state law, DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin would get to appoint folks to fill those vacancies,
“This is about clean money and good government,” Newsom spokesman Tony Winnicker told reporters of Newsom’s DCCC plan.

So, let’s hope the Mayor’s Office applies the same standards when it comes to opening the landfill disposal contract bids this summer and shining light on the money that’s influencing the city’s garbage disposal contract.

Meanwhile, Peskin, who was reached by cell phone somewhere near Moab, in Utah, where he’s taking his annual camping and hiking trip with his wife, told the Guardian that Newsom “is not thinking very far ahead” with his latest dominion scheme.

Welcome to Peter Darbee’s world

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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June 11, 2010

7

“The only thing worse than a thug is an ineffective thug,” a source, who has closely tracked Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s activities for years, told us yesterday. “And that’s what [PG&E CEO] Peter Darbee is revealing himself to be.”

That’s pretty harsh, and isn’t just some hot air blown off by a disgruntled employee or a customer angry about a power shutoff. PG&E’s problem now is that since Darbee set out on the political adventure known as Proposition 16, this kind of characterization isn’t so far off from the sentiments publicly expressed by a number of powerful figures that the company must continue to work with.

California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey wrote in an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News that, “Pure and simple, Proposition 16 is a clever, brazen, buzzword-driven effort by one company to manipulate the California Constitution to protect its current monopoly.” Peevey isn’t exactly known as a PG&E hater –- green-power advocates have complained to the Guardian in the past that they think he’s too willing to honor the company’s requests. But Prop 16 clearly irked Peevey, who presides over the commission that decides whether PG&E will be allowed to raise rates.

Half a dozen state senators, including Senate pro tem Darrell Steinberg, rebuked PG&E over Prop 16, writing in a formal letter in December that it “calls into question your company’s integrity.”

On June 9, the day after voters shot down Prop 16, PG&E shares dropped 2.2 percent — the greatest decline of electricity utilities in the S&P 500 — possibly signaling a fluctuation in shareholder confidence. The Los Angeles Times ran a story pointing out (as the Guardian did) that the majority of counties that voted “no” on Prop 16 overlap with PG&E’s service territory, suggesting that the initiative dubbed by opponents as “PG&E’s power grab” was roundly rejected by its own customers.

Yet amid all the signs that PG&E had gone too far, despite all the indications that the utility had alienated regulators and political allies and royally pissed off its customers to boot, CEO Peter Darbee was patting himself on the back. While others were beginning to see Darbee as an unaccountable power-monger, Darbee evidently regarded himself as a fearless, courageous leader.

In a memo obtained by the Guardian that the CEO sent out to PG&E employees the day after Prop 16 was defeated, Darbee compares PG&E’s $46 million, failed quest to alter the state constitution through Prop 16 to the company’s decision to withdraw from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The utility won the respect of environmentalists when it dumped the national business organization last fall, denouncing its do-nothing approach to climate change.

Darbee suggests that PG&E’s willingness to take a stand in both instances is evidence of strong corporate leadership, but it’s an odd comparison to make. As Steinberg and other senators pointed out in their December letter, Prop 16 would’ve served to limit renewable energy development, not facilitate it. “It is unacceptable for a company that is falling behind in meeting state adopted goals for clean energy to impede the efforts of others who would attain those goals through innovative means,” Steinberg wrote.

Without further ado, here’s what Darbee had to say after Prop 16 went down. The essay, which was submitted as an opinion piece to the San Francisco Chronicle, is prefaced with a note to employees.

——————————————————————————————–
From: A Message From Peter Darbee
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 2:18 PM
To: All PG&E Mail Recipients; All PGE Corp Employees
Subject: After Election Day, A Reflection On Leadership

To All Employees:

As we look forward after the culmination of a hard campaign on Proposition 16, I wanted to share with you a short opinion essay that we submitted today to the San Francisco Chronicle. It addresses head on some of the questions we have all seen about PG&E’s stance on tough issues-from Proposition 16 to climate change, or any number of other examples many of us can no doubt recall. It makes clear that, in each case, our focus is on leadership, even-or maybe especially-when it requires tremendous courage.

I believe passionately that this is one of the aspects of our character that sets PG&E apart from many other companies. That’s been true throughout our history, and it’s even more true today.

As is always the case, the paper may or may not choose to print this piece. We hope they will. It’s an important and timely message for our customers. But it’s just as important and timely for all of us as employees. And, whether it appears in print or not, it’s a message we can all take heart in and carry forward proudly to others.

________________________________

The Price of Leadership

By Peter Darbee, Chairman, CEO and President, PG&E Corporation

Prime Minister Tony Blair said a few years ago, “I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the price of leadership. And the cost of conviction.”

I was reminded of that observation this spring, as Pacific Gas and Electric Company came under widespread criticism for its support of Proposition 16, a statewide initiative to give people the right to vote on proposals to create risky new public agencies to provide electric power.

Many of those who criticized our support of Proposition 16 have long applauded our leadership at the state and national level on environmental issues and as a clean-energy provider. At the state level, PG&E helped champion passage of AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

PG&E also supported California’s aggressive vehicle emissions standards, opposing efforts by a national business organization to overturn them.

At the national level, we were instrumental in forging an historic alliance of major utilities, other large businesses, national environmental groups and labor unions to support comprehensive and effective clean-energy and climate change legislation in Congress. The work of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, of which PG&E has been a major contributor, is widely credited with inspiring major congressional initiatives on this vital issue.

While PG&E has been frequently honored for its environmental performance and commitment, including Newsweek magazine’s ranking as the country’s greenest utility in 2009, our environmental leadership has aroused controversy as well.

Last year, in a widely discussed move, PG&E withdrew its membership in a national business organization over fundamental differences on the need for climate change legislation. While a number of other major businesses followed our lead, others questioned why we broke ranks to support actions that could increase energy costs. We have explained, without apology, the science behind our stand and our careful choice of policies to utilize market forces to minimize costs.

Some of our longtime supporters, who decried Proposition 16, believe the PG&E they once admired lost its way somewhere along the line. I would tell them that their disagreement with us-which we respect-is the price of our leadership on important issues of the day. By staking out bold positions, we of course invite controversy. But the alternative is to be cowed by fear of criticism into ducking our leadership opportunities and responsibilities. Surely our society needs more leadership, not less.

After a lively debate, the voters have now spoken on Proposition 16 and we respect the outcome. We hope our critics will equally respect our willingness to participate in the system and engage on the important issues of the day. Through mutual engagement and mutual dialog, we can improve our company, our communities and our country.

Newsom’s fiscal conservatism undermines his agenda

Sasha Cuttler

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June 9, 2010

15

Newsom’s fiscal conservatism undermines his agenda

Gavin Newsom’s nomination for lieutenant governor places many San Franciscans in an uncomfortable position, one that was illustrated well by the victory speech that he gave last night just as our story our on his latest budget – in which he proudly rejected taxes in favor of deep spending cuts and future budget deficits — was coming off the presses.

Even though most San Francisco progressives don’t like our fiscally conservative mayor, few of us would rather vote for his Republican challenger, Abel Maldonado, despite the fact that this moderate Latino is actually fairly close to Newsom ideologically. “We don’t want to underestimate the challenge we have. There’s never been a moderate Latino on the statewide ballot,” Newsom pollster Ben Tulchin told me last night.

SF Labor Council President Tim Paulson was at the Newsom event gritting his teeth as he talked about the opportunity progressives now have to work with “a mayor of San Francisco we have issues with,” noting that, “What I find interesting in the easy win for Newsom is how there is going to be a real campaign around this man. It could establish a narrative for what California is about.”

And he’s right, but the danger is if Newsom sticks with his inflexible and longstanding “no new taxes” stance then the narrative could be that neither major political party’s top nominees are willing to tap millionaires, oil companies, and other entities that can afford it in order to fund education, health care, and the development of a green economy, which Newsom said are his top priorities. That and “jobs,” by which he means only private sector jobs, based on his past statements and actions and current failure to support new tax measures.

But Newsom doesn’t seem to see the glaring contradiction in his political philosophy, which he illustrated as he told a story about the potential to achieve strong economic growth while aggressively pursuing solutions to global warming and other environmental challenges, which he and progressives both seem to believe are not just possible, but “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Newsom noted that the only four wealthy countries that signed the Kyoto Protocols and met their greenhouse gas reduction goals – Sweden, Denmark, United Kingdom, and Germany – have similar economic strategies. “All four of these countries had three things in common vis-a-vis the United States: Lower unemployment, higher growth, and lower income disparities,” he said.

Yet Newsom left out another key commonality that was even more central to their success, and big reason for two of Newsom’s three items: All have far higher tax rates than the U.S. and a more vibrant, respected, and well-funded public sector that was able to guide that economic transformation and ensure a smart, equitable distribution of the country’s wealth – something Newsom has been overtly hostile to as mayor and while campaigning for statewide office.

Nonetheless, he continued, “What’s interesting about these four countries is they dramatically shifted their framework in terms of economic growth and economic development towards a cleaner and greener energy future and they were rewarded with higher growth and lower unemployment. I think that’s suggestive, in the context of this debate.”

So do I, suggestive of the need for Newsom (and Jerry Brown) to finally realize it’s going to take money and a rejuvenated public sector to meet his stated goals for education, health care, and the environment. In San Francisco, his reluctance to challenge the Chamber of Commerce fallacy that taxes kill growth has left a legacy of dangerously diminished social services and increasing budget deficits running indefinitely into the future.

But the four countries that Newsom claims to admire don’t think that way. They don’t boast of cutting social services while proposing even more business tax cuts, and they don’t say things like, “It’ll take an entrepreneurial look at solving problems in this state.” He’s sounds like Meg Whitman and the Republicans.

What we need is the other Gavin Newsom, the one who last night also said, “Now is the time for serious problem solving in California….It is a time for California to fundamentally change.”

But first, Mr. Mayor, you’re going to need to embrace a few fundamental changes of your own.

Should Antonini recuse himself from Lennar vote?

Mary Magee

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June 3, 2010

1

Should Antonini recuse himself from Lennar vote?

As a Newsom appointee, Planning Commissioner Michael Antonini is expected to be a key vote today in favor of Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan at Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard.

And then there’s the fact that he wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Business Times in December 18, 2009, suggesting that business, civic, labor and government leaders can keep the 49ers in town by “joining forces to assist in needed repairs and improvements to Candlestick Park and to expedite development of the Candlestick Point Hunters Point Shipyard, a project that features a “state-of-the art,” 69,000-seat football stadium.”
(The full text of Antonini’s op-ed is included at the end of this post to put his words into full context.)

But Antonini’s cheerleading has got some folks questioning his impartiality when it comes to the decisions that members of the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions will make today around certifying the project’s Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) and adopting related environmental findings.

In a June 2 letter to Planning Commission president Ron Miguel, Arthur Feinstein of the Sierra Club, Mike Lynes of the Golden Gate Audubon Society, Jennifer Clary of San Francisco Tomorrow and Jaron Browne of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) claim that “Commissioner Antonini has clearly prejudged the proposed project and become a strong advocate for locating a football stadium for the 49ers at the Hunters Point site as part of this project.”

“He has publicly urged others to support that stadium and cannot impartially review the record before him to determine whether the EIR is adequate, accurate and objective and whether adequate measures are required to protect the environment,” the foursome continue.

Noting that he could have chosen to sign the December 2009 op-ed as a Member of the Republican County Central Committee, Feinstein, Lynes, Clary and Browne observe that Antonini “ instead identified himself in the capacity where the law requires him to act impartially – as a Planning Commissioner.”

With others arguing that Antonini’s right to express his opinion is protected by the First Amendment, and Antonini planning to read a rebuttal into the record at 1 p.m. today, it sounds like there’ll be plenty of drama at today’s hearing.

Antonini’s Op Ed in San Francisco Business Times

Friday, December 18, 2009
Business leaders can save the Niners
San Francisco Business Times – by Michael J. Antonini

“The 49ers are deeply and historically identified with San Francisco. San Franciscans Vic and Tony Morabito founded the team in 1946, many years before the Giants moved from New York and the Warriors from Philadelphia.

Hence business, civic, labor and government leaders are joining forces to assist in needed repairs and improvements to Candlestick Park and to expedite development of the Candlestick Point Hunters Point Shipyard, a project that features a “state-of-the art,” 69,000-seat football stadium. Leaders from the Committee on Jobs, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Recreation and Park and others are asking businesses and individuals to help with funding of improvements at Candlestick in return for advertising. These improvements could translate into increased revenue for the contributor, the city and the team. Replacement of aging seats and a highly visible new luxury section are two concepts being studied.

Naming rights to Candlestick Park is an attractive opportunity for a company or an entity to gain nationwide exposure and local acclaim — and, perhaps, position itself to be a key contributor when a new stadium is built at Hunters Point. No new stadium can be built anywhere without significant private investment, in addition to $100 million assured from Lennar Corp. as a precondition of development rights and the amount which the 49ers ownership would invest.

On Thursday, Dec. 17, the San Francisco Planning Commission was to hear comment on the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Candlestick Point Hunters Point Shipyard Plan. Because this plan features many diverse uses, particularly huge amounts of housing, funding is being rapidly obtained for greatly improved transit and traffic access.

San Francisco must avoid the errors of the past, when we failed to build an arena for indoor sporting, major conventions and entertainment events. Such a facility could have brought huge amounts of revenue to San Francisco businesses.

Leaders have twice stepped up to save the San Francisco Giants. One would expect no less from our leaders when dealing with our home grown, five- time Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers!

Michael J. Antonini is a planning commissioner for the City and County of San Francisco.”

Labor’s small business friends

David Talbot

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June 2, 2010

0

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outspoken foes of organized labor like to claim that small business owners are as anti-union as the notoriously anti-union Chamber and its big business members. But don’t you believe it.

Unfortunately, plenty of people do believe it. They accept the conventional wisdom that employers, large or small, don’t like unions in general and especially don’t like their employees joining or organizing unions to represent them in determining their working conditions.

Certainly many employers resist unionization. But what the Chamber of Commerce and its corporate friends don’t tell you is that many employers welcome unions for a variety of pragmatic as well as philosophical reasons.

Listen, for instance, to a small business owner in Virginia who was included in a representative sampling of some 1,200 small business owners and self-employed workers who were surveyed recently by American Rights at Work, a respected labor advocacy group:

“When workers form unions, they can secure benefits and rights in the workplace, including a decent wage and health care. They have economic and job stability. Unions lift workers and workers lift the economy. It’s as simple as that.”

The survey included much more that you’re not likely to hear from the Chamber of Commerce. “Unions,” said one small businessman, “help level the playing field for companies that voluntarily treat their employees right and compensate them fairly, When companies compete on equal footing, consumers fare better.”

Among the many other contradictions of the Chamber of Commerce ‘s anti-union line was this from a small businesswoman in Boulder, Colo.:

“The free market system is driven b y workers’ productivity and unions tend to produce more educated and well-trained – and therefore productive – employees. When competitors prevent their employees from forming a union, it is usually a pretty good indication that they are also underpaying their employees. That hurts our business and others in the industry because it allows them to unfairly undercut the market.”

Kimberly Freeman Brown, executive director of American Rights at Work, noted that unionization not only helps individual businesses and their employees, but also “makes the free market system stronger by increasing consumer purchasing power – which is good for their businesses’ bottom line.”

Eighty percent of the small business owners surveyed by Brown’s organization agreed. Other significant findings:

* About half of those surveyed expressed “strong concern that unions have been weakened so much our economy has actually been hurt.”

* More than half agreed that “strong unions make the free market system stronger.”

* Almost 60 percent “strongly agreed that labor unions are necessary to protect the working person.”

* Nearly 70 percent said it was very important for their businesses that Congress “enact legislation that rewards employers who respect their workers’ right to join a union.”

* More than 70 percent agreed that “a good business person can make a profit and respect their workers’ choice to form a union.”

* Eighty-two percent “strongly agreed that it’s morally wrong for employers to fire or threaten employees for wanting to form a union.”

So, despite conventional anti-union wisdom, many small businesses are quite aware that unionization benefits them, their employees and society in general.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its anti-union members and allies know that, but their interest is not in benefitting those who do the work of society. Their interest, of course, is in maximizing the profits of big business.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

The hidden zinger in Prop. 14

David Talbot

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June 1, 2010

11

By Richard Winger

OPINION Proposition 14, a June 8 ballot measure, would mandate that all candidates for Congress and state office appear on the same June ballot, and that all voters use that ballot. Only the two candidates who got the highest vote totals could run in November. Even write-ins would be banned in November for Congress and state offices.

Prop. 14 also has a hidden zinger in it that would remove the Peace and Freedom and Libertarian parties from the ballot. But so far only one daily newspaper has mentioned it — the San Francisco Chronicle, in a March 11 story by Wyatt Buchanan. The state ballot pamphlet says nothing about this particularly nasty detail of Prop. 14.

California has six recognized political parties: Democratic, Republican, American Independent, Green, Libertarian, and Peace and Freedom. The parties remain ballot-qualified either by polling 2 percent of the vote for any statewide race in a midterm year (all parties get a free ride in presidential years) or by maintaining registration equal to 1 percent of the last gubernatorial vote.

In practice, it’s far easier for the smaller parties to meet the first test. The Peace and Freedom Party has 58,000 registered members, and the Libertarian Party has 85,000 registered members. But these parties always meet the 2 percent vote test. Minor parties typically draw far more votes than they have registered members.

The problem is that Prop. 14 eliminates, in practice, the 2 percent vote test. Under Prop. 14, no party officially has any nominees for any office except president and vice-president. And since minor party candidates almost never place first or second in the June primary, minor party members would never be able to run for statewide office in November. And, the catch is that only the November vote counts for meeting the 2 percent vote test.

Prop. 14 also says that members of unqualified parties will not be permitted to list their party label on the June ballot.

The real irony is that the big newspapers of California know about this problem with Prop. 14 but refuse to mention it. That’s ironic because back in 1981, when Democrats in the Legislature wanted to toughen the ballot-access requirements, the big newspapers of California denounced that bill with full fury. Forty of California’s biggest newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations editorialized against that measure.

This year the Los Angeles Times (which led the charge for minor-party access in 1981) refused to mention that Prop. 14 has the same characteristic as that bill, only worse. The Times has rejected at least 10 op-eds submitted by various individuals in the last year that mentioned this problem. None of the Los Angeles Times stories about Prop. 14 have mentioned it. None of the political columnists for that newspaper have mentioned it.

Prop. 14 is supported by the Chamber of Commerce, the for-profit health insurance companies, the for-profit hospitals, and various multimillionaires, and the Yes on 14 campaign has a huge war chest. Why won’t the L.A. Times even mention this flaw in the measure? Who are the big dailies afraid of offending?

Richard Winger is the editor of Ballot Access News.

PG&E has no friends

Zelda Bronstein

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May 26, 2010

2

The full-page ad on the back of the front section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle shows exactly how far PG&E has fallen in its political fortunes.

The Yes on 16 ad lists all endorsers of this godawful ballot measure — and other than the Chamber of Commerce, there’s not one San Francisco politician, community group, or organization on the list. Not one.

In fact, there’s not one statewide elected official. Nobody wants to carry PG&E’s water any more (unless you count the California Republican Party and the San Bernadino County Tea Party, two listed endorsers who will no doubt sway a lot of votes in the Bay Area).

That’s a big change. In past public-power campaigns in San Francisco, the giant utility was able to call in its chits and find a handful of politicians (who had been elected in part with PG&E campaign money) and community groups (who paid their bills in part with PG&E grants) willing to be PG&E shills. Now: Nobody.

Part of that is a reflection of just how bad Prop. 16 is — not one significant newspaper in the state has endorsed it, and most have blasted it. But it also shows how badly CEO Peter Darbee and his minions have alienated the California political world. “Nobody remembers them acting so outrageously,” State Senator Mark Leno told me. “They’ve just gone down a whole new path, and Peter Darbee is leading the charge.”

And if Prop. 16 goes down, PG&E’s fortunes will just fall further.

UC, CSU chiefs need to quit the Chamber of Commerce board

Zelda Bronstein

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May 18, 2010

1

UC, CSU chiefs need to quit the Chamber of Commerce board

The California Chamber of Commerce is one of the most consistently right-wing organizations in the state, particularly on economic issues. The Chamber’s against pretty much all taxes and supports pretty much all cuts in government spending.

So why are the heads of the three largest public educational institutions in California, the University of California, California State University, and the California Community Colleges, members of the Chamber board?

It’s a tradition at the Chamber to put the UC president and the CSU and CCC chancellors on the board, which has about 100 members. But the three educators came under fire recently when the Chamber put out a blatantly partisan ad attacking Jerry Brown

And in fact, UC President Mark Yudof told the Chamber’s fundraising chair last year that he couldn’t donate to the CalChamberPAC because that group was trying to make sure that Democrats don’t win enough seats in the Legislature to hold a two-thirds majority. “As president of a public institution that is both in practice and in policy nonpartisan, I must decline your request for a contribution,” Yudof wrote in an Oct. 9, 2009 letter, a copy of which I obtained under the state’s Public Records Act.

But Yudof also stated: “As a member of the Board of Directors, I appreciate the Chamber’s engagement in the political process and its advocacy for a strong and vibrant California economy.”

The truth is, the Chamber’s “engagement in the political process” is almost always adversarial to the interests of the state’s public education system. The fundraising letter Yudof was responding to specifically sought money to block Democrats from holding enough seats to raise taxes — and the refusal of the governor and his GOP colleagues to seek any new revenue sources has been the major reason the state’s budget is so horribly messed up. And that’s the main reason the University of California and CSU have faced such alarming budget cuts.

Why are the people in charge of promoting public higher education willingly putting their names, and their credibility, behind what’s really a Neanderthal institution? Because that’s what’s going on here — Yudof, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed and CCC Chancellor Jack Scott aren’t on the Chamber board to offer advice. They’re on the board to give the Chamber more credibility. They help make the organization seem more friendly, more concerned with the public interest.

They help make an organization devoted to reducing the role of the public sector in this state seem supportive of public education. They help propagate a political lie.

I asked Yudof, Reed and Scott why they’re still on the board, and got pretty weak responses. Here’s Yudof’s spokesperson, Peter King:

[President Yudof] considers the California business community to be one of several key constituency groups that are important to the University, which is why traditionally higher education leaders in California have held seats on the Chamber board. In general, President Yudof has found the Chamber to be highly supportive of higher education in California. He cannot recall in his tenure as President a single Chamber proposal to reduce funding for higher education.

Um, actually that’s not true at all. The Chamber just released its 2010 “job killer” list — a roster of bills that the organization will oppose on the grounds that they’re bad for business. Among them: Assemblymember Tom Ammiano’s bill to fix a loophole in Prop. 13 (and provide more money for public education), and a bill by Sen. Leland Yee that would allow the state to recapture tax-credit money if the company that got the credits (for increasing employment in the state, for example) winds up leaving California or shipping jobs elsewhere. That money would be available for higher education.

Passage of those bills would allow the state to stop cutting UC and CSU. The Chamber wants to kill them.

King did say, however, that after the Brown ad aired, he “has informed the Chamber that he will continue to serve on the board only if his status is changed to that of an ex officio member.” But that doesn’t mean anything; it’s his name on the letterhead that matters.

Reed’s press person, Erik Fallis, was even more vague. He would only refer me to a statement Reed and Yudof issued after the Brown ad controversy, which said, in part:

We value our inclusion on the Chamber board, which provides an opportunity to interact with business leaders on issues that are of vital importance to the future of California. This is a dialogue that has been of great benefit to higher education, the business community and the state as a whole.

Actually, the inclusion of top state education officials is detrimental to the public interest, detrimental to public education and really bad form. Particularly now, when the Chamber is going out of its way to make sure that the state budget crisis is solved with nothing but cuts.

Scott has been openly complaining about budget cuts (PDF) but his office hasn’t responded to my questions.

Yee, a frequent critic of UC management, responded, though, and he didn’t mince words:

It would be one thing if President Yudof and Chancellor Reed used their positions on the California Chamber of Commerce board to support more revenue for our beleaguered public universities. Unfortunately, the CalChamber is categorical in its opposition to new revenues and has become nothing short of a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. The Chamber benefits from the prestige that Yudof and Reed bring to the table, and uses it to advance a right-wing agenda that includes questioning the validity of global warming (AB 32, 2006) and the need to protect workers from discrimination (AB 793, Jones, 2009), blocking universal health care (SB 810, Leno, 2010), and holding corporations accountable to their promises to create jobs (SB 1391, Yee, 2010). It is outrageous that Yudof and Reed would serve as accomplices to killing bills that would increase revenue for higher education.

The top education executives need to resign from the Chamber board, now.

Sit-lie proponents criticize their allies

Sasha Cuttler

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May 11, 2010

37

Sit-lie proponents criticize their allies

It’s really amusing to read the recriminations and second-guessing from the most vociferous proponents of criminalizing sitting or lying on San Francisco sidewalks after yesterday’s Public Safety Committee hearing on the matter. And the funniest part is their failure to understand that this punitive, overreaching law just isn’t needed to deal with aspects of street life that scare them most, as the police reluctantly testified.

Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius and Haight Street resident Arthur Evans have been the two most vocal promoters of the sit-lie ordinance, and both sounded similar criticisms of the Police Department and the Mayor’s Office (as well as progressives, their usual target), Nevius in the paper and Evans on the Guardian’s Politics blog (last comment on this item). They call on the so-called “moderates” step up their games or be defeated.

But they miss the point, and falsely believe that “common sense” is on their side. Certainly police officers have the ability to deal with rowdy groups of vagrants who are blocking the sidewalks and intimidating people. They do it all the time, and simply walking a beat usually prevents such behavior. To argue that tough police officers are powerless to deal with thugs defies common sense. And Assistant Chief Kevin Cashman even testified that police don’t need an official citizen complaint to deal with people who are blocking the sidewalk, debunking a fallacy that is oft-cited by Evans and others.

But the efforts by Evans and the Chamber of Commerce to rebrand the sit-lie ordinance as the Civil Sidewalks Law – and to threaten to use it as a wedge issue on the November ballot – reveals their true intentions. The bottom line is they don’t like the more unruly aspects of urban life, and they believe that they can legislate “civility” and have the cops enforce it.

That’s a scary notion, and it’s part of larger campaign to, as Nevius writes, “demonstrate to the far-left supervisors that they were seriously out of step with the residents of the city.” Nevius, who is not a resident of this city, wants San Francisco to be a bit more like his hometown of Walnut Creek. But San Franciscans shouldn’t fall prey to their divisive fear-mongering, and supervisors like Sup. David Chiu – who has publicly toyed with the idea of compromising on sit-lie with some kind of restorative justice program – should heed the message of this hearing and resist creating an unnecessary new law that the community opposes.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen yesterday as the committee voted to continue the matter for two weeks. And you better believe that next time, the Evan-Nevius crowd will come back strong, with more fearful anecdotes than ever. But the opposition campaign to sit-lie has been strong, creative, and effective — the true voice of San Francisco — and it seems up to the fight.

ENDORSEMENTS: State ballot measures

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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April 27, 2010

8

PROPOSITION 13

LIMITS ON PROPERTY TAX ASSESSMENT FOR SEISMIC RETROFITS

YES

The primary sponsor of Prop. 13 is Republican Sen. Roy Ashburn, who dominated the news for several days after he was arrested for drunk driving on his way home from a Sacramento gay bar. Needless to say, Ashburn’s dramatic coming out has whipped up far more attention than his noncontroversial ballot initiative.

We’re generally opposed to anything that gives tax cuts or tax deferrals to property owners; thanks to a 1978 measure also called Prop. 13, much of the commercial and residential property in California is badly under assessed. And Prop. 13, 2010 style, is indeed a tax break. But it’s probably justified.

Buildings in this state are typically reassessed for property taxes after they’ve been modified with new construction, except in cases where the modifications are made to comply with earthquake-safety standards. While most buildings that undergo seismic retrofitting are exempt from reassessment until the property is transferred to a new owner, the exemption for unreinforced masonry buildings is limited to 15 years. Prop 13 would remove that 15-year cap.

The fiscal impact on cities is likely to be pretty minor, and the measure might encourage both commercial and residential landlords to bring their buildings up to standard. Vote yes.

PROPOSITION 14

OPEN PRIMARIES

NO

At the height of a royal mess last year when the state budget was long overdue and the two-thirds majority needed to pass it was still out of reach by one vote, Republican Sen. Abel Maldonado struck a deal with Democrats. He said he’d support the budget — if the majority party would meet a few of his demands. One thing he insisted on was Prop. 14 — a ballot measure that would effectively remove political parties from the primary elections process, allowing all voters to cast ballots for any candidate regardless of party affiliation.

Under Maldonado’s plan, all candidates would run on a single primary ballot, and the top two vote-getters would face off in the general election. Heavily funded by the California Chamber of Commerce and marketed by the same spin doctors and corporate lawyers who are rolling in Yes on 16 campaign money, Prop. 14’s backers say it will result in more centrist elected officials.

There are plenty of pitfalls here, the most worrisome being that it would drive up the cost of elections and give more moneyed (and corporate-allied) candidates a sharper competitive edge while elbowing out progressives. It would allow Republicans to play a role in what would normally be Democratic primaries (and vice versa.) The measure would also make it nearly impossible for smaller parties — the Green Party, for example — to offer candidates in the November elections.

Bad idea, bad process, Vote no.

PROPOSITION 15

FAIR ELECTIONS ACT

YES

California desperately needs electoral reform. Corporate campaign spending and lobbyists have poisoned the decision-making process and muzzled the voice of the people. Something radical needs to be done — and while this measure is only a small, measured step in the right direction, it’s an important and promising experiment.

Prop. 15 would create a pilot public financing program for the 2014 and 2018 races for California Secretary of State — and the program would be funded by a tax on lobbyists. Right now lobbyists pay only $12.50 per year to register with the state. This measure would increase that fee to $350 annually and use the money to create a fund of about $6 million that candidates for the crucial office overseeing elections in the state could tap after demonstrating their popular support by gathering a number of small contributions. All candidates who qualify would be given the same amount of money and left to compete on the issues. Ideally this public financing program would prove successful and eventually be expanded to other offices. Public financing of election campaigns, which is currently working well in Arizona and Maine, is certainly worth a try in California. Vote yes.

PROPOSITION 16

MONOPOLY PROTECTION FOR PG&E

NO! NO! NO!

The deceptively titled “Taxpayer’s Right to Vote Act” was dreamed up and funded entirely by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the monopolistic utility that is worried it could face actual competition here in San Francisco (and elsewhere) from municipal electricity programs that would offer customers a greener energy mix and more accountability than PG&E executives will ever demonstrate.

Rather than accept some healthy competition, this sleazy corporation has opted to spend some $35 million to exterminate all possibilities of municipal electricity programs cropping up anywhere in the state in a bid to preserve its octopus-like grip on the energy market in Northern California. Prop. 16 would require a two-thirds majority vote at the ballot before any community choice aggregation (CCA) program — or any attempt at creating or expanding a public-power system — could move forward. That’s an extreme hurdle — -and PG&E knows it.

In effect, PG&E is trying to buy public policy here, trying to pass a law that will protect its own monopoly interests.

In San Francisco, the CCA being proposed would offer customers 51 percent renewable power by 2017, which means it would blow PG&E out of the water in the green arena and mark S.F. as taking greater strides toward combating climate change than any other major U.S. city. This example could set a precedent for others, which, in turn, could create favorable market conditions for green energy startups that want to harness wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, tidal, and energy efficiency alternatives.

The very existence of Prop. 16 is already threatening the San Francisco CCA; the city’s Public Utilities Commission is trying to delay a final contract until after the June 8 vote on the measure (see editorial, page 5)

Vote no on Prop 16. Not just because it’s an example of a big business single-handedly trying to alter the state constitution for its own economic benefit by pouring millions of dollars into a deceptive advertising campaign. Not just because a two-thirds majority vote requirement is anti-democratic. Not just because there were reports that the signature gatherers who got people to sign on in support of placing Prop. 16 on the ballot were telling people that its purpose was to limit PG&E expansion or encourage solar power. Not just because Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and a half dozen members of the Legislature sent a letter rebuking PG&E CEO Peter Darbee for disrespecting the democratic process by going straight to the ballot to undermine legislation it initially supported that enabled the creation of CCA programs. Not just because PG&E is using $35 million of ratepayer dollars (that’s the check you wrote them for your electricity bill!) to put out slick TV ads for this campaign when it should have been repairing the pipelines under those manholes that keep exploding and messing up your morning commute. Not even just because with CCA, you already have the right to vote whether or not you want to be part of it, a choice PG&E will never give you. And not just because PG&E keeps trying to raise rates, which is much more difficult for municipal energy agencies to do.

If for no other reason, vote no because Prop. 16 flies in the face of everything environmentalists stand for. It’s a measure that will thwart progress on fighting climate change, brought to you by the company that practically invented green-washing. PG&E is a huge nuclear power player; it purchases coal from mountaintop-removal coal mines in West Virginia that are completely devastating biodiverse landscapes in Southern Appalachia and screwing over poor people by tainting their drinking water; and it’s in the process of building fossil fuel-fired power plants in poor communities of color in California. The CCA programs at least represent a glimmer of hope for an alternative model; Prop. 16 kills off that possibility with one fell swoop motivated by pure greed. For the love of justice, democracy, and the planet, vote no on Prop 16.

PROPOSITION 17

CAR INSURANCE SCHEME

NO, NO, NO!

Mercury Insurance sponsored this measure and is campaigning for it with tens of millions of dollars, betting it can fool voters and make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits by doing so. And if the company is right, insurance rates will skyrocket for new drivers and those who haven’t had continuous insurance coverage, which experts say will increase the number of uninsured drivers on the roadways and end up increasing insurance rates for everyone.

Mercury and its founder George Joseph have been truly malevolent players in California, exploiting their customers to make billions of dollars in profits, attacking California’s landmark insurance reform measure Prop. 103 with lawsuits and corrupting campaign contributions over more than 20 years, and flouting insurance regulators in such brazen fashion that even Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a conservative Republican, recently chastised the company for its “lengthy history of serious misconduct” (see “Buying power,” March 17).

Now, however, the company is hoping its promise to cut the insurance premiums of drivers who have maintained continuous coverage by “as much as $250 per year” will buy their votes and that they’ll overlook the myriad negative impacts of increasing everyone else’s premiums by $1,000 per year or more, based on Mercury’s own estimates.

Think about that. If you’re a driver who missed an insurance payment by even one day, or a soldier returning from boot camp, or someone with a low-income getting insurance for the first time or after ditching your car for a while, what are you going to do when you discover already-expensive car insurance comes with a $1,000 annual surcharge?

Many Californians, those who share our roads, will choose to drive without insurance. Then they’ll be more likely to leave the scene of accidents or declare bankruptcy rather than paying out-of-pocket for their accidents, both of which increase the cost of insurance for everyone else.

That’s how insurance works. If someone pays less, someone else pays more; and the only entity guaranteed to really make money over the long term is the insurance company. Don’t fall for this scam. Vote no on 17.

Nevius makes the case for a progressive DCCC

Sasha Cuttler

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April 26, 2010

27

Nevius makes the case for a progressive DCCC

Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius made an excellent argument for supporting the Guardian’s slate of progressive candidates for the Democratic County Central Committee in Saturday’s paper, even though he was trying to do just the opposite. But I suppose that perspective is everything.

Our perspective at the Guardian is one of great pride in San Francisco and its left-of-center values. Nevius looks at San Francisco from his home in Walnut Creek and sees a scary place where people question authority figures and don’t simply trust developers, big corporations, and the Chamber of Commerce to act in the public interest.

“The next two months will see a battle for the political soul of the city. It will pit the progressives against the moderates in a face-off that will have huge implications in the November elections and, perhaps, the election of the next mayor. The key is control of an obscure but incredibly influential organization called the Democratic County Central Committee,” Nevius writes, and he’s right about that.

But he’s wrong when he assumes most San Franciscans agree with him and others who want to make the city more like the sterile suburbs that they prefer. Nevius values “safe streets,” which is his code for giving police more power through the proposed sit-lie ordinance and other unpopular crackdowns, despite the fact that he sat in the back row and watched the DCCC voted overwhelmingly against sit-lie after nobody presented a credible case for it.

Nevius is so utterly blind to the fact that most San Franciscans want adequate mitigation and community benefits from development projects that he recently ranted and raved about the defeat of the 555 Washington project, even though it was unanimously rejected by the Board of Supervisors for inadequately addressing these requirements.

The “moderate values” that Nevius champions are actually quite extreme: give downtown and developers everything they want, never question the behavior of cops or the Fire Department’s budget, keep cutting taxes until city government becomes incapable of providing services or regulating the private sector, ignore the cultural value of nightclubs and artists, and deport all the undocumented immigrants.

This is the Democratic Party that Nevius and his allies like Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and supervisorial candidate Scott Wiener (a conservative attorney who would be the best friend that the suburban cowboy cops could ever have on the board) want to promote, and it looks more like the Republican Party than a political party with San Francisco values.

But they aren’t honest about that intention, instead trying to fool people into believing that progressives are the extremists. “But when Mrs. Jones receives her Democratic voter guide in the mail…she’s thinking of the party of Barack Obama, not the party of Aaron Peskin and (Supervisor) Chris Daly,” Wiener said.

But in the Democratic presidential primary election, it was Daly and Peskin who were the strongest early supporters of Barack Obama, while Wiener backed John Edwards and Alioto-Pier, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and the rest of the “moderate” party stalwarts supported Hillary Clinton. That’s not a huge deal, but it’s a sign of how the so-called moderates are willing to distort political reality.

So Nevius is right. This is an important election and it is about the soul of the city. Do you support scared suburban twits who disingenuously try to hide behind the “moderate” label in order to seem more reasonable, or do you support progressive candidates who have integrity and won’t moderate their values in order to appease the cops or the capitalists?

If it’s the latter, support the Guardian’s slate (which is substantially similar to the slates approved by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Sierra Club’s SF Bay Chapter, and other progressive groups).

And if you want that slate to have some money to mail out a Guardian slate card, come to a fundraiser this Thursday evening at CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, featuring the candidates and some great exemplars of the culture they support, including amazing singer/songwriter Valerie Orth, the zany dance troupe Fou Fou Ha, and DJs Smoove and Kramer, who regularly rock the best clubs and community-based parties in town.

And by “town,” I mean San Francisco, not Walnut Creek.