Congress

Iowa: a report from the grassroots

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

As an Iowan, I am fascinated by all the reports by all the hotshot out of state reporters who paratroop into the state and start filing stories from Rock Rapids, Clear Lake, Storm Lake, and Cedar Rapids and little places all over the state.

Iowans like to see their candidates up close and there is a feeling back there that they may end up voting for the candidate they would most like to invite into their living room for a chat or meet down at the local cafe for breakfast.

Here’s a dispatch sent to me from the grassroots by Carolyn Schmidt, retired associate director of public relations at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Carolyn is a political activist, Iowa style, calling Congress members, writing letters to the editor, emailing Congress and doing so, in the past two weeks, in the teeth of the onslaught of ice and snow.

Carolyn writes from Cedar Rapids,

“As the dems are so close. I’m betting on Obama, but Hillary and Edwards campaigns have been ringing our phone several times a week with “surveys” asking if it’s “concerning to us that Obama voted ‘present’ on a choice issue in Congress” or that he’s a community organizer while Edwards is a trial lawyer who went to bat for poor people. THEY must think Obama is going to win too. Hillary has been running some very appealing ads, with her mother and daughter in tow. She may surprise us. Edwards is on the preferred side of the domestic issues, particularly the bad deal existing for poor and low-income families, but his personality is too laid back.

“On the Republican side, I’d just say that Romney–who has spent a ton of money saturating the airwaves with ads since summer–is fading. People see him as artificial and opportunistic. Des Moines high school students on Friday characterized him as “completely fabricated.” I think they are right on! Huckabee took some hits this week for actions he’s taken as governor in Arkansas, but he still appeals to conservatives more than any other Republican, I think. McCain’s support is rising, however. Most Iowans aren’t fooled by Guiliani, but he IS charming.

“Many Iowans attend rallies for a number of candidates to see how the personalities compare. Obama comes across as fresh, articulate, straightforward, and impassioned. He’s been able to deflect criticisms, and he has a superb organization. His staff is training first-time caucus-goers on procedures and strategies. (The Democratic caucus procedures are more complicated than the Republicans who just conduct a straw poll, as you probably know.) Biden and Hillary and Richardson are impressive because of the accomplishments they can point to, saying these aren’t campaign promises, they are proof I can deliver.

“A lot can happen in the next three weeks, of course.”

I hope to get more reports from Carolyn and others. Stay tuned. B3

SPORTS: A free pass for owners

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Mitchell, the owners’ man

By A.J. Hayes

Boy, George Mitchell’s juicy report on baseball’s performance enhancing drug epidemic sure pepped up the news week.

The 409-page report was part CSI Cooperstown, and part gossipy tattler sheet with tons of tasty tidbits ranging from the names of nearly 100 players (the big one being Roger Clemens), to anecdotes detailing some of the black market purchases, including dealer Kirk Radomski returning home to find an overnight package stuffed with $8,000 in cash laying in a rain puddle at his doorstep.

But the more you delve into the Mitchell Report the fishier it smells.

First off couldn’t baseball find someone other than Mitchell, a minority owner of the Boston Red Sox, to head the investigation? Mitchell may very well be ethically impregnable, but the fact is he has both feet planted in an owner’s box. Was it a coincidence that virtually no current or former Red Sox players, besides Mo Vaughn, disliked in Boston for the way he departed the team, was mentioned in the report?

Was George Will too busy rearranging his bow-tie collection?

In the report, Mitchell gave ownership a slap on the wrist. The lion’s share of the blame went to the players – most of them little known utility-infielders and back of the bullpen relief pitchers.

The fact is baseball was rolling along happily collecting the real cash box profits garnered by artificially inflated players over the past decade.

After the owners canceled the 1994 World Series, baseball’s popularity took a nose dive. It wasn’t until Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s thrilling competition for the single season home run record in 1998 did the fans come back.

Why, because it was damn entertaining. These buffed out sluggers had their selfish reasons for juicing, yes, but they also helped save the sport in the process. The owners knew it, the players knew it and any fan that it isn’t natural for a 38-year-old pitcher to get drastically better, knew it as well.

It wasn’t until congress got involved, threatening baseball with the removal of it anti-trust exemption that the owners considered a clean-up.

One of the players named, former San Francisco and Oakland bench warmer F.P. Santangelo, has come out this week and admitted his usage.

It’s time for an owner came out and said the same thing. Yes they had knowledge that something was up but did not act because the fans were eating the homers and strike outs, not to mention stadium hot dogs, up like crazy.

Someone has to say that, because the Mitchell Report does not.

Cindy Sheehan takes on Pelosi

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Cindy Sheehan, who turned the loss of her son Casey in Iraq into a major national antiwar campaign, became a lighting rod for right-wing attacks, then stepped down from her leadership role, exhausted and somewhat bitter, is back on the scene — and running for Congress in San Francisco.

She came by the Guardian office this week and talked at length about her new political challenge. She realizes it’s not going to be easy taking on Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, the head of the local Democratic Party power structure and a champion fundraiser with essentially unlimited access to cash. But while Pelosi has been building up her power base in Washington, she’s often forgotten her base back home — and I hope Sheehan can push her not only on the war but on the Presidio privatization and its impacts nationwide.

You can listen to the full interview below.


Converting the rock

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› news@sfbg.com

Native American spiritual leader Marshall "Golden Eagle" Jack admits he was just a kid in 1969 when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island. They claimed that the island’s reclassification as surplus property following the 1963 closure of Alcatraz Prison entitled them to take possession of the iconic island.

But Jack says he knows enough people from the American Indian Movement, which began advocating for urban Indians in the late ’60s, to understand that "the people standing up for their rights back then didn’t have enough clout in the legal system" to keep the island and build an American Indian cultural center on its craggy slopes.

Instead, the island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is operated by the National Park Service. Today it attracts 1.5 million visitors per year, the GGNRA’s chief of public affairs, Rich Weideman, says. But having a brutal former prison as one of San Francisco’s top tourist attractions is unsettling to some.

So Jack and AIM founder Dennis Banks, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, Laynee Bluebird Woman, and Rose Mary Cambra of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe have sponsored Proposition C, a nonbinding declaration on the February 2008 ballot that would make it city policy to explore acquiring Alcatraz Island and setting up a global peace center in place of the prison.

They envision a white domed conference center, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and what their campaign literature calls an "array of architecturally advanced domed Artainment [sic] multimedia centers," which sounds more like a new age resort than a Native American cultural center. But Jack said the most important thing is turning the page on the island’s bleak modern history.

"My bottom line is getting the actual prison off the island," Jack explains. "There’s a lot of crystal energy, spiritually wise, on the island. It’s an icon for a lot of tribes around the Bay Area who were here way before the Europeans. A Global Peace Center idea is just an option, but if it doesn’t manifest that way, if it becomes an ecological center, fine."

Jack serves as assistant director of the Global Peace Foundation, a branch of the nonprofit San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, which Mill Valley resident Da Vid founded in the late 1970s — about the time he first had a vision of domes on Alcatraz.

"I saw them during a Celestial Healing Festival on Mt. Tam in 1978, seven years after the Indian occupation ended," says Da Vid, who says he is a medical doctor and artist — and currently serves as treasurer of the Alcatraz Conversion Project, a political action committee whose coffers contain $30,000 from Da Vid’s mother, Miriam Ornstein.

Da Vid is also the founder of the Light Party, which he describes as "a spiritual–political party using its resources to promote the Alcatraz Conversion Project in order to garner support for the construction of a Global Peace Center."

But to the San Francisco Republican Party, Prop. C represents nothing but a tax burden. "Were this proposal implemented the burden of maintaining and operating Alcatraz would shift from the federal government to San Francisco taxpayers," San Francisco Republican Party chair Christine Hughes writes in an official ballot argument against the measure, also claiming the measure’s sponsors are "an unaccountable and loosely organized nonprofit which envisions a billion dollar project administered by a local-international trust."

Yet GPF assistant director Kevin Ohnsman told the Guardian, "We feel that the Republican Party’s opposition to Prop. C is our best endorsement.

"Once acquired by the city, a portion of the considerable revenue from the ferryboats will be shared with the city," Ohnsman said. "This income will be more than sufficient to cover the minimal administrative costs for maintaining Alcatraz."

Currently ferry tickets to Alcatraz cost $16.50 each, of which about 25 percent, or $4.5 million annually, goes to the GGNRA, with the bulk of those monies covering Alcatraz’s night security and maintenance of the buildings and sewer.

According to San Francisco controller Ed Harrington, "should the proposed policy statement be approved, it would not increase the cost of government."

But that’s only because the policy statement wouldn’t do anything.

"However, should San Francisco actually work to acquire Alcatraz Island from the feds," Harrington adds, "there would be significant costs."

But Da Vid says there’s something more important at stake than money. He asks, "The bottom line is, do we want an old, decaying prison to continue to be a prominent landmark for the Bay Area or do we want to create a new Alcatraz, which will define a new emerging paradigm committed to progressive, enlightened values?"

Weideman cites Alcatraz’s landmark status and the 10,000 birds that nest on the island each spring as major hurdles in Vid’s path: "To remove the prison, which is a national historic monument, along with the Civil War–era fort beneath it, would take an act of Congress."

Stop holiday Media Giveaway

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Stop the FCC’s Quiet Holiday Giveaway to the Big Media

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Since the Big Media are blacking out the story, let me pass along the news and the action plan to mobilize the message and the troops to stop the latest media giveaway by the Bush Administration. It’s payback time for their support of the Iraq war and occupation.

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People across the country are building a wall to stop the FCC’s plan to let Big Media swallow up more local stations.

Dear Media Reformer,

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin refuses to listen to the public, but Congress is starting to pay attention. This week, the House announced a formal investigation into the way the FCC conducts business. And yesterday, during a House oversight hearing, Congress scolded the FCC for a “short-circuited decision-making process” and “abuse of power.”

Our campaign is gaining momentum, but we need you to join us in our stand against Big Media.

Stop FCC Chairman Martin & Big Media

In response to a growing public outcry, the Senate Commerce Committee this week passed the Media Ownership Act of 2007 (S. 2332). This crucial legislation would force Martin to slow down, give the public more time to comment, and address the negative impact of media consolidation on minority and female ownership.

Senators Boxer and Feinstein are already a co-sponsors. Thank your senators being leaders on this important effort.


Thank Your Senators for Co-Sponsoring the Media Ownership Act

Chairman Martin hopes you aren’t paying attention. He wants to vote on his proposal to let Big Media get even bigger on Dec. 18. If you think we need more local, diverse, and democratic media, now is the time to act.

Congress is taking action, but we need to show that this isn’t just another inside-the-Beltway issue. Too much is at stake, and they need to see the faces of the millions of Americans who are fed up with another massive giveaway to Big Media.

Build the Wall: Ask Your Senators to Co-sponsor the Media Ownership Act

In 2003, nearly 3 million citizens like you stood up to the FCC and put a stop to media consolidation. We can do it again. But we need to put a public face on the resistance to media consolidation.

Write Your Senators. Add Your Picture to the Wall. Stop Big Media.

Onward,

Alexandra Russell
Program Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net
www.stopbigmedia.com

P.S. To fully understand what Chairman Martin doesn’t want you to know about his new ownership rules, read our new report: Devil the Details

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View more information about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/tyownership

Tell your friends about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/tyownership/forward

Law professor to be Supes counsel against Jew

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Yesterday, the Board faced a choice: hire legal firm Garcia Calderon Ruiz, which specializes in government law,
or run with academic lawyer Prof. Robert Weisberg, as outside counsel for official misconduct proceedings against Sup. Ed Jew.

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Beleagured Sup. Ed Jew in happier times outside his flower shop on Waverly Place.
Photo by Charles Russo

Three attorneys with GCR, Mary Hernandez, George Yin and Nicolas Vaca, gave a relatively slick presentation compared to the Dumbledore-style ramblings of Prof. Weisberg.

“We have dealt with removal issues before,” said Hernandez.
“We are used to working in gray areas,” said Yin.
“A reasonable estimate,” said Vaca,of the firm’s $24,800 bid to get the project started.

But that bid appeared to be $24,800 too much, compared to Weisberg’s offer to work pro-bono, even if he teaches criminal law and doesn’t have experience in government agency law.

“This is not really a criminal matter,” said Weisberg. “The Board is a legislative body, and so it would be unconstitutional for it to convict someone of a crime.”

Maybe the Board enjoyed Weisberg’s easy-to-grasp explanations,which included making an analogy between Jew’s case and congressional impeachments proceedings: just as Congress indicts and the Senate then votes to remove from office, the Ethics Commission would do the “impeaching” and the Board of Supervisors would then vote whether to remove Jew from office.

Alles klar, Herr Professor.

Because in the end Sup. Geraldo Sandoval, seconded by Sup. Tom Ammiano, directed the Clerk of the Board to enter into an agreement with the professor, which does include the possibility of the $15-an-hour labor of his student research assistants at Stanford University.
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You’re getting warmer

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR SPECIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

› news@sfb.com

I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall was still littered with the carcasses of the sleeping diplomats who had gathered in Japan to draw up the first global treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But when word finally came that an agreement had been reached, people roused themselves with real enthusiasm — lots of backslapping and hugs.

A long decade after the first powerful warnings had sounded, it seemed that humans were finally rising to the greatest challenge we’d ever faced.

The only long face in the hall belonged to William O’Keefe, chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, otherwise known as the American coal, oil, and car lobby. He’d spent the week coordinating the resistance, working with Arab delegates and Russian industrialists to sabotage the emerging plan. And he’d failed. "It’s in free fall now," he said, stricken. But then he straightened his shoulders and said, "I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we can get things under control."

I thought he was whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he knew far better than the rest of us what the future would hold. He knew it would be at least another decade before anything changed.

TEN YEARS WARMER


The important physical-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that they included the warmest years on record. All of the warmest years on record.

In that span of time we’ve come to understand that not only is the globe warming but we’d also dramatically underestimated the speed and the amount of that warming. By now the data from the planet outstrips the scientific predictions on an almost daily basis. Earlier this fall, for instance, the seasonal Arctic sea ice melt beat the old record — by mid-August. Then the ice kept melting for six more weeks, losing an area the size of California every week.

"Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts," the headline in the New York Times reported. And the scientists were shaken by rapid changes in tundra permafrost systems, not to mention rainforest systems, temperate soil carbon-sequestration systems, and oceanic acidity systems.

Planetary climate change has gone from being a problem for our children to a problem for right about now, as evidenced by, oh, Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, and epic droughts in the Southeast and Southwest. And that’s just in the continental United States. Go to Australia sometime: it’s gotten so dry there that native Aussie Rupert Murdoch recently announced his News Corp. empire is going carbon neutral.

The important political-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that we haven’t done anything.

Oh, we’ve passed all kinds of interesting state and local laws, wonderful experiments that have begun to show just how much progress is possible. But in Washington DC, nothing. No laws at all. Until last year, when the GOP surrendered control of Congress, even the hearings were a joke, with "witnesses" like novelist Michael Crichton.

And as a result, our emissions have continued to increase. Worse, we’ve made not the slightest attempt to shift China and India away from using coal. Instead of making an all-out effort to provide the resources for them to go renewable, we’ve stood quietly by and watched from the sidelines as their energy trajectories shot out of control: these days the Chinese are opening a new coal-fired plant every week. History will regard even the horror in Iraq as just another predictable folly compared to this novel burst of irresponsibility.

A HINT OF A MOVEMENT


If you’re looking for good news, there is some.

For one thing, we understand the technologies and the changes in habit that can help. The past 10 years have seen the advent of hybrid cars and the widespread use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of electricity generation throughout the period. Japan and Germany have pioneered, with great success, a subsidy scheme required to put millions of solar panels on rooftops.

Even more important, a real movement has begun to emerge in this country. It began with Katrina, which opened eyes. Then Al Gore gave those eyes something to look at: his movie made millions realize just what a pickle we are in. Many of those millions, in turn, became political activists.

Earlier this year six college students and I launched stepitup07.org, which has organized almost 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states. Last month the student climate movement drew 7,000 hardworking kids from campuses all over the country for a huge conference. We’ve launched a new grassroots coalition, 1sky.org, that will push Congress and the big Washington environmental groups.

All of this work has tilted public opinion — new polls have energy and climate change showing up high on the list of issues that voters care about, which in turn has made the candidates take notice. All of the Democrats are saying more or less the right things, though none of them, save John Edwards, is saying them with much volume.

THE RACE OF ALL TIME


Now it’s a numbers game. Can we turn that political energy into change fast enough to matter?

On the domestic front the numbers look like this: we’ve got to commit to reductions in carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2050, and we’ve got to get those cuts under way quickly and reduce emissions by 10 percent in the next few years. The marketplace will help — if we send it the message that carbon carries a cost. But only government can do that.

Two more numbers we’re pushing for: zero, which is how many new coal-fired power plants we can afford to open in the US, and five million, which is how many green jobs Congress needs to provide for the country’s low-skilled workers. All that insulation isn’t going to stuff itself inside our walls, and those solar panels won’t crawl up to the rooftops by themselves. We can’t send the work to China, and we can’t do it with the click of a mouse; this is the last big chance to build an economy that works for most of us.

Internationally, the task is even steeper. The Kyoto Accord, which we ignored, expires in a couple of years. Negotiations begin this month in Bali, Indonesia, to strike a new deal, and it’s likely to be the last bite at the apple we’ll get — if we miss this chance, the climate is likely to spiral out of control. We have a number here too: 450, as in parts per million of carbon dioxide. It’s the absolute upper limit on what we can pour into the atmosphere, and it will take a heroic effort to keep from exceeding it.

This is a big change — even 10 years ago, we thought the safe limit might be 550. But the data is clear: the Earth is far more finely balanced than we thought and our peril much greater. Our foremost climate scientist, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, testified under oath in a courtroom last year that if we don’t stop short of that 450 redline, we could see the sea level rise 20 feet before the century is out. That’s civilization challenging. That’s a carbon summer to match any nuclear winter anyone ever dreamed about.

It’s a test, a kind of final exam for our political, economic, and spiritual systems. And it’s a fair test — nothing vague or fuzzy about it. Chemistry and physics don’t bargain. They don’t compromise. They don’t meet us halfway. We’ll do it or we won’t. And 10 years from now we’ll know which path we chose.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is an author and environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming. McKibben’s essay was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Approximately 50 AAN member papers will be publishing the essay this week.

This oil spill — and the next

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EDITORIAL The first headline the San Francisco Chronicle ran after the Cosco Busan crashed into a Bay Bridge protective fender Nov. 7 implied that nothing terrible had happened. It read, almost comically, "CRUNCH!" Initial reports suggested that only a few hundred gallons of fuel oil had spilled from the gash in the 810-foot freighter’s hull. Caltrans assured the public that the system had worked: the fender had absorbed the blow, the bridge had suffered no damage, and motorists had no cause for concern.

It wasn’t until much later in the day that the public learned just how big an ecological disaster was unfolding in the bay. And the most disturbing evidence is only now becoming clear: this was an accident waiting to happen. The regulations and processes in place to prevent a catastrophic oil spill in the bay — where thousands of ships with tanks carrying foul and toxic fuel oil sail through a fragile ecosystem every year — were, and are, tragically inadequate.

Just look at the record so far:

•The Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic Service on Yerba Buena Island, which has extensive radar and electronic tracking devices, was clearly aware that the container ship was heading for a collision — but was unable to stop it.

The fog was thick, and the ship, which had just made a wide S turn out of the Port of Oakland, was far from the center of the 1,200-foot-wide channel under the bridge. The Coast Guard could hardly have missed what was going on.

In fact, according to news reports, a VTS staffer radioed the bar pilot at the helm of the ship minutes before the crash and warned him that he was on an errant course. "Your [compass] heading is 235. What are your intentions?" the VTS staffer asked (essentially saying, in nautical-radio speak, "What the hell are you doing?"). The pilot, John Cota, insisted he was heading right for the center of the span and not to worry, his lawyer told reporters.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if air traffic controllers at San Francisco International Airport saw a commercial jet flying off course in zero-visibility fog and heading for the top of San Bruno Mountain. The controllers wouldn’t ask the captain what his intentions were; they would announce an imminent crash and order him to immediately increase altitude, change course … whatever was necessary. The captain wouldn’t argue that his or her instruments said everything was fine; the airliner would change course at once and sort out the question of instrument accuracy after it was out of harm’s way.

But traffic regulators on the bay operate under different rules. Even a minor course change would have prevented the accident — but according to VTS rules posted on the Web, the Coast Guard has no authority (other than in times of national-security alerts) to directly order preventative action. Under centuries-old rules of the sea, the captain of a ship is in total control and can’t be told what to do, even if a disaster is looming — and modern safety regulations haven’t caught up to that tradition.

•The ship was sailing under terrible conditions, with almost zero visibility, and even some bay captains say running a 70,000-ton vessel in an area like this in fog that thick is a bad idea. But the shipping companies have so much money on the line that nobody wants to slow down the schedules.

•It’s no secret where the fuel tanks are in a ship like this. The moment the ship took a gash that size in the hull, the authorities should have assumed that a sizable and extremely dangerous spill was in the works and begun immediate emergency containment procedures. But somehow just about everyone seemed to believe the initial reports that the crew of the ship had transferred the fuel away from the hole and only a trivial amount had escaped.

Remember, we’re talking about a rip of 100 feet, one-eighth the length of the ship, right in the part of the hull where half a million gallons of nasty bunker fuel were stored. Emergency responders should have known a spill was inevitable and gone into action right away.

Yet hours passed. No public warning was issued. Bay swimmers continued to take their morning natations — and some came back covered with oil. Nobody knew what was going on.

•The day after the spill, when it was clear an ecological disaster was happening in the bay, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom split town and went on vacation.

•So far, the taxpayers are picking up the tab for the cleanup — and in the end, it may prove difficult to get the owner of the ship to pay, even if faulty navigation equipment on the Cosco Busan was at least partly the cause of the spill. The companies that own these big ships use layers of dummy corporations, legal tricks, and secretive contracts to protect them from liability. In this case, the Chronicle has reported, the Cosco Busan is a Chinese vessel owned by either a company in Cyprus or one in Hong Kong and managed by a separate Hong Kong outfit. It’s going to take years to get to the bottom of who should pay for this mess.

Meanwhile, the crab-fishing industry is out of business, and the economic impact will be dramatic.

There are obvious lessons here — and the first is that the public and all of the regulatory and response agencies at every level of government have to stop taking a nonchalant, hands-off attitude toward the ships that represent an ecological time bomb in the bay.

Shipping is part of the lifeblood of the local economy, and everyone who lives in the Bay Area has to live with the fact that giant steel vessels loaded with toxic fluids are going to be passing through a diverse and easily damaged ecosystem every day of every year for the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot that can be done to make it safer.

For starters, the VTS ought to have the mandate and the authority to regulate shipping traffic in the same way that air traffic controllers regulate planes. Among other things, the service should keep ships in port when the fog is that thick and conditions aren’t safe. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is mad about the spill response, and that’s fine — but she and her Bay Area congressional colleagues ought to push for legislation that would allow the Coast Guard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

There’s a desperate need for a bay spill early-warning system, something that could go into effect the moment there’s a possibility of oil fouling the water — and get containment crews on hand quickly and let the public know the hazards. That’s something the State Legislature should move on immediately.

Perhaps Congress should mandate that ships passing through US coastal waters post an accident bond to ensure they don’t escape liability for disasters. But for now, the federal government needs to seize the Cosco Busan, impound its cargo, and make it clear that nothing is going anywhere until the bill for this catastrophe is settled.

And the state and federal governments need to compensate the crab fishers — and then collect the money from the ship’s owners to cover those costs.

Feinstein: easy on torture, tough on bay spill response

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so the front page head on Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle blared: ‘FEINSTEIN SLAMS SPILL RESPONSE.”
The subhead added: “This…should have never happened.”

Well, this was an easy one of course for Feinstein, pictured by the Chronicle wagging her finger in a characteristic pose of self-righteousness after a briefing on Treasure Island. She could denounce the locals, call for an investigation, and then scurry back to the safety of Washington. If she really wanted to get at the heart of theproblem and show some political courage, she could lead the way in doing what our editorial demanded: “push for legislation that would allow the Coast Guard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

She could push for modernizing safety regulations that would allow the Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic Service to order preventative action when a ship is heading toward a bridge or a disaster. She could urge Congress to mandate that the owners of ships passing through U.S. coastal waters be fully identified, be accountable for their actions, and post an accident bond to insure they don’t escape liability for disasters.
(What if the ship had so damaged the Bay Bridge that it collapsed with cars on it? The Chronicle reported that the Cosco Busan is a Chinese vessel owned by either a company in Cyprus or one in Hong Kong and managed by a separate Hong Kong outfit. It will take years to get to the bottom of who should pay for the mess. Meanwhile, the public pays and the crab-fishing industry is severely damaged if not ruined for this year.)

She could urge the federal government to seize the ship, impound the cargo, and make clear that nothing is going anywhere until the ownership is identified and the bill is settled. She could urge all of this for national security reasons, since it is conceivable that a terrorist could seize ships laden with oil or explosives and wreak havoc in major harbors.

If her past is any guide, Feinstein is not about to go up against the powerful shipping interests and do anything much beyond an easy call for investigation and a Chronicle headline or two.

After all, when the chips were down on Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General, Feinstein helped subvert San Francisco values in a most egregious way. She announced her early critical support for Mukasey, abandoned Democrats opposing the nomination, led the charge for his Senate confirmation, and voted in effect for torture and to give the job of the nation’s top law enforcement officer in the United States of America to an attorney who would not take a public position against torture.

This was a snapshot of Feinstein’s shameful record: she is tough on bay spill response, easy on torture. And she’s been late and weak and undependable on Bush and the war. B3

Water trumps Bush

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What does it take to override a wartime Republican president’s veto? Water, apparently.

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Thirty five years ago, facing a rising tide of discontent over polluted water, Congress overrode d Nixon’s veto of the October 15, 1972 Clean Water Act. As a result, municipalities were able to apply for federal funds to help build and improve their local sewage treatment plants, and water got cleaner, as a result.

Yesterday, facing a mounting tide of discontent over global warming and rising sea level are real, Congress (unable to end the war or provide health care for kids,) united to reject Bush’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act.

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As a result, 900 water projects will receive federal funds, including restoration in the Florida Everglades and the replacement on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers of locks that farm groups say are crucial for shipping grain.

Here in California, the Act authorizes $1.3 billion for 54 projects, including $106 million to strengthen the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees—a shoring-up project that has profound implications for San Francisco Bay.

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As Will Travis of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission told me this week, one of the central questions now facing this region is, ‘How do we build around a Bay that we know is going to get bigger, but we don’t yet know by how much?

“It’s a bit like seismic safety,” Travis said, noted that the 8-year plan that BCDC is proposing is just a proposal.

“It’s the beginning of a long conversation,” Travis explained. ” What’s not in that proposal yet is how the federal agencies and the business sector and the research facilities and laboratories fit in.”

Travis also admitted that this conversation could be “a struggle.”

“The first reaction of most people when they realize that sea level is rising and that we have a lot of extensive development on low lying areas around the Bay is, ‘Run for the hills!’”

“And that’s a reasonable course, until you realize the implications in an estuary that is the most urbanized in the United States,” added Travis, who believes that what’s needed is “a more nuanced approach.”

Part of that approach, suggests Travis, may involve some counter intuitive steps.

“In some places, we may see the encouragement of more development along the waterfront so we can use the economic engine to protect that development—and the low-lying areas behind it. That’s where it’s going to get interesting.”

As a harbinger of what’s to come, consider the battle that is breaking out over 1,400 acres that Cargill owns in Redwood City. Save the Bay and other environmental groups are urging Cargill to abandon plan to build homes on those acres, while Cargill is committed to developing those lands, and Redwood City is trying to decide what to do.
Fun, huh?

Feinstein’s torture cave-in

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EDITORIAL Sen. John McCain — the right-wing Republican who is the only member of Congress to have been subjected to torture — has the right line on the technique that has the unfortunately innocent-sounding name of waterboarding. It’s not a complicated issue, McCain says; it’s "a horrible torture technique." McCain asks, "How can we condone this sort of stuff?"

Well, the George W. Bush administration’s candidate for attorney general seems to disagree — and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is backing him up. Michael Mukasey hedged and ducked when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked him if he thought tying someone to a board and pouring water over them to simulate drowning was an acceptable and legal practice. He insisted in testimony that he didn’t have access to the specific details of what is being done to prisoners and said that "hypotheticals are different from real life, and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical."

We acknowledge that, as Feinstein wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece Nov. 3, Mukasey is probably the best nominee that Bush is going to put forward. He’s probably better than Alberto Gonzalez. And if the Senate turns him down, Bush will simply fill the nation’s top law enforcement post with an acting AG who won’t need congressional confirmation, won’t do much to solve the paralyzing morale problems in the Justice Department, and will likely be more blindly loyal to the president than Mukasey.

But the Bush administration is winding to a close, and the damage that’s been done to the Justice Department won’t be repaired until a new president takes office. The administration’s treatment of prisoners is not only a huge problem but also symbolic of everything wrong about the way Bush and his allies view foreign policy, the Constitution, and congressional oversight. So the Senate ought to be willing to take a stand on this one and simply say that any nominee for attorney general who isn’t willing to be clear about opposing torture won’t be confirmed.

Feinstein has been awfully friendly to Bush of late; after riding Air Force One to Southern California to view the fire damage, she practically gushed about what a good person the president is. That’s not what the people who elected her expect.

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Feinstein has not only voted poorly on the war but also refused to block some of Bush’s worst judicial nominees. If she can’t stand up to this administration, she shouldn’t be on the Judiciary Committee. She’s going to be around for another five years, and there’s no procedure to recall a United States senator, but her constituents can let her know, loudly, that her latest cave-in is unacceptable. There’s an e-mail link on her Web site, Feinstein.senate.gov; the message doesn’t have to be long or complex. "I vote against torture" will do just fine. *

Marginalia

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>paulr@sfbg.com

When the obituary of the Republican Party is written, it will be noted that the GOP died of war wounds, many but not all of them taken during the kamikaze mission in Iraq. For over the past half century, it has gone from being the party of cautious, America-first realism to one of reflexive belligerence; its embrace of militarism has been passionate and, perhaps, fatal. Over the same half century, meanwhile, the world’s great powers, except us, seem to have come to a gingerly understanding that war may not have much of a future on an environmentally brittle, densely interconnected Earth.

As for the obituarist: John W. Dean offers a strong audition. Dean, a self-described "Goldwater Republican," served as legal counsel in the Nixon White House and testified during the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 that he’d warned the president about "a cancer growing on the presidency." After Nixon’s crash, Dean left political life for several decades, but he has forcefully returned in the past few years as the author of an accidental trilogy about the Republican Party’s long journey into night. The books have raised alarms about the extreme right’s taste for secrecy (Worse than Watergate, 2004), the psychopathology of authoritarian conservatism (Conservatives Without Conscience, 2006), and now the extent of constitutional ruin wrought by a party interested only in power, not governance (Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, Viking, 352 pages, $25.95).

Dean’s critique carries particular weight because he is, simultaneously, a longtime Republican, a onetime White House insider, and a lawyer who understands that "proper process … produces good policy," while "compromised processes will lead to bad policy." This is a succinct definition of what is sometimes called process liberalism, the idea that if a society’s institutions are established and operated according to a set of rules and customs generally agreed on, those institutions will produce results that most of the population will be able to accept, if not always cheer. Related ideas in America are the rule of law — the notion that individuals, even self-styled wartime presidents and vice presidents, must respect certain institutional constraints — and the separation-of-powers doctrine, which contemplates that each branch of government will try to curb overreaching by the others.

It is beyond dispute that Republican abuses of process in the past 15 years have been unprecedented and calamitous. Dean is particularly interested in the Bush regime’s use of so-called signing statements to change the meaning of laws duly enacted by Congress. Neither the Constitution nor any statute gives the president such a power, and so such statements are, or should be, legally meaningless. But their plain political purpose is to create what Dean calls a "presidential autocracy"; the statements are (in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) "declarations of hegemony and contempt for the coordinate branches — declarations that [Bush] hopes will gradually come to be accepted in the constitutional culture as descriptions of the legal and political landscape properly conceived and as precedents for later action either by his own or by future administrations."

What invading body snatchers have turned the party of Lincoln and abolition into this freak show of power-crazed pod people? Dean doesn’t say, and perhaps he isn’t sure, but he is strangely silent on the military angle. The Constitution grants solely to Congress the power "to raise and support Armies," with the telling proviso that "no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The framers did not want a standing army sitting there like a loaded gun, waiting for some president to grab it and start shooting. And for nearly two centuries, the country’s practice was to demobilize after conflicts. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), the US Army in 1940 was smaller than Belgium’s. But over the next decade the military was to swell unimaginably, and it remained swollen, even as the "military-industrial complex" a departing President Eisenhower warned us about became a cancer growing on our politics, while its propaganda affiliates assured us that, whether the problem was poverty, drugs, terror, or Manuel Noriega, the answer was war.

The Republican Party chose to dance with this soul-sucking devil at some Mephistophelian ball, only to find later that its throat had been slit and a dagger plunged into its back. For us, the only remaining business is to assign the obituary and then find some way to operate our rickety two-party system with just one party. Unless … some nervy Republican presidential aspirant acknowledges the obvious: that given a choice between democracy and empire, a true Republican — a true American — chooses democracy. A true Republican puts America first by cutting the military budget by 90 percent and redirecting that money into a crash alt-fuel program, into education and health care and environmental protection. Rebuild America. Assuming such a braveheart didn’t soon perish in a mysterious plane crash, next year’s presidential election would immediately become more interesting. *

Green City: Saving people and the planet

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The average young person doesn’t pay much attention to things like wind turbines and energy efficiency. Friends and family, yes. School or work, sure. Green technology? Probably not. And for youths in underserved communities, where violence and economic hardship are a backdrop for everyday life, the likelihood of thinking green is even lower.

Enter activist groups like the Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and watch as things begin to change. Under the leadership of cofounder Van Jones, the Ella Baker Center has received widespread attention for its role in the development of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps program, set to begin in early 2008.

The Green Jobs Corps will provide training opportunities for hard-to-employ populations (read: at-risk youths, low-income people, and those formerly incarcerated) while supporting the development of a greener economy. It’s no small task. For decades the environmental community has looked for ways to make green relevant to marginalized communities. And it hasn’t been that successful. Ian Kim, campaign director for the Green Jobs initiative, says the program is significant in that it bridges the gap between the environmental and social justice movements.

"The connections are obvious once you start to look at them," Kim told the Guardian. "Just as there are no throwaway resources or species, there are no throwaway people or communities."

The Ella Baker Center has worked closely with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to anchor a larger coalition of activists called the Oakland Apollo Alliance. Together, these groups are propelling the initiative forward. The collaboration is a significant one. Historically, labor activists and environmentalists have been at odds. The assumption: there can be good jobs or a clean environment, not both. Victor Uno, a spokesperson for the IBEW, says that dynamic is changing.

"We think it’s important to partner with community groups, and we need alliances with environmental groups," Uno said. "Economic growth is going to mean green jobs, and we’re working together to create opportunities for people who have been historically locked out."

The Green Jobs Corps program received $250,000 in seed funding from the Oakland City Council in June — part of $2.3 million of unspent settlement funds the city received after the California energy crisis nearly a decade ago. The program will be administered through Oakland’s Community Economic Development Agency, and job training will focus initially on renewable-energy technology and efficiency — a requirement of the settlement funds. Forty young men and women are expected to participate in the nine-month program, which includes six months of training, a three-month paid internship, and services like case management and job placement. Kim says the likelihood of participants obtaining well-paying jobs afterward is good.

"Green-collar employers have jobs that pay a living wage, have benefits and good working conditions," he said. "They offer career ladders and real pathways out of poverty."

While recruitment for the program has not yet begun, Kim is aware that the initial draw will likely be the word job and not the word green. Still, it’s progress.

"There’s no shortage of people looking for job training," Kim said. "It’s within the course of the program that they’ll receive education about environmental awareness and sustainability. We need to educate people where they’re at."

Late last month the Ella Baker Center took the Green Jobs training initiative to the national arena by launching the Green for All campaign.

"We have definitely realized the green job idea is too big for one organization or one group," Kim said. "It’s turning into a really big movement with a lot of players."

The launch comes shortly after Congress approved the Green Jobs Act of 2007 (HR 2847) as part of the proposed energy package. It is legislation that would direct millions of dollars toward green job training and is now awaiting approval or, more likely, a veto from President George W. Bush. Kim said defeat wouldn’t be a surprise.

"We’ll just come back next year," he said. "We’ll come back with more political will and more ideas. There’s a lot to look forward to."

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL It’s time for San Francisco to declare war on privatization.

The local threat is very real: as we reported in last week’s special anniversary issue, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration has moved to turn over a long list of city services — from housing for the mentally ill to the operation of the public golf courses — to the private sector. Should this happen, if history is any guide, the city would wind up losing millions, the quality of services would decline, and the economy would suffer as hundreds of well-paid, unionized employees lost their jobs.

Equally important, the public would lose control over the institutions that were and are created and run for its benefit.

Privatization is a recipe for corruption. There always has been and always will be some level of graft, corruption, and incompetence in government operations; there will always be the occasional city employee who sleeps on the job, fudges time cards, doesn’t do the job right, and somehow manages to avoid being fired. But that sort of small-time problem amounts to peanuts in comparison to what happens when large amounts of public money are turned over to the private sector.

Private companies are out to make profits — and for the most part they keep their finances secret. Many of the worst scandals in American history have involved kickbacks, backroom deals, and bribery aimed at sending taxpayer dollars into the coffers of big contractors, and these continue today. And the argument that the private sector is more efficient often turns out to be utterly false; the absolute worst waste of money in the nation’s health care system, for example, is the phenomenal overhead involved in private insurance plans. As much as 30¢ of every dollar spent on private-sector health care goes to administrative overhead and profit. The public Medicare system operates on about 5 percent overhead.

Of course, the public has no way of keeping track of where most of the private health care money goes; the insurance companies keep that information to themselves. So do most other private contractors that take public money. And even if you don’t like the way the system is managed, you don’t have much choice — insurance executives aren’t elected by anyone and aren’t accountable to the community.

San Francisco has a history of allowing private operators to take over public resources, and the results have been almost universally bad. One of the reasons the 1906 earthquake caused such devastation was that the private Spring Valley Water Co. — looking only for quick profits and not at long-term maintenance or service — failed to keep its pipes in good repair. When the city really needed water, to put out the postquake fires, it wasn’t available. That fiasco led city officials to develop a municipal water system, which now delivers some of the best, cleanest, and cheapest water in the country.

Of course, Congress gave San Francisco the right to build that water system, which uses a dam in Yosemite National Park, only on the condition that it also develop public electric power. Instead, in the greatest privatization scandal in the history of urban America, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wound up initially controlling much of the output of the dam, and it still controls the city’s electric grid. The result: some of the highest electric rates in the nation and terrible, unreliable service.

San Francisco officials led the way to the privatization of the Presidio, turning over a national park to an unaccountable quasi-private board that operates as a real estate developer. The results: A giant commercial office complex, built with a $60 million tax break. Plans for high-end condos. Traffic problems, neighborhood problems — and a stiff bill to the city’s taxpayers, who have to subsidize private businesses that operate in a federal enclave without paying local taxes.

And if Newsom has his way, the pattern will continue: the mayor’s signature project this past year, for example, has been an attempt to let a private company control the city’s broadband communications infrastructure. Tens of millions in city contracts go every year to private nonprofits that fight like hell to avoid sunshine and accountability.

Enough is enough — San Franciscans of every political stripe need to organize to fight back. This city needs a new political coalition, a campaign against privatization.

There are all sorts of specific policies and legislation that ought to be on the agenda. For starters, privatization expert Elliott Sclar, a Columbia University economist, argues that any private business that takes city money to provide public services ought to be required to abide by open-government laws. That means every scrap of information related to that contract — including financial projections, executive salaries, profit and loss statements, and operating overhead figures — would be public record. All meetings of boards, panels, or other policy-making entities involved in managing the contract would be open to the public. If a private business doesn’t want to abide by those rules, fine; it can stick to private-sector work and stop bidding on government contracts.

Beyond that, the city needs to set up a task force to look at every private contract San Francisco hands out and determine why the city isn’t doing the work itself. If selling electricity is so profitable (and it clearly is, or PG&E wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep its illegal monopoly), why can’t the city take over the job and bring in some revenue? If there’s money to be made building bus shelters and selling ads on them — and clearly there is, since Clear Channel Communications, a giant private company, went out of its way to get a contract with the city to do so — why can’t San Francisco make that money for the General Fund? If a private company can make money running the golf courses, why can’t the city?

Sure, there are times when it makes sense to bring in an outside contractor. We’d argue, for example, that the Board of Supervisors needs an independent budget analyst, not tied to City Hall, to monitor budgets and spending. But there are millions of dollars going out City Hall’s door every year to private outfits that aren’t accountable to the public. And there are millions of dollars that ought to be available for badly needed public services that the city is losing because some private operator is making a profit on public resources.

Organized labor has every reason to oppose privatization and ought to play a lead role in creating a new coalition. So should the public-power coalition and the folks who have been demanding sunshine for the nonprofits. But everyone who uses public services and pays taxes in San Francisco is affected when city money gets stolen, wasted, or diverted. It ought to be a broad-based coalition.

There’s an opportunity to turn things around here and make San Francisco the model city that it ought to be. There’s no time to waste.

41st Anniversary Special: Privatize the airport?

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› gwshulz@sfbg.com

In August 2006 the five commissioners who oversee San Francisco International Airport discussed renewing a small contract with a consulting outfit called John F. Brown Co.

The contract’s value doesn’t matter as much as the advice the outfit was giving. Brown is helping San Francisco prepare for 2011, when an agreement SFO maintains with several airlines is set to expire.

This, the folks at the airport realize, is a very big deal — one that could cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars and tempt city officials to try to privatize one of San Francisco’s most lucrative assets.

The contract that will expire four years from now is basically a lease the airlines pay in exchange for using SFO facilities like runways and terminals. The agreement was established in 1981 as part of a legal settlement with the airlines, and it permits the city to draw millions of dollars in concession revenue from the airport into San Francisco’s General Fund. Last year the city received nearly $22 million from the airport.

But San Francisco is one of the few cities in the nation that are allowed to take money that the airlines pay for landing and use it to subsidize other city services. And the airlines have shown little desire to keep paying fees that are above what the airport needs to break even on its operations.

Nobody is talking publicly about what will happen after 2011, but it’s entirely possible that the airlines, with the support of the federal government, will refuse to keep subsidizing San Francisco’s General Fund. So $22 million per year in city revenue could suddenly dry up.

If the mayor is someone like Gavin Newsom, he or she will be looking for an easy answer — and a lot of people will argue that San Francisco should follow the trend set by airports in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh and head toward a private management contract.

The Reason Foundation, a libertarian Los Angeles think tank, concluded in the 1990s that SFO could be worth as much as $888 million to the private sector; that number is almost certainly higher now. Imagine, for a moment, the deal the city would be offered: lose $22 million per year in revenue — or get close to $1 billion in cash by turning over the airport to a private operator on a long-term contract.

But the airport’s past experiments with privatization suggest that giving SFO to the private sector might not be such a good idea.

In 2001, Congress created a pilot program in which five cities, San Francisco among them, privatized their security screening of passenger, checkpoint, and baggage operations. Federal airport officials here hired Illinois company Covenant Aviation Security.

An investigation last year revealed that Covenant and SFO officials relying on surveillance cameras conspired to tip off personnel working at checkpoints when undercover federal inspectors were on their way to test possible security breaches.

A whistle-blower first revealed the scheme. Covenant, which partnered in the security venture with global weapons designer Lockheed Martin, was nonetheless rehired by the federal Transportation Security Administration late last year with a $314 million contract lasting until 2010, signed just weeks after an inspector general for the TSA’s parent bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, revealed the results of its probe.

What is perhaps the airport’s greatest privatization disaster began in 1997 and didn’t end until earlier this year. Managers at the airport formed a private, for-profit company called SFO Enterprises, which they hoped would join a consortium of other airports doing consulting and managing work around the world. The initial consulting contract was with a Honduran airport.

The plan turned into a disaster, leaving the airport in Honduras worse off. By the time San Francisco’s controller caught up with the scheme in an investigation completed in January, he declared the city could lose as much as $1.5 million, with much of it poorly accounted for.

No compromise on ENDA

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EDITORIAL The move by US Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to remove protections for transgender people from a landmark antidiscrimination bill has set off a remarkable furor in the queer community nationwide. The condemnation of the Frank move by even fairly mainstream lesbian and gay organizations is a sign of how far trans people have come — and the fact that Frank, the first openly gay man to serve in Congress, isn’t budging is a sign of how far the political establishment still has to go.

But the full bill, without the cuts, is still very much alive, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco) needs to move it to the floor and bring it to a vote.

HR 2015 has been a priority of the Human Rights Campaign and other national LGBT groups for years. The bill, also known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, in its original version would have outlawed employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The second part of that phrase is critical, not just to transgender people but to queer workers in general: as the American Civil Liberties Union points out in a legal analysis of the changes, the gay and lesbian people most likely to face discrimination in the workplace are those who don’t hew to traditional male and female roles. Effeminate men and butch women are far more at risk than, say, a gay man who can easily pass as straight. "The more masculine a gay man is or the more feminine a lesbian is, the less the likelihood of discrimination," the ACLU notes. As the Lambda Legal Defense Fund writes, "This new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who may not conform to their employer’s idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit."

But the politics are more difficult. Frank argues that Congress might pass a stripped-down version of the bill, but the votes aren’t there for anything that can be described as protecting transgender people. Some protection for some lesbians and gays, he argues, is better than none at all.

That ignores the reality, which is that George W. Bush is going to veto any bill that protects queer people from discrimination anyway. The fight over HR 2015 is largely symbolic; the bill won’t become law until there’s a Democrat in the White House. And if the gender-identity language isn’t in the bill this time, it will be much harder to add it in later.

All civil rights advances seem hopeless at first. The first marriage-equality bill in the California Legislature faced strong opposition, but Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) kept bringing it back — and every time it came up, it got more votes. ENDA’s got the same prospects.

Of course, there’s a larger issue here: compromising on civil rights is always unacceptable. And as writer Wayne Besen puts it, "A minority as small as the trans community will never have the political clout to go it alone, nor will they have the funds to wage a credible fight in Congress unless Bill Gates wakes up tomorrow and decides to have a sex change. To put it bluntly, their only chance at legal protection is under the gay and lesbian banner."

The HRC has been awfully weak, refusing to pull its support for the watered-down bill, but most other LGBT groups nationwide are urging Congress not to accept the Frank proposal. We agree. The fate of HR 2015 is in the hands of Pelosi, who can simply bring the original bill to the floor. That’s what activists should push her to do.

Trans discrimination sparks fight

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ENDA-hi1.jpg

By Amber Peckham

One of the first waves of protest over the move in Congress to remove transgender people from an anti-discrimination bill came from the labor movement. Members of Pride at Work, an LGBT-focused labor coalition and the newest member of the AFL-CIO, held a press conference Sept 28 to announce they are withdrawing their support from the ENDA bill, and encouraging other LGBT advocacy groups to do the same.

The advocacy is having an impact – already, more than 20 LGBT organizations have come out against the move, and it’s entirely possible that the one-time landmark workplace-discrimination bill will lose almost all of queer community support.

“The need for gender provisions in this bill doesn’t apply only to those who are transgender, but also to, say, effeminate gay men, or lesbians who are ‘too butch’” said Robert Haaland, a representative of Pride at Work. “By picking and choosing who to include in their non-discrimination bill, these legislators are discriminating. It’s self-contradicting.”

“With the transgender community as arguably the most marginalized part of the LGBT community, they are really the ones who need the support of this bill the most,” added Masen Davis, a board member of the Transgender Law Center board. “Over 60% of transgenders in San Francisco are unemployed.”
Davis also expressed gratitude for the support of the labor community.
“If anyone is familiar with the ‘divide and conquer’ tactics being used on the LGBT community right now, it’s the labor movement.” he said. “It really heartens me to hear this voice of support from the labor community, because it means that maybe the bill won’t have to be divided, it can stay one, unified proposition.”

Pride at Work is calling on Pelosi to withdraw her support for the bill if transgender provisions are removed before ENDA is voted on, and is holding a vigil outside her office. If she were to do so, it is likely the bill would not pack the punch required to make it through a Congressional vote, and none of the LGBT community would benefit.

“That’s how the labor movement works; if you injure one, you injure all.” said Haaland. “And it looks like that’s how this bill is going to end up working as well.”

The underground campaign

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Click here for the Guardian 2007 Election Center: interviews, profiles, commentary, and more

› news@sfbg.com

Elections usually create an important public discussion on the direction of the city. Unfortunately, that debate isn’t really happening this year, largely because of the essentially uncontested races for sheriff and district attorney and the perception that Mayor Gavin Newsom is certain to be reelected, which has led him to ignore his opponents and the mainstream media to give scant coverage to the mayoral race and the issues being raised.

To the casual observer, it might seem as if everyone is content with the status quo.

But the situation looks quite different from the conference room here at the Guardian, where this season’s endorsement interviews with candidates, elected officials, and other political leaders have revealed a deeply divided city and real frustration with its leadership and direction.

In fact, we were struck by the fact that nobody we talked to had much of anything positive to say about Newsom. Granted, most of the interviews were with his challengers — but we’ve also talked to Sheriff Mike Hennessey and District Attorney Kamala Harris, both of whom have endorsed the mayor, and to supporters and opponents of various ballot measures. And from across the board, we got the sense that Newsom’s popularity in the polls isn’t reflected in the people who work with him on a regular basis.

Newsom will be in to talk to us Oct. 1, and we’ll be running his interview on the Web and allowing him ample opportunity to present his views and his responses.

Readers can listen to the interviews online at www.sfbg.com and check out our endorsements and explanations in next week’s issue. In the meantime, we offer this look at some of the interesting themes, revelations, and ideas that are emerging from the hours and hours of discussions, because some are quite noteworthy.

Like the fact that mayoral candidates Quintin Mecke and Harold Hoogasian — respectively the most progressive and the most conservative candidate in the race — largely agree on what’s wrong with the Newsom administration, as well as many solutions to the city’s most vexing problems. Does that signal the possibility of new political alliances forming in San Francisco, or at least new opportunities for a wider and more inclusive debate?

Might Lonnie Holmes and Ahimsa Porter Sumchai — two African American candidates with impressive credentials and deep ties to the community — have something to offer a city struggling with high crime rates, lingering racism, environmental and social injustice, and a culture of economic hopelessness? And if we’re a city open to new ideas, how about considering Josh Wolf’s intriguing plan for improving civic engagement, Grasshopper Alec Kaplan’s "green for peace" initiative, or Chicken John Rinaldi’s call to recognize and encourage San Francisco as a city of art and innovation?

There’s a lot going on in the political world that isn’t making the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The interviews we’ve been conducting point to a street-level democracy San Francisco–style in all its messy and wonderful glory. And they paint a picture of possibilities that lie beyond the news releases.

THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT


As the owner of Hoogasian Flowers on Seventh Street and a vocal representative of the small-business community, mayoral candidate Hoogasian describes himself as a "sensitive Republican," "a law-and-order guy" who would embrace "zero-based budgeting" if elected. "The best kind of government is the least kind of government," Hoogasian told us.

Those are hardly your typical progressive sentiments.

Yet Hoogasian has also embraced the Guardian‘s call for limiting new construction of market-rate housing until the city develops a plan to encourage the building of more housing affordable to poor and working-class San Franciscans. He supports public power, greater transparency in government, a moratorium on the privatization of government services, and a more muscular environmentalism. And he thinks the mayor is out of touch.

"I’m a native of San Francisco, and I’m pissed off," said Hoogasian, whose father ran for mayor 40 years ago with a similar platform against Joe Alioto. "Newsom is an empty suit. When was the last time the mayor stood before a pool of reporters and held a press conference?"

Mecke, program director of the Safety Network, a citywide public safety program promoting community-driven responses to crime and violence, is equally acerbic when it comes to Newsom’s news-release style of governance.

"It’s great that he wants to focus on the rock star elements, but we have to demand public accountability," said Mecke, who as a member of the Shelter Monitoring Committee helps inspect the city’s homeless shelters to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect. "Even Willie Brown had some modicum of engagement."

Mecke advocates for progressive solutions to the crime problem. "We need to get the police to change," he said. "At the moment we have 10 fiefdoms, and the often-touted idea of community policing doesn’t exist."

Hoogasian said he jumped into the mayor’s race after "this bozo took away 400 garbage cans and called it an antilitter program." Mecke leaped into the race the day after progressive heavyweight Sup. Chris Daly announced he wasn’t running, and he won the supervisor’s endorsement. Both Hoogasian and Mecke express disgust at Newsom’s ignoring the wishes of San Franciscans, who voted last fall in favor of the mayor attending Board of Supervisors meetings to have monthly policy discussions.

"Why is wi-fi on the ballot [Proposition J] if the mayor didn’t respect that process last year?" Mecke asked.

Hoogasian characterized Newsom’s ill-fated Google-EarthLink deal as "a pie-in-the-sky idea suited to getting young people thinking he’s the guns" while only giving access to "people sitting on the corner of Chestnut with laptops, drinking lattes."

In light of San Francisco’s housing crisis, Hoogasian said he favors a moratorium on market-rate housing until 25,000 affordable units are built, and Mecke supports placing a large affordable-housing bond on next year’s ballot, noting, "We haven’t had one in 10 years."

Hoogasian sees Newsom’s recent demand that all department heads give him their resignations as further proof that the mayor is "chickenshit." Mecke found it "embarrassing" that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi had to legislate police foot patrols twice in 2006, overcoming Newsom vetoes.

"San Francisco should give me a chance to make this city what it deserves to be, " Hoogasian said.

Mecke said, "I’m here to take a risk, take a chance, regardless of what I think the odds are."

ENDING THE VIOLENCE


Holmes and Sumchai have made the murder rate and the city’s treatment of African Americans the centerpieces of their campaigns. Both support increased foot patrols and more community policing, and they agree that the root of the problem is the need for more attention and resources.

"The plan is early intervention," Holmes said, likening violence prevention to health care. "We need to start looking at preventative measures."

In addition to mentoring, after-school programs, and education, Holmes specifically advocates comprehensive community resource centers — a kind of one-stop shopping for citizens in need of social services — "so individuals do not have to travel that far outside their neighborhoods. If we start putting city services out into the communities, then not only are we looking at a cost savings to city government, but we’re also looking at a reduction in crime."

Sumchai, a physician, has studied the cycles of violence that occur as victims become perpetrators and thinks more medical approaches should be applied to social problems. "I would like to see the medical community address violence as a public health problem," she said.

Holmes said he thinks the people who work on violence prevention need to be homegrown. "We also need to talk about bringing individuals to the table who understand what’s really going on in the streets," he said. "The answer is not bringing in some professional or some doctor from Boston or New York because they had some elements of success there.

"When you take a plant that’s not native to the soil and try to plant it, it dies…. If there’s no way for those program elements or various modalities within those programs to take root somewhere, it’s going to fail, and that’s what we’ve seen in the Newsom administration."

Holmes spoke highly of former mayor Art Agnos’s deployment of community workers to walk the streets and mitigate violence by talking to kids and brokering gang truces.

The fate of the southeast sector of the city concerns both locals. Sumchai grew up in Sunnydale, and Holmes lived in the Western Addition and now lives in Bernal Heights. Neither is pleased with the city’s redevelopment plan for the Hunters Point Shipyard. "I have never felt that residential development at the shipyard would be safe," said Sumchai, who favors leaving the most toxic sites as much-needed open space.

Despite some relatively progressive ideas — Holmes suggested a luxury tax to finance housing and services for homeless individuals, and Sumchai would like to see San Francisco tax fatty foods to pay for public health programs — both were somewhat averse to aligning too closely with progressives.

Sumchai doesn’t like the current makeup of the Board of Supervisors, and Holmes favors cutting management in government and turning services over to community-based organizations.

But both made it clear that Newsom isn’t doing much for the African American community.

ORIGINAL IDEAS


The mayor’s race does have several colorful characters, from the oft-arrested Kaplan to nudist activist George Davis to ever-acerbic columnist and gadfly H. Brown. Yet two of the more unconventional candidates are also offering some of the more original and thought-provoking platforms in the race.

Activist-blogger Wolf made a name for himself by refusing to turn over to a federal grand jury his video footage from an anarchist rally at which a police officer was injured, defying a judge’s order and serving 226 days in federal prison, the longest term ever for someone asserting well-established First Amendment rights.

The Guardian and others have criticized the San Francisco Police Department’s conduct in the case and Newsom’s lack of support. But Wolf isn’t running on a police-reform platform so much as a call for "a new democracy plan" based loosely on the Community Congress models of the 1970s, updated using the modern technologies in which Wolf is fluent.

"The basic principle can be applied more effectively today with the advent of the Internet and Web 2.0 than was at all possible to do in the 1970s," Wolf said, calling for more direct democracy and an end to the facade of public comment in today’s system, which he said is "like talking to a wall."

"It’s not a dialogue, it’s not a conversation, and it’s certainly not a conversation with other people in the city," Wolf said. "No matter who’s mayor or who’s on the Board of Supervisors, the solutions that they are able to come up with are never going to be able to match the collective wisdom of the city of San Francisco. So building an online organism that allows people to engage in discussions about every single issue that comes across City Hall, as well as to vote in a sort of straw-poll manner around every single issue and to have conversations where the solutions can rise to the surface, seems to be a good step toward building a true democracy instead of a representative government."

Also calling for greater populism in government is Chicken John Rinaldi (see "Chicken and the Pot," 9/12/07), who shared his unique political strategy with us in a truly entertaining interview.

"I’m here to ask for the Guardian‘s second-place endorsement," Rinaldi said, aware that we intend to make three recommendations in this election, the first mayor’s race to use the ranked-choice voting system.

Asked if his running to illustrate a mechanism is akin to a hamster running on a wheel, Rinaldi elaborated on the twin issues that he holds dear to his heart — art and innovation — by talking about innovative ways to streamline the current complexities that artists, performers, and others must face when trying to get a permit to put on an event in San Francisco.

"I’m running for the idea of San Francisco," Rinaldi said. He claimed to be painting a campaign logo in the style of a mural on the side of his warehouse in the Mission District: "It’s going to say, ‘Chicken, it’s what’s for mayor,’ or ‘Chicken, the other white mayor.’"

He repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; when we asked him what he’d do if he won, he told us that he’ll hire Mecke, Holmes, Sumchai, and Wolf to run the city.

Yet his comedy has a serious underlying message: "I want to create an arts spark." And that’s something he’s undeniably good at.

THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT VIEW


Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris aren’t being seriously challenged for reelection, and both decided early (despite pleas from their supporters) not to take on Newsom for the top job. In fact, they’re both endorsing him.

But in interviews with us, they were far from universally laudatory toward the incumbent mayor, saying he needs to do much more to get a handle on crime and the social- and economic-justice issues that drive it.

Hennessey said San Francisco’s county jail system is beyond its capacity for inmates and half of them are behind bars on drug charges, even in a city supposedly opposed to the war on drugs.

"I had this conversation with the mayor probably a year ago," Hennessey said. "I took him down to the jail to show him there were people sleeping on the floor at that time. I needed additional staff to open up a new unit. He came down and looked at the jails and said, ‘Yeah, this is not right.’"

Asked how he would cut the jail population in half, Hennessey — in all seriousness — suggested firing the city’s narcotics officers. He readily acknowledged that the culture within the SFPD is a barrier to creating a real dialogue and partnership with the rest of the city. How would he fix it? Make the police chief an elected office.

"From about 1850 to 1895, the San Francisco police chief was elected," he said. "I think it’d be a very good idea for this city. It’s a small enough city that I think the elected politicians really try to be responsive to the public will."

Hennessey said that with $10 million or $15 million more, he could have an immediate impact on violence in the city by expanding a program he began last year called the No Violence Alliance, which combines into one community-based case-management system all of the types of services that perpetrators of violence are believed to be lacking: stable housing, education, decent jobs, and treatment for drug addiction.

Harris told us so-called quality-of-life crimes, including hand-to-hand drug sales no matter how small, deserve to be taken seriously. But it’s not a crime to be poor or homeless, she insisted and eagerly pointed to her own reentry program for offenders, Back on Track.

More than half of the felons paroled in San Francisco in 2003 returned to prison not long thereafter, reaffirming the continuing plague of recidivism in California. Harris said more than 90 percent of the people who participated in the pilot phase of Back on Track were holding down a job or attending school by the time they graduated from the program. "DAs around the country are listening to what we’re saying about how to achieve smart public safety," she said of the reentry philosophy.

But at the end of the day, Harris is a criminal prosecutor before she’s a nonprofit administrator. And her relationship with the SFPD at times has amounted to little more than a four-year stalemate. Harris and former district attorney Terrence Hallinan both endured accusations by cops that they were too easy on defendants and reluctant to prosecute.

To help us understand who’s right when it comes to the murder rate, Harris shared some telling statistics. She said the rate of police solving homicides in San Francisco is about 30 percent, compared with 60 percent nationwide. And she said she’s gotten convictions in 90 percent of the murder cases she’s filed. Nonetheless, cops consistently blame prosecutors for crimes going unpunished.

"I go to so many community meetings and hear the story," she said. "I cannot tell you how often I hear the story…. It’s a self-defeating thing to say, ‘I’m not going to work because the DA won’t prosecute.’ … If no report is taken, then you’re right: I’m not going to prosecute."

YES AND NO


In addition to the candidates, the Guardian also invites proponents and opponents of the most important ballot measures (which this year include the transportation reform Measure A and its procar rival, Measure H), as well as a range of elected officials and activists, including Sups. Aaron Peskin, Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, and Daly.

Although none of these people are running for office, the interviews have produced heated moments: Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann took Peskin and other supervisors to task for not supporting Proposition I, which would create a small-business support center. That, Brugmann said, would be an important gesture in a progressive city that has asked small businesses to provide health care, sick pay, and other benefits.

Taxi drivers have also raised concerns to us about a provision of Measure A — which Peskin wrote with input from labor and others and which enjoys widespread support, particularly among progressives — that could allow the Board of Supervisors to undermine the 29-year-old system that allows only active drivers to hold valuable city medallions. In response, Peskin told us that was not the intent and that he is already working with Newsom to address those concerns with a joint letter and possible legislation.

"If San Francisco is going to be a world-class city, it’s got to have a great transportation infrastructure," Peskin told us about the motivation behind Measure A. "This would make sure that San Francisco has a transit-first policy forever."

Measure A would place control of almost all aspects of the transportation system under the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and give that panel more money and administrative powers in the process, while letting the Board of Supervisors retain its power to reject the MTA’s budget, fare hikes, or route changes. He also inserted a provision in the measure that would negate approval of Measure H, the downtown-backed measure that would invalidate existing city parking policies.

Ironically, Peskin said his approach would help prevent the gridlock that would result if the city’s power brokers got their wish of being able to build 10,000 housing units downtown without restrictions on automobile use and a revitalization of public transit options. As he said, "I think we are in many ways aiding developers downtown because [current development plans are] predicated on having a New York–style transit system."

Asked about Newsom’s controversial decision to ask for the resignations of senior staff, Peskin was critical but said he had no intention of having the board intervene. McGoldrick was more animated, calling it a "gutless Gavin move," and said, "If you want to fire them, friggin’ fire them." But he said it was consistent with Newsom’s "conflict-averse and criticism-averse" style of governance.

McGoldrick also had lots to say about Newsom’s penchant for trying to privatize essential city services — "We need to say, ‘Folks, look at what’s happening to your public asset’" — and his own sponsorship of Proposition K, which seeks to restrict advertising in public spaces.

"Do we have to submit to the advertisers to get things done?" McGoldrick asked us in discussing Prop. K, which he authored to counter "the crass advertising blight that has spread across this city."*

Letters as leverage

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› news@sfbg.com

It’s a thin, seemingly innocuous letter. The Social Security Administration mails it when names and Social Security numbers don’t match on an employee’s I-9 form. The intent is to make sure workers receive their benefits.

But unions and immigrants have long charged that unscrupulous employers use SSA "no match" letters to harass undocumented workers and squelch union organizing efforts. Now, after a failed immigration debate in Congress, the George W. Bush administration wants to pass a regulation that would explicitly turn the letter into an immigration enforcement tool.

Activists fear this could result in massive firings and retaliation against workers organizing with unions. Employers complain it could lead to an economic slump in industries dependent on undocumented labor. A temporary injunction granted by a San Francisco judge is the only thing holding back letters across the country; it ends Oct. 1.

Bay Area activists have been national leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and labor movements. They are now shaping national policy on this new regulation in the courts and promise wide-scale street action and workplace walkouts if it goes into effect.

A look at past and present related Bay Area organizing may shed light on the future of the national issue.

BAY AREA ORGANIZING


US companies file hundreds of millions of W-2 forms with the SSA every year. The SSA uses them to calculate how much it owes workers at retirement. When the name and the Social Security number do not match, the SSA sends a "no match" letter to the employee to clear up the discrepancy. The letters are also sent to employers who have more than 10 employees with no match. These letters have nothing to do with immigration law, and employers are not required to take any adverse action against these employees.

But under the new Department of Homeland Security regulation, no-match letters may be seen as evidence that an employer knowingly employed an undocumented worker. The letters would include a leaflet from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing employers that they must fire workers who cannot resolve no matches with the SSA or reverify their work authorization within 93 days. If the companies do not, they may be subject to fines or criminal charges.

The rule was drafted more than a year ago but was not announced by Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff until Aug 10. "The magnet that brings most economic migrants into this country is work," he explained. "And if we have worksite enforcement directed at illegal employment, we strike at that magnet."

Brooke Anderson, an organizer with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, told the Guardian that this is an unlikely scenario. Workers will not leave the country; they will simply be forced into underground economies, rotate through different jobs, and become even more vulnerable.

Anderson was among a delegation of more than 30 labor, faith, and community leaders that presented a letter Aug. 30 at the regional SSA office in Richmond. The letter outlined their concerns and asked that the SSA send out no-match letters only to employees, not employers.

"DHS is using an incomplete, hodgepodge system intended to ensure our economic security to implement a regressive immigration policy that Bush failed to pass in Congress," Anderson told us. "The SSA as an agency should have a spine and say no to DHS and no to the Bush administration."

If the ICE inserts do go out with no-match letters, she predicts walkouts and massive street actions.

The regulation is also being challenged in a lawsuit filed by the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. The AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the San Francisco Central Labor Council have joined it. The plaintiffs claim that because the SSA’s database is full of errors, many citizens and legal immigrants could end up losing their jobs. They also argue that the DHS has exceeded its authority by seeking to use the SSA to enforce immigration laws.

US District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco granted a nationwide temporary restraining order Aug. 31, blocking the SSA from sending letters with ICE inserts. The order is in effect until Oct. 1, when another federal judge here, Charles Breyer, will decide whether to grant another injunction.

"DHS is trying to create a huge terror, to give the illusion that they are doing something," Bill Sokol, a lawyer with Weinberg, Roger, and Rosenfeld, the firm representing the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, told us. "Workers are afraid, but we must dial down people’s fear and terror under our new gestapo."

He said the law will have little impact if employers understand it and do not abuse it. If employers overreact, however, the result could be disastrous. Sokol said employers are already firing employees immediately after receiving the letters.

HISTORY


Unions and immigrant workers across the country have charged that no-match letters have been used to stifle workers’ rights since the SSA began sending them to employers in 1994. Activists in the Bay Area have played a key role in resisting these efforts, setting national precedents upholding worker rights.

When a San Francisco Travelodge fired workers after they began organizing with a union in 1999, allegedly due to Social Security no matches, the terminated employees took it to court. The next year they won an arbitrator’s decision that the firing, based solely on no-match letters, was a violation of their union contract.

Local community pressure on the SSA also resulted in the inclusion of cautionary text in the letter. The no-match letter now states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate state or federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

Activists at Oakland’s Labor Immigrant Organizers Network wrote a resolution in 1999 asking the AFL-CIO to renounce its support of the employer-sanctions provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the federal law that for the first time made it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Their agitation is credited in part for a resolution the AFL-CIO passed in 2000 calling for the repeal of sanctions and for a legalization program for undocumented workers.

The letters remained a potent tool for antiunion activity. A 2003 survey by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that 25 percent of workers listed in no-match letters reported that their employers fired them in retaliation for complaining about inadequate worksite conditions. More than one in five workers reported that their employer fired them in retaliation for union activity.

San Francisco opposed the DHS no-match regulation when it was proposed last year. An August 2006 resolution by the Board of Supervisors said it may lead to employers "using it as a device to fire, intimidate, harass, or underpay employees." It promised that the city would defy the regulation if it received a no-match letter for a city employee.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce also came out against the regulation.

But some employers embraced the proposed regulation. Uniform manufacturer Cintas fired hundreds of employees across the country, allegedly responding to the proposed guidelines after receiving no-match letters during a union organizing drive. Organizers said the company targeted employees involved in the union and jumped the gun on new regulations.

The Woodfin Suite Hotel in Emeryville fired 21 housekeepers in December 2006, also allegedly due to no-match letters. The workers claim the Woodfin retaliated against them for organizing with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, to enforce the living-wage law (see "Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07).

A yearlong campaign targeting the Woodfin has brought the issue to a national audience.

FALSE INFORMATION


Organizers say the regulations are far less strict than the news media has portrayed them, adding to an atmosphere of hysteria and fear among employers and workers. Francisco Ugarte, a lawyer with the Oakland firm of Leonard Carder, held up several San Francisco Chronicle articles at a Sept. 13 workshop for union organizers as examples of media inaccuracies.

An employer is not required to fire an employee after 90 days, as news accounts have stated. The employer has 90 days to fix discrepancies, and the worker has three days after that to fill out another I-9 form with a new Social Security number. If it appears credible, employers must accept the new I-9, Ugarte said.

The ICE insert in the SSA letter will terrify employers, he predicted, but the rule does not create any new information sharing between the SSA and other governmental agencies. The SSA is actually prohibited by law from sharing private data with any other governmental agencies.

There are also no automatic fines assessed to employers, as news accounts have implied. ICE will only levy fines if it raids employers and finds that they did not address no-match discrepancies. It is unlikely that the DHS will be able to enforce the regulations; in announcing them, Chertoff said the agency would rely largely on self-policing.

Even if this is the case, organizers fear that the DHS’s no-match regulation will provide employers with another tool to squelch immigrant workers’ rights. Comprehensive immigration reform is still needed to reconcile employers’ demands for workers, immigrants’ needs for employment, and US immigration policy.*

Democrats can end the war

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iraqbeheading.jpg
Photo from www.mindprod.com/politics/iraqwarpix.html

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) today published an excellent analysis of how the mainstream media and Democratic Party are falsely conveying a sense of official powerlessness to end the war in Iraq. The reality is that the Democrat-controlled Congress could defund the war effort immediately if it had the will to do so, forcing the Bush Administration to pursue a new strategy (ideally something along the lines of the McGovern plan).
Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi is more concerned with expanding her party’s power than taking a principled stand that would save thousands of lives and begin restoring this country’s image in the eyes of the Muslim world. And none of the presidential candidates (except also-rans Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel) are offering plans for Iraq that will substantially reduce the long-term U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. That’s a disgrace that is being compounded by the mainstream media and its campaign to disempower the average American and ensure that our imperial experiment continues unchecked and unquestioned.

Petraeus’s War

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EDITORIAL Nine Americans soldiers died in Iraq on Sept. 10, a few more than average, but overall it was just another typical day in a war that has cost a fortune, claimed the lives of 3,774 US troops and perhaps 600,000 Iraqis — and accomplished nothing.

While those (mostly) young people died in the desert, Gen. David Petraeus was in Washington, D.C., wearing a starched uniform shirt with four stars and seven rows of medals, telling members of Congress that the mission in Iraq is coming along just fine.

The surge, he insisted, is working, and there are signs of progress. He held up chart after chart showing that casualties and sectarian killings are down, that parts of Baghdad are becoming more secure — and that he expects to be able to end the surge and bring back the additional 30,000 troops by next summer.

What that means, in essence, is that the top general in Iraq thinks the United States will still need 130,000 troops in that country a year from now. That’s unacceptable — and it’s up to the Democratic leadership, which has been all too deferential to the military brass, to stand up and say so.

For months now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco), who prematurely took impeachment off the table, has been telling her antiwar constituents that she wanted to wait until she heard from Petraeus before taking any action on the war. Now she’s heard. He’s said he doesn’t see any end to the occupation. He’s mouthing platitudes that clearly aren’t true (the violence now is still far worse than it was four years ago) and presenting an image of Iraq that is on its face false (a remarkable new poll by ABC News, the BBC, and Japanese broadcaster NHK concludes that 70 percent of Iraqis think the situation has gotten worse in the past six months and the surge is a failure). And he’s talking about al Qaeda and Iran in tones that suggest that the administration is looking for excuses to expand the conflict even further.

Pelosi should not be allowed any more excuses. She needs to begin moving for an immediate and dramatic troop reduction with an aggressive schedule for complete withdrawal. And if she has to, she should publicly state that the Democrats in Congress are prepared to cut off funding for the war.

This latest report should be a call to arms for the antiwar movement, which needs to be visible and active on every front — including reminding the Democratic presidential candidates that moderate, cautious statements about ending the war simply aren’t good enough. Anyone who wants the nomination for George W. Bush’s job ought to be willing to stand up and say what the clear majority of Americans think: it’s time to bring the troops home, now.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (9/10/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (9/10/07): Gen. David H. Petraeus says the U.S. can reduce troop strength to pre-surge numbers. 9 U.S. soldiers killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq told Congress this afternoon that the United States should be able to reduce its troop strength to what it was before the recent increase and that it could be done without jeopardizing the hard-won progress made in Iraq, according to the New York Times.

U.S. military:

9 U.S. soldiers were killed today in and around Baghdad, all but one were killed in vehicle accidents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This wave of U.S. military fatalities occurred on the same day that U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and top commander Gen. David Petraeus began a series of appearances before Congress to report on the situation in Iraq since President Bush ordered nearly 30,000 extra troops to Iraq this year.

4,037: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

122 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraqi civilians:

654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

71,510– 78,081: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a list of recent events that have resulted in Iraqi casualties, visit :
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/recent/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

30,000?: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

200 journalists have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Refugees:

Read a first hand account of how Iraqis are being treated when attempting to enter Jordan on vacation. http://last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com/

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

2.2 million: Iraqis displaced internally

2 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Incessant violence across much of Iraq’s central and southern regions has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes every month, presenting the international community with a humanitarian crisis even larger than the upheaval aid agencies had planned for during the 2003 war, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

122,000: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (9/10/07): So far, $450 billion for the U.S., $57 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Britney vs. Petraeus

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Ah, a cozy Sunday night spent toggling between Britney Spears’s expectedly disappointing performance on MTV’s Video Music Awards and early word of Gen. David Petraeus’s expectedly disappointing – to those hoping for a rapid draw down of forces overseas, at least — “report on Iraq” that our dear “Austria, Australia, what’s the dif?” President will pretty much base all of his future expectedly disappointing decisions on.

Both of these media hotspots are shaping up in the mind as almost miraculously opaque; the twin poles of current American culture — celebrity and violent hubris — apexed in such highly anticipated but awkwardly non-eventful performances that the status quo can only feel impelled to continue (dribble, dribble): Ms. Spears giving us tottering, soulless blah-horridness that will provide more WTF grist for her rumor mill$ …

brit.jpg
Praying for coverage. Screen grab from mtv.com

….and General Petraeus giving us simply a slight blah torque on Bush’s “stay the course.” (Petraeus’s recommendations before Congress tomorrow, reportedly, will be to withdraw one surge battalion by December and four more by next August – a minutely faster timetable than Bush’s “experts” had been predicting.) Of couse, Britney’s decisions haven’t killed thousands — or have they?

Censored!

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>>Project Censored’s 15 missed-story runners up

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

>>The story behind a censored story that was killed by The Nation

amanda@sfbg.com

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS


The Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.

The law allows the president to designate any person an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.

Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."

The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, "this law does not apply to American citizens."

Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific "alien unlawful enemy combatant" to the vague "any person subject to this chapter."

"Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?" Parry wrote. "Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?"

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the "any person" terminology is troubling. "It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted," Parry said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU


The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.

Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.

The Warner act defines a public emergency as a "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States" and extends its provisions to any place where "the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to "suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."

So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006

3. AFRICOM


President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent "vital interest" in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick "vital interest."

The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.

Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. "A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it," Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."

Source: "Understanding AFRICOM," parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, Feb. 21, 2007

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTS


As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.

At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.

In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.

Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements "competitive liberalization," and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.

But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. "The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets," states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.

Sources: "Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries" Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; "Signing Away the Future" Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQ


Part of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.

Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, "No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site."

Source: "A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy," David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006

6. FALCON’S TALONS


Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."

However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.

What about the other 7,481 people? "Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?" Whitney asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.

Sources: "Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State," Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006

7. BLACKWATER


The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.

Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.

"It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror," author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.

Source: "Our Mercenaries in Iraq," Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA: THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA


A March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.

The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.

Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.

Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.

Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: "Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India," Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; "Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto," Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE


In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.

Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.

But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.

As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, "the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected."

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.

Sources: "The Highwaymen" Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway," Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE


Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.

Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that "the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington."

With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.

Source: "Vulture Fund Threat to Third World," Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

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